Top three sights in Fiji? / WED 8-19-26 / Immature high score initials on an arcade game / Old West outlaw who left behind poetic messages after some robberies / Three unnamed things, in shorthand / 2008 film about a solitary trash-compacting robot / The word "salary" derives from the Latin for this / ___ royale (champagne cocktail) / Female friends from Fuenlabrada

Constructor: Kareem Ayas

Relative difficulty: Easy

THEME: BURIES THE LEDE (57A: Hides one's central point, in a way ... with a doubly homophonic hint to 20-, 30, 38- and 48-Across) — the "lead" word in each theme answer is a type of "berry":

Theme answers:

• GOOSE FEATHERS (20A: Natural pillow filling) (gooseberries)
• ELDERCARE (30A: Services for senior citizens) (elderberries)
• STRAW POLL (38A: Unofficial vote) (strawberries)
• BLACK BART (48A: Old West outlaw who left behind poetic messages after some robberies) (blackberries)

Word of the Day: BLACK BART (48A) —

Charles E. Boles (c. 1829 – ? Last seen February 28, 1888), also known as Black Bart, was an English-born American outlaw noted for the poetic messages he left behind after two of his robberies. Often called Charley by his friends, he was also known as Charles (or C. E.) Bolton. Considered a gentleman bandit with a reputation for style and sophistication, he was one of the most notorious stagecoach robbers to operate in and around Northern California and Southern Oregon during the 1870s and 1880s. [...] In 1867, Boles went prospecting for gold in Idaho and Montana. In a surviving letter to his wife from August 1871, he told her of an unpleasant encounter with some Wells, Fargo & Company agents and vowed to exact revenge. // Boles adopted the nickname "Black Bart" and proceeded to rob Wells Fargo stagecoaches at least 28 times across northern California between 1875 and 1883, including a number of times along the historic Siskiyou Trail between California and Oregon. Although Boles became widely known for the poetic messages left behind after his robberies, he wrote only two poems–left at the fourth and fifth robbery sites–but this was enough to ensure his fame. Black Bart was quite successful as a highwayman, often taking in thousands of dollars a year. // Boles was afraid of horses and he fled from all of his robberies on foot. He was invariably polite, never using foul language except in his poems. He dressed in a long linen duster coat and a bowler hat, using a flour sack with holes cut for his eyes as a mask. He brandished a shotgun but reportedly never once fired it during his years as an outlaw. All these became his trademarks and he quickly gained notoriety. (wikipedia)

• • •

Weird. I always thought BLACK BART was fictional. I wonder why ...

Gonna have to be short a write-up today (I swear), as today is my first day back at school for the Fall semester, and I ... still have a little work to do. Not a lot. A little. But because it's not done and I have to stand in front of a class in [checks clock] seven hours, it feels like a lot. So I gotta get a move on. The puzzle was funny today because it felt like it was accusing me, personally, of not getting my second syllabus finished in a timely fashion. It's throwing things at me like STUDENT (47D: Lecture attendee) and UNIT (16A: Section in a textbook) and CURRICULUM (10D: Set of courses offered) and ASS (as in, "why aren't you totally prepared, you ASS?") (54A: Immature high score initials on an arcade game). I laughed it off. What else could I do? One thing I couldn't do: understand the the damned theme once I'd finished the puzzle. The puzzle was easy to finish, and the themers all easy to come up with, but I had no idea how BURIES THE LEDE was supposed to be singly homophonic, let alone doubly so. I kept trying to read the clue cryptically, so I was looking for something "buried" in the answer ... maybe a word that meant "lead"? But the middle of each themer (i.e. the letter "buried" at the heart of each themer), taken in order, spells ERWK, so ... no luck there! No matter how hard I looked, there was nothing "buried" in those damned theaters. Finally I had a look at the "lead" words in the theme phrases and noticed that they were all types of "berries" (!!!!!!). Not a pun I was looking for (clearly)! Is LEDE a pun? Since LEDE basically means the introductory (or "lead") portion of a news story, it indicates primary status (i.e. firstness) just as well as "lead" does. Doesn't seem nearly as "punny" as the bury/berry thing. Anyway, first words "berries," very clever, liked it. I do wonder if the Pronunciation Police are going to come out today. "Bury" and "berry" sound the same in my ear, but I have this suspicion that that may not be the same for everyone. Still, it's close, and it's crosswords, and as with horseshoes and hand grenades, close counts.

