So-called "Champagne of Spain" / FRI 6-5-26 / Seaweed-based gels / What might give a hand in a casino? / Small marsupial whose name is spelled using only the letters of TROP / ___ Neal, co-star of TV's "The Hughleys" / Actor Gilliam of "The Wire" / Pioneering civil rights activist ___ Arnold Hedgeman / Opposite of "stay silent"

Constructor: Kelly Morenus

Relative difficulty: Medium-Challenging

THEME: none 

Word of the Day: POTOROO (37D: Small marsupial whose name is spelled using only the letters of TROP) —

Potoroo is a common name for species of Potorous, a genus of smaller marsupials. They are allied to the Macropodiformes, the suborder of kangaroo, wallaby, and other rat-kangaroo genera and is the only genus in the tribe Potoroini. All three extant species are threatened by ecological changes since the colonisation of Australia, especially the long-footed potoroo Potorous longipes (endangered) and P. gilbertii (critically endangered). The broad-faced potoroo P. platyops disappeared after its first description in the 19th century. The main threats are predation by introduced species (especially foxes) and habitat loss.

Potoroos were formerly very common in Australia, and early settlers reported them as being significant pests to their crops. (wikipedia)

• • •

The long answers up top and down below are just fine. Chatty, breezy, in-the-language. Nice. The rest ... I really don't see the appeal of any of it. This is Friday, you can do anything! All that space. And what do I get? DEALER'S SHOE?! (10D: What might give a hand in a casino?). I barely know what a "shoe" is in this context, but thank god I did, because otherwise I'd still be wondering what the hell the dealer was doing, using, or possibly wearing. In case you are unfamiliar, a "shoe" is a thingie that holds cards, looks like this:

The other marquee Down is PARASAILING, which is fine, but not terribly interesting, and the rest of the puzzle is fairly blah. Fridays should not be blah. On top of the blahness, there was the barrage of names. I laughed out loud when I hit my third ???? name. Some guy who won a Chemistry Nobel 45 years ago? I guess this is the price we pay for canceling ROALD Dahl. Crossword needs better ROALDs! We have a ROALD emergency! Calling all ROALDs! Well, not all ROALDs. Not this ROALD. Yeesh. Also, somebody who acted on The Hughleys? (28D: ___ Neal, co-star of TV's "The Hughleys"). A pioneering civil rights person? (46D: Pioneering civil rights activist ___ Arnold Hedgeman). It's not that these people are totally uncrossworthy, it's just ... name name name. Or more like "unfamous name unfamous name unfamous name." Oh, dang, I forgot about SETH, another TV actor (13D: Actor Gilliam of "The Wire"). Throw him in there too. Just not my day for names. At all. But I think it was the POTOROO that really made me ... "mad" isn't the right word, but—that is not an animal I've ever heard of. And that clue! (37D: Small marsupial whose name is spelled using only the letters of TROP) ... you know your animal is obscure when the puzzle has to resort to telling you "it has these letters in it!" Also, what is "TROP"? Why "TROP" and not, say, "PORT"? PORT has the virtue of being a word. An English word, I should say. "TROP" is a French word (meaning "too" as in "excessively"). I think it's also the nickname of a ballfield where the Marlins ... played? Play? The TROP! Gah, no. Not the Marlins. Close, but no. The Tampa Bay Rays play there, not the Miami Marlins. Shows you how much I care about Florida baseball. I still don't think of those Florida teams as real because I didn't grow up with them. Also, they both used to. have different names (The Tampa Bay Devil Rays, the Florida Marlins). Anyway, POTOROO! It's a thing, apparently! Sounds like an Australian music festival, but nope. Tiny marsupial. Who knew (besides all the Australians)?

