Fad game of 1990s / SAT 8-10-19 / Certain online food critic / Enemies in slang / Body parts that sound like some units of measure

Constructor: Anna Gundlach and Erik Agard

Relative difficulty: Medium-Challenging (8:42) (at least a minute of that was self-inflicted: a dumb wrong letter that I entered, dumbly—a mistake no one else could possibly have made; anyway, I'm not factoring that minute into "difficulty")

THEME: none

Word of the Day: TYPE-A flu (51D: Most serious kind of flu) —

• • •

Loved this one, though the way it's glutted with teenspeak made me literally laugh out loud. It's like, we get it, youths. You're youthful. I got TURNT and thought, "What's next, LIT?" And thennnn ... bam, IT'S LIT. Cool. No one is going to be able to convince me that OPPS is a thing, mostly because it doesn't sound plausible. Sounds like too many other words. People would just be saying "What? Your hops? Your pops? Are you a British person trying to say APPS?" every time you tried to use it. It's a not-good bit of fill that is trying to pretend it's cool. But no matter. It's inferrable, and if not all the colloquialness lands, most of it does. There's very little not to like here. YELPER and E-SPORTS and UPSOLD are all fresh and fun. This puzzle made me feel like I still had some connection to modern youthful slang, because I knew all the terms (except OPPS, which we've established is made-up and/or dumb), but, real talk, I am an old and the way you know that I am an old is that my first answer, the first one I put into this here grid, was EWELL (3D: Tom ___, co-star of Marilyn Monroe in "The Seven Year Itch"). EWELL YELPER AESOP was how I got going. How I got *stopping* (ugh) was by being very stupid and somehow, after getting almost all of 19A: Parody (IMITATE) from crosses, deciding to write in an "N" in the second position. In my head, I was spelling INITIATE, which ... doesn't even make sense for the clue. Did you ever do something so dumb you can't even make sense of it to yourself? Well that's what happened here. INITATE. So I (fittingly) had NO USE at the beginning of 20D: Arrow on a screen (MOUSE POINTER) for a minute (figuratively and possibly literally). That stupid mistake inflated my time pretty badly. But I don't think the actual difficulty here was too bad. Saturday-worthy, for sure, but quite doable.


Loved POWER MOVE as an answer, and loooved the clue on DEAR SANTA (62A: Start of an anti-coal petition—I sincerely wrote in DEAR EARTH at first, like ... someone was writing a letter to the earth apologizing for polluting the *&^! out of it). Why is your RES. on your "business" card? (44A: Business card abbr.) And why does ERNESTINE have such a terrible clue (60A: Woman's name that's an anagram of INTERNEES). I mean, terrrrrible. Not only could not not think of a single ERNESTINE, but you decided to conjure up internment camps as part of your clue? Oh, no. No. Weird. Was confused by LAS at first, since I figured the Los Angeles Sparks would be ... LOS; but of course L.A. Sparks, LAS. Makes sense. Had GAIA for 10A: Goddess of spring and rebirth (MAIA), so thank goodness for fair crosses, and thank goodness GUTT is not a real word (10D: Unlikely entrant in a Westminster show) (MUTT). My big accomplishment of the day was getting HALTERTOP from just the "H" (57A: Article of summer wear), and good thing, because, as I've suggested, NO USE was making that SW corner a bear. This was my kind of Saturday. Fresh, fun, hard. Knocked me around just the right amount.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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