Jack who co-starred with Charlie Chaplin in "The Great Dictator" / SUN 8-25-19 / Mumbai royal / Donizetti's "Pour mon âme," e.g. / French greeting

Constructor: Matt Ginsberg

Relative difficulty: Medium-Challenging

THEME: NOW YOU SEE ME / NOW YOU DON'T — Across answers have an extra "C" added to normal phrases to create wacky phrases. Down answers have a "C" subtracted from normal phrases to create wacky phrases. So wacky!

Theme answers:

• NOW YOU SEE ME (113A: Illusionist's phrase illustrated by seven Across answers in this puzzle?)
• NOW YOU DON'T (73D: Illusionist's phrase illustrated by three Down answers in this puzzle?)

Across themers (+C):

• ANY COLD TIME (23A: When you can ice skate outside?)
• DEAD CHEAT (25A: Poker player in the Old West after being caught with a card up his sleeve?)
• WINCE MAKER (50A: Bad pun?)
• PAGE CRANK (58A: Manual part of a printing press?) 
• SPARE CRIB (77A: Need for parents who weren't expecting twins?)
• CROW HOUSES (85A: Rookeries?)
• CREST AREA (111A: Toothpaste aisle?)

Down themers (-C):

• MODERN DANE (5D: Queen Margrethe II, e.g.?)
• FREE RADIAL (15D: Arrangement in which you buy three times but get a whole set?)
• MAGI MOMENT (70D: Visit to baby Jesus?)

Word of the Day: KLEIN (55A: ____ bottle (topological curiosity)) —

In topology, a branch of mathematics, the Klein bottle /ˈklaɪn/ is an example of a non-orientable surface; it is a two-dimensional manifold against which a system for determining a normal vector cannot be consistently defined. Informally, it is a one-sided surface which, if traveled upon, could be followed back to the point of origin while flipping the traveler upside down. Other related non-orientable objects include the Möbius strip and the real projective plane. Whereas a Möbius strip is a surface with boundary, a Klein bottle has no boundary (for comparison, a sphere is an orientable surface with no boundary).

• • •

Hi all, Rachel Fabi in for Rex today, which under most circumstances would be a good thing for a constructor; I tend to say nice things about puzzles, while Rex is (in)famously cranky about many of them. Today's puzzle, however, is unfortunately going to be a challenge for me to glow about, as I have objections to the fill, the theme, and (some of) the cluing.

As a general rule, if the answer at 1A is a variant of a very common piece of crosswordese, you have already lost me. By the time I realized the puzzle was looking for AMIR instead of EMIR, I had already wasted an annoying amount of time trying to decipher that corner and moved on *twice*, and only managed to crack it by virtue of having written about OONA Chaplin on a previous review for Rex. The fill throughout the rest of the puzzle is not significantly better (see IDYL [also a variant!], RANEE [variant!!!!], ANAS [what?]).

I did not see this movie, now or otherwise

Despite the fill, my primary gripe is actually with the theme. NOW YOU SEE ME, when a magician (sorry, "illusionist") says it, does not mean "Now there is a C!". This theme would have made far more sense if the thing that was added to or subtracted from the "normal" phrases was the word ME, rather than the letter C. "Now you see ME. Now you don't." Almost as strange was the imbalance between the +C phrases (7) and the -C phrases (3). Why not have 5 of each, if you're determined to pack that many themers into this puzzle? The grid was pretty tortured by the theme density, and the fact that more Cs were appearing than disappearing feels inelegant. The iffy fill just wasn't worth the payoff.

a Klein bottle, apparently

I didn't really connect with a lot of the clues, but I generally don't blame constructors for that--sometimes you're just on a different wavelength. I will say that it seemed like the clues skewed harder when they didn't need to-- there are plenty of ways to clue KLEIN, for instance, and I suspect that the "topological curiosity" (pictured here) is beyond not just my wheelhouse, but that of 95% of solvers. In general, I am thrilled to learn new ways to clue common words, but when it's crossing UTILE and the aforementioned variant RANEE, I think it's better to stick with tried-and-true clues, especially on a Sunday. I won't bore you with the laundry list of clues I had similar objections to, but let's just say there were several. Ok, one more: 28A: Lamb offering? for ESSAY. Just, what? I have googled, and apparently there is a 19th century essayist by the name of Charles Lamb, but this is not an answer that needed that kind of clue. Contrast this with OAKIE, which was clued as an actor who is unfamiliar to me, but which is also not cluable in many other ways. In cases like that, a tricky/trivia-name type of clue is reasonable. But for LAMB and KLEIN and several other clues, it seems like they went hard when the Sundayness of this puzzle called for easy-medium.

I do have a few positive things to say! I lol'd at the clue on TIDAL (46A: Like the motion of the ocean) because it reminded me of a lyric from the Bloodhound Gang song "Bad Touch." I also enjoyed the inclusion of CHARO, whose "cuchi-cuchi" tagline I learned through RuPaul's Drag Race. And even though I don't think the theme was executed well, I did enjoy some of the puns that came out of it (specifically MAGI MOMENT, MODERN DANE, and SPARE CRIB).


Overall, I did not click with this puzzle, but there were enough bright spots that I can say that I also didn't hate it!

Signed, Rachel Fabi, Queen-for-a-Day of CrossWorld
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