I got the top third of this puzzle easy but then oof. Right around ROALD, things got rocky. Rocky ROALD! Also, the clue on PANTRIES was tough (26A: Grocery stores?). And I thought 27D: I I I (IOTAS) was THREE. And then ELISE is there in the east gumming things up. Managed to raggedly hack my way down to the bottom, only to encounter POTOROO (again I say, "!?"), and that's where I made my biggest mistake. Put in DEMS instead of LEFT at 41D: Blue side, with "the". Blue does not apply to the LEFT. The LEFT and the DEMS are Not The Same. Just ask the LEFT. Blue is associated with the DEMS. Red, Republicans, Blue, DEMS. That is how those colors work in this country. So ... DEMS left me wondering how 41A: Not so rich, so to speak could be DIRE (answer: it couldn't be, the answer is LITE). Didn't know ANNA. Had END for AIM (46A: Destination). Was not at all confident that HOGANS were structures of the SW, but thank god that guess was correct, otherwise I might still be solving this thing. Because of all this, I had trouble seeing the long Acrosses down below. Tried to get the front ends of them, and while MRIS and AUDI were easy enough, that ugly fill-in-the-blank clue on IN ON, that got me (44D: __ a secret). I had "IT'S A" and later tried "I GOT." The clue isn't a quotation, so both those guesses were bound to be wrong, but I couldn't really see that. This made SING hard to get (53A: Opposite of "stay silent"). All of this fussing with mediocre fill and crummy clues and for what? A few good long answers. This just wasn't for me at all.

Bullets:

• 14A: "Can anyone explain this?!" ("MAKE IT MAKE SENSE!") — the clue is a question and the answer isn't, and the clue makes it sound like you're addressing a crowd, while the answer feels like the kind of thing you'd say to a specific person. But I guess the idea was to make this clue (14A: "Can anyone explain this?!") rhyme with the next clue (17A: "Let me try to explain ..."). It's a nice idea. But I still don't think this clue is right.
• 20A: Coat on a tip? (POLISH) — the coat on the "tip" of your finger, i.e. your nail. Nail POLISH.
• 30A: Seaweed-based gels (AGARS) — I'm enduring AGARS and IOTAS and EKES and EMTS and OROs rather than getting four to six more entertaining longer answers. I don't get it.
• 32A: So-called "Champagne of Spain" (CAVA) — pfft. Nope. I maybe have heard of this, but completely forgot it. I know KAVA (Polynesian plant used to make a psychoactive beverage). But CAVA, not so much. "Champagne of Spain" sounds like "Champagne of Beers," i.e. a highly dubious marketing slogan:

• 40A: Something you can see right through (IRIS) — another rough clue. You see through your IRIS. You don't see "right" through it. No one would say that. But I guess that's the point. Still, I didn't need more aggravation from the slew of short stuff today. Not helping.
• 45A: New wave band with the 1979 album "Duty Now for the Future" (DEVO) — got this easily, but I really thought the 1979 album was Freedom of Choice. Maybe that was 1980 ... yup, May 1980. I got it as a present at my 11th birthday party, at Aldo's Pizza. I got Abba: The Album. I remember very clearly disdaining the Abba (not cool by young boy standards in 1980) and my mom giving me a very stern talking-to, right then and there, about gratitude. Years later I would come to think Abba was awesome. And that is my DEVO story. DEVO: cool then, cool now ... but the album in this clue is slightly obscure. It peaked at #73 and provided only one recognizable single: their semi-cover (?) of "Secret Agent [not 'Asian'] Man":

• 49A: Provide proactive help, in a way (RUN INTERFERENCE) — that clue did little to get me to the answer. It's accurate enough, I guess, but it doesn't quite get at the whole idea of "handling a bunch of secondary problems or distractions for someone so that person can focus on the primary task," which is how I think of the phrase RUN INTERFERENCE.
• 23D: 500 competitor (RACER) — no "Indy" or "Daytona" for you, solver. Just ... 500! Is that normal racing slang? Car racing, like casino shoes, and casinos in general—not my thing.
• 31D: People not to argue with, they say (FOOLS) — this was also weirdly hard. Do "they" really say this? I mean, it seems like good advice, but this is not a saying about FOOLS that I know. A fool and his money are soon parted, I know that one. Fool me once, shame on me, etc. That's another "fool" saying. You certainly shouldn't argue with people on the internet, ever (ever), but "don't argue with fools" does not have the zippy, memorable quality I associate with "sayings."

