Full of vivid detail, as memory / THU 9-24-26 / The two most valuable Scrabble tiles / Slang for an Italian dish / "Same here," more stiffly / From one tone to the next adjacent tone, in music / American architect who invented Scrabble while unemployed during the Great Depression / Scrabble's name prior to its acquisition by James Brunot in 1948 / Verizon competitor, informally

Constructor: Jeff Stillman

Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium (the "Medium" is solely for the theme trivia)

THEME: Scrabble — some Scrabble trivia

Theme answers:

• ALFRED BUTTS (21A: American architect who invented Scrabble while unemployed during the Great Depression)
• CRISS-CROSS WORDS (37A: Scrabble's name prior to its acquisition by James Brunot in 1948)
• FIFTY POINTS (53A: Bonus score for a bingo (using all seven of one's tiles) in Scrabble)
• 'ZA (1A: Slang for an Italian dish ... or along with QI, the highest-value two-letter word in Scrabble)
• [two blank squares] (67A: The two most valuable Scrabble tiles)

"BLANK" square crosses:

• WENT [BLANK] (51D: Forgot what you intended to say)
• LEFT [BLANK] (52D: Didn't fill in, as a field on an application) 

Word of the Day: EIDETIC (42A: Full of vivid detail, as memory) —

adj.

Of, relating to, or marked by extraordinarily detailed and vivid recall of visual images. (thefreedictionary.com)  

Eidetic memory (/aɪˈdɛtɪk/ eye-DET-ik), also known as photographic memory and total recall, is the alleged ability to recall an image from memory with high precision—at least for a brief period of time—after seeing it only once and without using a mnemonic device.

Although the terms eidetic memory and photographic memory are popularly used interchangeably, they are also distinguished, with eidetic memory referring to the ability to see an object for a few minutes after it is no longer present and photographic memory referring to the ability to recall pages of text or numbers, or similar, in great detail. When the concepts are distinguished, eidetic memory is reported to occur in a small number of children and is generally not found in adults, while true photographic memory has never been demonstrated to exist.

The term eidetic comes from the Greek word εἶδος (pronounced [êːdos], eidos) "visible form".

• • •

OK, looks like we get the Stevie Wonder puzzle and the anti-Stevie Wonder puzzle in the same week (if you missed Tuesday's puzzle, go back and see how lovely a tribute puzzle is done). Tuesday's puzzle was an anniversary puzzle; this puzzle commemorates nothing. Tuesday's puzzle: an iconic album, two widely-known and beloved #1 songs, incredibly smooth grid. Today's puzzle: iconic game (I'll give it that), random / obscure / arbitrary trivia, a grid so rough I stopped to document the moment I knew it was all going to go sideways:

When you get AROAR RETAG and GAEL before you've even fully exited the tiny NW corner ... that's an ill wind that blows no good. Bodes no good? (looks it up). Proverbially, "an ill wind that blows nobody any good." Shakespeare's got it (in HVI, Part 3) as an "ill wind that profits nobody," and it seems there are many acceptable variants. Anyway, the wind was ill out of the NW, that's for sure, and it didn't get too much less ill (ASDOI ITT ATT INF ONCLE ... the always-repulsive TASE). HOARY stuff. Even longer fill was leaving me cold today: WTATOUR, EIDETIC, STEPWISE ... knew it, heard of it, no idea (respectively), but none of it has real zing. But the real problem here is how inside-baseball the theme is. Those three long themers fit symmetrically, sure, but otherwise, I don't know why they're here. Truly random trivia. This puzzle's sole reason for being appears to be the nonstandard elements, namely the two-letter words and the two blank squares. And for that, I give the puzzle credit. And a full star more than I was actually inclined to give it. But when you've got four good squares to thirty-seven yawners that are just taking up space ... that's not a good balance. I know there are lots of crossword solvers who enjoy Scrabble, but that Venn diagram overlap does not include me. If it includes you, maybe you enjoyed this. Me, I just wanna go back and stare at that Stevie Wonder puzzle some more.

