Handle in a theater / SAT 5-2-26 / Rotisserie-roasted Turkish dish / Sign on a convenience store window / Three-peating N.B.A. champs from 2000 to '02 / Traditional gift for a fifth anniversary / "Full House" father

Constructor: Hannah Slovut-Einertson

Relative difficulty: Medium

THEME: None

Word of the Day: COLOR WARS (30A: Summer camp competitions for which teammates dress similarly) —

A color war is a competition played in summer camps, schools and some social organizations (such as sororities, fraternities, or small businesses). Participants are divided into teams, each of which is assigned a color. The teams compete against each other in challenges and events to earn points. Typical color war challenges include tug-of-war, dodgeball, archery, soccer and basketball. These challenges and events vary based upon the venue for the game. The games' durations can range from a day to several months. The winning team is the one with the most points at the end of the game. Typically, color wars consist of several events that are worth insignificant numbers of points, and then one large final event that is worth enough points to win or lose the entire color war. It is usually at the end of the summer.

• • •

Hello, friends! Rex is still on his trip, so it's Rafa here as your Rexplacement du jour. It's May! How did we get here? I know I'm getting older because now I'm the kind of person who talks about how quickly time is passing. But ... New Year's was basically yesterday?! I don't know what's going on. Forgive me, I saw the date and needed to have this small spiral before moving onto the puzzle.

Here's a giraffe with its ossicones

SO ANYWAYS, I *really* enjoyed this puzzle. It's really wide open at 64 words (themeless puzzles at the NYT can go up to 72 words). Sidenote: we refer to entries in the crosswords as "words" regardless of how many actual words the entry contains. So I'LL START is one word, FLAT is one word, etc. But, yes, 64 words, and not a single bad or gluey entry. And pretty much all the long stuff is fun multi-word entries: LATEST FAD, MOONSHOTS, STAGE NAME, GO BANANAS, NO PEEKING, etc., etc. I loved the modern PERMABAN, and even the more "boring" entries were still totally legit words that can take many cluing angles: FRAMEWORK, TENANTS, SWALLOW.

This is what a BOW SAW looks like, for those who don't know

Some nice clues here, too. [Rounded up?] for DOMED was probably my favorite, and [Disappearing ink?] for TEMPORARY TATTOO was nice, too. I wish there had been a handful more clever misdirects. Oh, I also enjoyed [Residents without a title] for TENANTS. But [Call it!] for HOTLINES didn't quite land for me. Didn't feel precise enough to be a satisfying clue. The verb "call" could apply to too many things, IMO.

What else? ORA reminded me of this recent article in The Onion which was cute. I'd also never heard of COLOR WARS, but admittedly I never attended summer camp growing up. CELESTA was new to me, too ... but it has a really inferable name, and was cool to learn about. I was going to comment on difficulty but I solved this on paper (unusual for me), and I can't tell if I felt slow because I'm not used to having to hunt for the clues or because the puzzle was on the trickier side. Let me know how the difficulty played for you!

SAN Marzano tomatoes

Finally: Hannah, who constructed this puzzle, also helped organize the Midis for Minnesota charity puzzle pack, supporting mutual aid for immigrant families in the state. I have solved several of the puzzles and can vouch for their quality! It also seems like you can receive a physical booklet if you donate in the next couple of days, so do check them out.

Bullets:

• FRAGS (42D: Hand grenades, informally) — I knew this because I played a lot of Call of Duty as a child (it's what I was doing instead of being at summer camp)
• RAW BAR (45A: Establishment that might have a "buck-a-shuck" promotion) — I'm not a picky eater at all, but there's something about raw oysters that I just can't do. I've tried, but it's just not for me. I wish I could enjoy them because the people who love oysters seem to really enjoy them, but alas...
• MASH-UPS (1D: Composite numbers?) — Forgot to mention this clue above, but it was a banger!
• BAMBINA (35D: Little girl, in Italian) — I cannot explain why (I do not speak Italian), but I got this answer immediately and it made me smile
  

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on BlueSky and Facebook and Letterboxd]
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Spongy exfoliator / FRI 5-1-26 / Myosin's partner protein / "Tom ___" (classic folk song that became a #1 hit in 1958)

Constructor: Rena Cohen 

Relative difficulty: Harder than usual (13:54)

THEME: Themeless

Word of the Day: GEMS (Baguettes, e.g.) —

The step cut's rectilinear form was popular in the Art Deco period. Antique jewelry of the period features step-cut stones prominently, and there is a market in producing new step-cut stones to repair antique jewelry or to reproduce it. The slender, rectangular baguette (from the French, resembling a loaf of bread) was and is the most common form of the step cut: today, it is most often used as an accent stone to flank a ring's larger central (and usually brilliant-cut) stone. [Wiki]

• • •

Hey squad! It's Malaika, filling in for Rex who is on a trip. I solved this puzzle on the train home from seeing Maybe Happy Ending, so am generally feeling nostalgic and plagued with a sense of romantic doom. On to the puzzle!

It is my belief that the NYT has decided the Friday puzzle should be an easy themeless puzzle, and the Saturday should be a hard themeless. No more of this "a little hard" and then "very hard." I absolutely breeze through these Fridays like they are Wednesdays. This is not a complaint, but rather to fend off complaints! Don't complain that Fridays are easy, because I'm pretty sure they're supposed to be!

"It's as easy as falling off A LOG!" said the Earl, falling off a log with a loud thump

This is a pretty intense grid shape to fill! When I see three long answers vertically intersecting three long answers horizontally, it is usually in the form of six eleven-letter answers. (Like this one, from KAC.) Here, Ms. Cohen has used a fifteen, a thirteen, two elevens, and two nines. Something a little different! 

The best entry by far in this grid was THE MUNCHIES and it's not even close. Fantastic addition to the puzzle. It does seem totally insane to clue this without referencing weed... I'm pretty sure that if you are just looking for a snack, you don't have the munchies. The term only applies when you're high, right? Chime in, fam. 

A lot of the other long entries fell flat for me.... ERADICATES and SONOROUS and CAPABLE are all just regular words, and ARMADILLOS felt less exciting to me because of the plural. SPOILER ALERTS felt a little ruined by the plural, actually, it didn't feel grammatically valid to add an S there (same with APPLE TVS). LOCK AND LOAD sounded awkward, since I'm used to "locked and loaded" and BANK AUDIT is not what I would call fresh or interesting. I did like COLD TAKES, COUPLES ONLY, and MAKE BELIEVE, though all three got boring (or I suppose I should say, easy) clues.

Bullets:

• ["WandaVision" co-star Elizabeth ___] for OLSEN — I just watched her in "Eternity," which I loved. Exactly the type of cute-but-still-interesting romcom I've been looking for.
• [Company whose name comes from a term in the board game Go] for ATARI — The term describes one of the board's potential states
• [Big name in petrol] for ESSO — I've seen this a thousand times in puzzles and I will simply never remember the final letter. Here I tried every vowel since I wasn't familiar with RKO either.
• [Dough in tamales] for MASA — I went to Mexico City over the weekend and took a class where we learned about nixtamalizing corn and made tamales. I've made tamales before, but this was the first time I used banana leaves as wrappers. (Usually I use corn husks.)
• [Home of Swansea and Wrexham] for WALES — I knew this because of the soccer club that Ryan Reynolds co-owns.

xoxo Malaika

[Follow Rex Parker on BlueSky and Facebook and Letterboxd]
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