That's all for today. See you next time, hopefully with functioning internet (still using the hotspot on my phone until the new router arrives, later today)

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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Shamash holder / THU 6-4-26 / Italian liquor distilled from winemaking leftovers / Freudian censor / Altered excerpts of a film posted to social media, say / Broad-shouldered Titan / Faux flattery / Sons of ___, exemplars of biblical wickedness / Middlemen in illicit transactions / Historic Bulgarian ruler / Beer brand with the slogan "La Playa Awaits" / Site of an 1899-1909 gold rush

Constructor: Joe Deeney

Relative difficulty: Easy

THEME: BIG BOX STORE (61A: Large retail establishment ... and a hint to four squares in this puzzle) — big (slightly oversized) "boxes" hold the names of "stores" (I guess all the "stores" are themselves examples of "BIG BOX STOREs," though I've never thought of ALDI that way...) 

Theme answers:

• LOCAL DIVE / VIVALDI (20A: Neighborhood watering hole / 4D: "The Four Seasons" composer)
• SLOWEST / LOW ESTIMATES (11A: Last over the line, say / 12D: Conservative guesses)
• YOGA POSES / MEGAPLEXES (47A: Downward dog and others / 39D: Movie theaters with many screens)
• LIKE A CHARM / STRIKE A POSE (50A: Exactly as desired / 36D: Fashion photographer's direction)

Word of the Day: GRAPPA (45A: Italian liquor distilled from winemaking leftovers) —

Grappa is an Italian alcoholic beverage: a fragrant, grape-based pomace brandy that contains 35 to 60 percent alcohol by volume (70 to 120 US proof). Grappa is a protected name in the European Union.

Grappa is made by distilling the skins, pulp, seeds, and stems (i.e., the pomace) left over from winemaking after pressing the grapes. It was originally made to prevent waste by using these leftovers. A similar drink, known as acquavite d'uva, is made by distilling whole must. The original date grappa was created cannot be determined, but was likely first made pre-1300s as distillation arrived in Italy during the Middle Ages.

In Italy, grappa is primarily served as a digestivo or after-dinner drink. Its main purpose is to aid in the digestion of heavy meals. Grappa may also be added to espresso coffee to create a caffè corretto, meaning "corrected" coffee. Another variation of this is the ammazzacaffè: the espresso is drunk first, followed by a few ounces of grappa served in its own glass. In Veneto, there is resentin: after finishing a cup of espresso with sugar, a few drops of grappa are poured into the nearly empty cup, swirled and drunk down in one sip. (wikipedia)

• • •

Very short write-up today, as my router just ... died yesterday. Dead. Done. Kaput. So while I'm waiting for the new one to arrive, I'm using a Personal Hotspot on my phone for connectivity, and while it seems to be working, everything feels insanely unstable and I just want to get something posted quickly before Things Fall Apart again. Can't print the puzzle out because my stupid printers can't seem to "find" the network I'm on. Bah. This is what happens when you set things up in a way you understand, a way that works for you, and then well over a decade goes by and you forget how any of it is held together and one little thing goes wrong and ... chaos. Already dreading the new router set-up. Annnnnyway, puzzle! Quickly! 

Uh ... sure. Those are big boxes, alright. And there are stores inside them. ALDI is just a supermarket to me, so I wouldn’t have put it in the BIG BOX STORE category, but it's a chain, and the stores are ... box-shaped, I guess, so shrug, why not? I think of GAP as more of a mall store than a BIG BOX STORE, but whatever. I can be a little flexible on this matter (as it's something I don't think about or care about at all). Because the rebus boxes are flagged today (by virtue of their bigness), the rebus was especially easy to pick up. There may as well have been arrows and flashing lights pointing at the relevant squares saying "Enter Rebus Here!" The first rebus square would've been a cinch without the big square telling us it's a rebus—I mean, ["The Four Seasons" composer]? Everyone's gonna know that's VIVALDI, see it doesn't fit, and go, "well, rebus square, I guess." But you can't very well have those rebus squares be normal sized, or your whole theme premise disappears. So extreme easiness is the price we pay for this concept. Oh well. It wasn't unfun. I like the rebus answers, for the most part, esp. LOCAL DIVE and YOGA POSES / MEGAPLEXES and LIKE A CHARM / STRIKE A POSE. You've also got some like eight 7+-letter non-theme answers livening up the grid. Pretty remedial rebus with an odd-man-out "box store," but still a pretty good time.