The fill was wobbly to start. "I'M NOT OK" feels ... unsolid. "I'M OK," all day long, no problem, solid as heck. "THAT'S NOT OK!," same. "I'M NOT OK" gets me some songs (?), and ... I guess it has some currency in mental health contexts. I can imagine someone saying it, but I can imagine someone saying lots of things. Lots of other fill just felt ordinary and tired: ARID SKORT PSATS (plural) UNSEE ERR ERS URSA etc. But the themers were all interesting, and sometimes the short fill picked up (PUFFY next to SNEEZE—successive answers! (Why weren't these tied together the way URSA and ASIA ([___ Minor]), or LOWER and DIP ([Drop]) were? You've got PUFFY tied to allergies—that's a set-up for a SNEEZE tie-in if there ever was one). FAN BASE and LOST CAUSES also liven up the grid. The only real difficulty I had today came with trying to understand the theme. Oh, and remembering which spelling of AVA/EVA to use for AVA Max (39D: ___ Max, singer of the 2018 hit "Sweet but Psycho").

Bullets:

• 10A: Private sleeping accommodations? (COTS) — So ... "Private" in the Army.
• 24A: Three unnamed things, in shorthand (XYZ) — nearly wrote in XXX, but that's a porn movie, or else the letters on a jug of hooch.
• 67A: 2008 film about a solitary trash-compacting robot (WALL-E) — WALL-E stars in commercials for Lavazza. Or his double does. Hulu can't/won't stop showing me ads for this new coffee system they have called TABLI (5!). And if the robot from Short Circuit and WALL-E had a baby ... well ...

[my ads are English, but this'll do]

• 4D: Top three sights in Fiji? (DOTS) — now this is cryptic. The word "Fiji" has three DOTS at the top (the top of the "i" the "j" and the "i")

That's it. Gotta run (to make coffee). See you next time.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on BlueSky and Facebook and Letterboxd]
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High-end private jet, familiarly / TUE 8-18-26 / Academy Award-winning tune from "La La Land" / Singer Kahan with the 2026 #1 album "The Great Divide" / Eponym of a chess rating system / Mario has a red "M" on his / Sarcastic title girl of 1990s-2000s MTV / Utah skiing destination / Dickens villain

Constructor: Jeremy Venook

Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium 

THEME: "MUSIC OF THE NIGHT" (58A: Iconic number from "The Phantom of the Opera" ... or an apt title for this puzzle) — theme answers are SONGS (66A: 17-, 29-, 45- and 56-Across) containing words related to "night":

Theme answers:

• "MOONLIGHT SONATA" (17A: Classic Beethoven piano piece)
• "CITY OF STARS" (29A: Academy Award-winning tune from "La La Land")
• "SWEET DREAMS" (45A: 1983 Eurythmics hit whose full title includes "(Are Made of This)")

Word of the Day: NOAH Kahan (64A: Singer Kahan with the 2026 #1 album "The Great Divide") —

Noah Berkenkamp Kahan (/kɑːn/ KAHN; born January 1, 1997) is an American singer-songwriter. His breakthrough single, "Hurt Somebody", achieved gold status in the United States and charted in multiple international markets. The single and EP of the same name preceded the release of his debut album, Busyhead (2019). Within five years, two more albums came out: I Was / I Am (2021) and Stick Season (2022), the latter became his mainstream commercial breakthrough. It led to his nomination in 2023 for the Grammy Award for Best New Artist. In 2026, his fourth album The Great Divide was released and achieved record-breaking streaming and vinyl sales for a No. 1 rock album debut on the Billboard 200. That preceded The Great Divide Tour, his first stadium tour. // Kahan was born in Strafford, Vermont, where he grew up on a tree farm. His father, Josh Kahan, taught him to play guitar while his mother, Lauri Berkenkamp, who wrote parenting guides for a living, taught him to write. His father is Jewish and his mother is Christian. He says that his Jewish roots play a large part in his identity. [...] In October 2020, Kahan began posting viral TikTok videos showcasing the first verse of what would become the hit single "Stick Season". Over the next two years, he uploaded more snippets of the song and teased other songs from his forthcoming third studio album, leading Stick Season to become viral before it was even released.^[6] On July 8, 2022, he finally released the full version of the song to the public. Kahan says "Stick Season" is the kind of song he wanted to write, moving away from his pop heavy projects in the past to a folk centric project. He released the single "Northern Attitude" prior to the album's release. // On October 14, 2022, Kahan released his third studio album, the 14-track Stick Season, which was produced by Gabe Simon. The album debuted at number 14 on the Billboard 200, his first appearance on the chart^[17] launching him into mainstream success and helping make him a recognizable figure within the music world.