Nothing to slow you down today besides the trivia, and maybe a couple of the longer answers I already mentioned. EIDETIC is ... not exactly an everyday word. I had seen it before, somewhere (maybe a crossword? ... yes, this is the fourth appearance in the Shortz Era). STEPWISE was totally new to me (15D: From one tone to the next adjacent tone, in music). I just built it from the crosses, and inferred the -WISE part. Obscure to me, but maybe common to music folks, I don't know. Aside from the two-letter themers and the blank squares, the only things that gave me pleasure today were WET NOSE (who's a good buddy!?) and WINGSPAN (though ... more birds, less Howard Hughes, please). I also liked the clue on SAMSON (24D: Biblical figure with a notoriously bad hair day?). Oh, and ALFRED BUTTS made me laugh, the way "BUTTS" might make a 10-year-old laugh. This 10-year-old specifically:

Bullets:

• 3D: Ones who have trouble finishing sentences? (ESCAPEES) — I didn't love the wordplay here at first, since you escape because you want to be free, not because you are unable to finish your sentence (as the wording of the clue seems to imply). But I've since warmed to the clue. Perhaps because there was so little to keep me warm today.
• 10D: Belmont entry (COLT) — this threw me, since other kinds of horses (geldings, fillies) can race at the Belmont. I needed the "O" from COLT to get "AS DO I" (ugh), which could just as easily have been "AS AM I" (16A: "Same here," more stiffly).

• 31D: Hamburger connection? (UND) — UND = "and" in German. "And" is a "connecting" word (aka a conjunction).
• 44D: Straight-horned antelopes (ORYXES) — you know you've been solving crosswords way, way too long when you can actually think of two six-letter plural antelopes that start with OR-. Nearly twenty years ago, in the first week of this blog's existence, I discovered there was an antelope called the ORIBI. And so, today: ORIBIS! Back in 2006, my suggestion that ORIBI was perhaps not a well-known word inspired a reader named "grandpamike" to comment "this blog is just a bad idea imho." Sadly, grandpamike seems to have deleted his comment in the intervening two decades;  happily, I seem to have taken a screenshot:

Thankfully, the next comment I got (from good old Anonymous) was this: "This site is one of the best I've seen on crossword puzzles. Good graphics, good references...highly entertaining! If grandpa mike doesn't want to have hints about the puzzle, no one is forcing him to look at your site. I hope you keep it up." I kept it up. But I remember grandpamike fondly. 

[ORIBI: in my defense, those horns are pretty straight]

That's all for today. This blog turns 20 tomorrow. Hope to see you then.  

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on BlueSky and Facebook and Letterboxd]
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Nonmedical childbirth assistant / WED 9-23-26 / Jay's reticent partner of filmdom / Carnival diversion requiring precision / Music genre named for its voluminous dos / Instrument also called the "sprightly companion" / Brand acquired by Hasbro / Super Mario character with a mushroom for a head

Constructor: Dana Edwards

Relative difficulty: Easy

[3D: "Star Wars" series starring Diego Luna]

THEME: "THAT'S FAIR GAME" (55A: "You're free to criticize it" ... or a comment one might make about 20-, 34- and 41-Across?) — familiar answers that involve "fair" and "game" in different ways:

Theme answers:

• SPORTSMANSHIP (20A: Honorable conduct on the field)
• OPEN SEASON (34A: When hunting restrictions are lifted)
• BALLOON POP (41A: Carnival diversion requiring precision)

Word of the Day: SILENT BOB (33D: Jay's reticent partner of filmdom) —

Jay and Silent Bob are fictional characters portrayed by American actors Jason Mewes and Kevin Smith, respectively. They appear in the View Askewniverse, a fictional universe used in most of the films, comics, and television programs written and produced by Smith. [...]

The characters are shown spending most of their time selling marijuana in front of the convenience store in the Clerks films. In Clerks: The Animated Series, they were also shown selling illegal fireworks. [...]

Silent Bob, portrayed by Kevin Smith, has a reticent nature, communicating mostly through gestures and facial expressions rather than speech. When he does speak, his comments are often poignant and insightful, providing critical reflections that influence the course of the narratives. Silent Bob is characterized by his long dark hair, beard, and a backwards baseball cap, and typically wears a long coat resembling a Jedi robe. Originally a smoker, the character has been shown to have quit in later films.