I had exactly one problem area, and it was (briefly) a doozy. I just stared at S-T / -TIMATES and ... nothing. The only -TIMATES I could think of were "guesstimates" and "estimates" and neither of those yielded a box store (and neither worked with the cross). I wanted 11A: Last over the line, say to be LAST and 12D: Conservative guesses to be GUESSTIMATES, but as you can see both "Last" and "Guess" are in their respective clues, *and* they don't work both directions, so ... total failure. Total stoppage. Squinting. Head-tilting. Staring. Resigning myself to failure ... and then I start mulling 12D: Conservative guesses ... "'conservative' ... so, they're probably on the lo-" And that was that. Low. LOWES! SLOWEST / LOW ESTIMATES. The Down was not one word but two! Phew. That was a harrowing few seconds (5? 10? 15 seconds? Felt like forever). The rest of the puzzle basically filled itself in. Don't know what a "Shamash" is but managed to get MENORAH off just the "ME-" anyway (a MENORAH "holds" candles, and "Shamash" sounds Hebrew so ... ta da!) (the "Shamash" is the candle used to light the other eight candles of a MENORAH). Oh, and I needed a few crosses to get FAN EDITS. No good reason I didn't get that right away, I just didn't (5D: Altered excerpts of a film posted to social media, say). 

Bullets:

• 1A: In "The Tempest," when Miranda says "O brave new world, That has such people in't!" (ACT V) — one of the first Shakespeare plays I ever read, along with Richard II (such a weird play for high schoolers to read, but we read whatever was going to be on at the Ashland (OR) Shakespeare Festival that year (we took a week-long trip there in both my junior and senior years), and The Tempest and RII were what was playing in '86 and '87, apparently)). The whole "Brave new world" speech comes late in the play, when Miranda sees actual people (besides her father Prospero and Caliban) for the first time. I don't know I could've told you with certainty it was ACT V, but I know it wasn't ACT I, and no other Acts fit, so ... success!
• 19A: "American ___" (PIE) — the preceding Across clue is 17A: Forbidden idol so my brain was like "American IDOL!? But they just used 'idol' in the cl- ... ah, I see, not IDOL. Doesn't fit."
• 34A: Bob who narrated "How I Met Your Mother" (SAGET) — perennial "what is Bob Sag-t's second vowel" problem.
• 35A: Historic Bulgarian ruler (TSAR) — "Bulgarian"!? What do I know about Bulgaria (almost zero). I guess not using "Russian" was a way to try to slow the solver down. Didn't work.
• 38A: Faux flattery (SMARM) — people say they hate the word "moist" but I think SMARM might beat "moist" on my ickword list. Somehow "smarmy" doesn't rankle, but SMARM, ew, get it off me!
• 41A: Broad-shouldered Titan (ATLAS) — me: "... all of them? Oh, right, it's the 'carries the world on his back' guy. Makes sense."

• 6D: Sons of ___, exemplars of biblical wickedness (ELI) — got this off the "I" but only because ELI is a biblical name I know. Wait, is ARI biblical? Of course it is. Means "lion." So I guessed right on the three-letter "I"-ending biblical man's name. If there's another example of such a name, do not tell me, this part of my brain is full up.

Not as short a write-up as I imagined. I'll try harder (less hard?) tomorrow. See you next time.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld 

PS someone in the comments mentioned the POSE dupe (STRIKE A POSE, YOGA POSES) and yes that is pretty bad. Can’t believe I missed it.

PPS to people saying the stores in the boxes aren’t supposed to be BIG BOX STORES, just regular stores inside big (oversized) boxes … ok, but when two of your stores are indisputably BIG BOX STORES (IKEA, Lowe’s), you can see how people might wonder if we’re meant to see the other stores as BIG BOX STORES as well

[Follow Rex Parker on BlueSky and Facebook and Letterboxd]
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