• • •

I kinda like the basic idea here, but the song set seems really arbitrary, and the fill was listless and dull, with almost no truly interesting answers and a barrage of overfamiliar short stuff. So it got an "oh" and a bit of a smile out of me when I realized the theme, but the experience of solving it wasn't very entertaining. I also didn't really care for the redundant revealer: SONGS. It's exceedingly anticlimactic, coming as it does after the proper revealer, and "revealing" absolutely nothing new. If you want a secondary revealer, at least make it clever somehow. This felt like SONGS just happened to be in the finished grid and then the clue writer (constructor? editor?) decided to make it thematic, and I can see why you'd be tempted, but SONGS it's completely unnecessary to our comprehension of the theme, and adds nothing funny, humorous, or clever. Strange choice there. As for the theme answers themselves, "MOONLIGHT SONATA" and "SWEET DREAMS" are iconic to me, but "CITY OF STARS," despite its Academy Award, means nothing to me. Not sure I've heard it, ever (I've never seen La La Land, despite my admiration for and fascination with the screen presence that is Ryan Gosling). I can't say the song doesn't belong here, just that it seems less major than the other songs, which only highlights how arbitrary the whole set is: how many songs out there must have "moon" or "dream" or "star" in them somewhere? So you get a set here that's not exactly tight. But as I say, I liked the revealer and I liked discovering the connection among the themers, and there's very little that is actively off-putting about this puzzle. I just wish the grid were more interesting—that would've helped a lot.

ELO and ALOE before we ever get out of the tiny NW corner—that did not herald goodness. Two initialisms right after that (SEC, UNICEF) didn't make me any more optimistic. URIAH ISH ATTA ESAU NATL OFUSE ISAW AMA EUR ... the puzzle just limps lacklusterly along, with only the themers to perk it up. HYSTERIA gave the grid some juice (9D: Madness), and DEWDROPS has a certain alliterative sweetness (39D: Morning condensation), but otherwise, it's a snooze. I guess "BITE ME!'s got some sass, but I never did take to that expression (which now feels dated, somehow) (33D: "Oh, buzz off"). The clue on G-SIX is ... ??? (52D: High-end private jet, familiarly) ... I assume it used to be a governmental alliance clue but then someone thought "hey, we don't talk about the ultra-rich enough" and decided to make it a private jet clue? That's called taking regrettable fill and making it regrettabler. The G6 was the six largest countries in the EU, but then Britain (famously, extremely smartly, with great foresight) left, and the name changed to the E5. Not sure why they changed from "G" ("Group of") to "E" ("European Group of"), but there you are. I suppose G-SIX could also be a Bingo call. But no, it looks like all former clues for GSIX referred to the (now former) European alliance. I understand wanting to update the clue, but ... a private jet? In this economy? Hard pass.

Bullets:

• 39A: Sarcastic title girl of 1990s-2000s MTV (DARIA) — I watched every episode of this, I think, and still hesitated a bit trying to process the phrase "Sarcastic title girl"; I wonder what kind of cultural legs DARIA has. What's the age break? Seems like an extremely Gen-X / Millennial show. Not sure how familiar it is to older / younger people.
• 50A: It has its x's and y's (ALGEBRA) — I don't understand what this clue is doing with its phrasing, what expression it's playing on. Are x's and y's supposed be like "ups and downs?" I get the x and y part, I can see why ALGEBRA is the answer, but the whimsical phrasing here is lost on me.
• 27D: What gossipers and tall buildings are full of (STORIES) — I don't really like "riddles," but this clue at least slowed me down and made me think for a little today—probably the toughest answer for me besides the La La Land song and the private jet, which I just didn't know. Oh, and NOAH Kahan, whose name has been floating around the periphery of my entertainment world all year, I just couldn't retrieve it, which made that SE corner tough, as 67A: Person regularly sought out for advice was somehow not GURU ... but GO-TO (not loving it as a noun, but OK)
• 2D: Eponym of a chess rating system (ELO) — really gotta hate music and fun and life not to go with the band every time here. If you must use ELO (again), please just remind me of the great music. Chess, shmess, zzzzz:

[gotta love a song that just randomly breaks into French]

• 60D: Mario has a red "M" on his (HAT) — what are we doing here? Do we not get enough Marioverse clues without having to torture the clues for perfectly ordinary things into Mario form? If you want to take the HAT somewhere pop cultury, at least branch out, be creative. Yet Another Mario Clue is not the way.

That's all for today. See you next time.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on BlueSky and Facebook and Letterboxd]
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