• • •

I don't mind a simple pun theme on a weekday, but the punniness here feels like a stretch most of the time. "THAT'S FAIR GAME" works pretty well for BALLOON POP, which is, in fact, a game one might find at a fair, but you wouldn't say "THAT'S FAIR GAME" about OPEN SEASON, exactly. It's like one word is missing each time: "that's a fair game" for BALLOON POP; "that means fair game" for OPEN SEASON (which I believe is where the phrase "fair game" comes from in the first place). SPORTSMANSHIP has maybe the wonkiest relationship to the revealer of all. "Those people played a fair game"? Is that the idea? Also, playing fairly and displaying SPORTSMANSHIP feel like two different things to me. I have to mentally torture the revealer phrase a bit to make it apply properly to the themers, and ... I guess I don't really like mentally torturing things. I also had no idea that the fair game in question was called a BALLOON POP. I guess it makes sense. That's literally what you do—make a balloon pop ... by shooting water in a clown's mouth? Am I thinking of the right game? No, wait, is it by throwing darts at a wall of balloons? Yeah, it looks like the latter is correct. What am I thinking of, with the freaky clown mouths? AH, YES, here we go—absolute nightmare fuel:

There's also apparently a ball-in-the-mouth variation, which is somehow worse:

["Feed us, Billy!!!!"]

No balloons in the ball-in-the-mouth version. No wonder clowns want to kill humans in so many horror movies. Look at the weird gagging-torture rituals we subject them to!

The fill on this one buckles and sags under the weight of very tired 3-4-5s, including two awkward -ED's (CCED, OKED), a counting partial (EENIE), and a classic kealoa* (ATAD) (not ABIT) (19A: Slightly), which (fittingly?) sits right underneath an answer whose clue contains an actual Loa (16A: Mauna Loa output). There's also a Charybdis-like vortex of awful, ambiguous two-letter hesitation syllables in the central SW, with the "OH" from "OH, IT'S ON" running smack into the "UH" from "UH, NO," which is itself adjacent to the "AH" in "AH, YES." You should really only be allowed one of those per grid. I think that "H" where "UH" meets "OH" took me longer to work out than anything else in the grid. I kept leaving it and coming back to it until I finally parsed "OH, IT'S ON." "UM, NO" seemed just as valid as "UH, NO," but "OM, IT'S ON" would really only work at an improbably violent meditation retreat.

Bullets:

• 14A: Covid-19, colloquially ('RONA) — this cutesy name for the disease makes my skin crawl every time it comes up. I never thought I'd say this, but just bring back '70s gossip columnist RONA Barrett. 

• 4D: Music genre named for its voluminous dos (HAIR METAL) — best answer in the grid. Most entertaining, anyway. I definitely got the double-disc Monster Ballads compilation when it came out in the late '90s. It hadn't even been ten years since HAIR METAL "died" (I guess Grunge killed it?), but the nostalgia was already in full effect.

• 31D: Meshed (with) (JIBED) —GIBED, JIVED, JIBED ... I'm truly hopeless in this arena.
• 24A: On-schedule (TIMELY) — this doesn't work. "TIMELY" is far looser and more abstract than "on-schedule." Trains can be on time, but they're not "TIMELY."
• 62A: Instrument also called the "sprightly companion" (OBOE) — ok, what? By whom? I dare you to call it that in regular conversation (you know, all the regular conversations you have about OBOEs).
• 11D: One preferring purrs to pooches (CAT PERSON) — OK, first of all, that clue is terrible. Where's the parallel construction!? "Purrs" are an animal sound, whereas "pooches" are the animal itself. Really … ruff. Your alliteration is not worth it! Second, I am very much a CAT PERSON (in that I own and love cats) but this has absolutely no relationship to my feelings about dogs, whom I also generally adore. I talk to every dog I see, even if I only see it out the car window. But then again I pretty much talk to every animal I see, even if it's on the television. "Buddy!" "Hey, buddy." "Look at that buddy!" I'll say. Anyway, I do not get these "preference" people. No need to make the denigration of other species part of your identity. Justice for all buddies! ("buddy" and "missy" are just the most common of the 1,001 things I call Alfie and Ida, respectively). Here's a little visual short story to give you some indication of what I'm dealing with here every day:

That's all. See you next time.

*kealoa = a pair of words (normally short, common answers) that can be clued identically and that share at least one letter in common (in the same position). These are answers you can't just fill in quickly because two or more answers are viable, Even With One or More Letters In Place. From the classic [Mauna ___] KEA/LOA conundrum. See also, e.g. [Heaps] => ATON or ALOT, ["Git!"] => "SHOO" or "SCAT," etc.  

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on BlueSky and Facebook and Letterboxd]
=============================
❤️ Support this blog ❤️: 

• Venmo (@MichaelDavidSharp)]

=============================
✏️Upcoming Crossword Tournaments✏️:

• Midwest Crossword Tournament (Chicago, IL, Sat., Oct. 3, 2026)

=============================
📘 My other blog 📘:

• Pop Sensation (vintage paperbacks)

Read more...