Ointment with orange label / SAT 4-11-20 / High Life director Claire / 2017 #1 song whose music video has over 6.5 million views on YouTube / Syrup in mai tai / Rectangle on staff / Coin whose obverse shows King Maha Vajiralongkorn / Mono no Japanese term for gentle sadness at life's impermanence / 2006 #1 Chamillionaire hit that begins They see me rollin

Constructor: Erik Agard and Wyna Liu

Relative difficulty: Medium (7:19)

THEME: none

Word of the Day: HALOGEN (10D: I, for one) —

noun Chemistry.

any of the electronegative elements, fluorine, chlorine, iodine, bromine, and astatine, that form binary salts by direct union with metals. (dictionary.com)

• • •

Liked this much better than yesterday's, despite my having a somewhat similar "I don't know what many of these things are!" reaction. There was definite Saturday-level difficulty here, but a. that difficulty was more straightforward and less cutesily performative, and b. there was just *more* stuff to love, so that even though the difficulty (read (mostly): my ignorance) got me down, other answers very quickly got me back up again. "AMEN TO THAT!" and "(Yer) DARN TOOTIN'!" are just so wholesome and positive, which is a vibe I definitely need in my life right now. HAVE A HEART: no BAD EGGS! I mean, yes, there were some downsides to this one. ATE DINNER falls hard into the Green Paint category, subset "EAT/ATE ___" phrases. As I've said before, my never-seen but long-awaited paradigm for this kind of answer is EAT A SANDWICH—i.e. a totally arbitrary EAT phrase that anyone might say in conversation but that does not have the solidity to stand alone very comfortably—and ATE DINNER is very close. Put any meal after ATE, and you're one step away from putting any food after ATE, at which point all bets are off, all rules out the windows, cats and dogs are friends, it's literally raining men. It's a slippery slope from ATE DINNER to utter chaos, is what I'm saying. And what is going on with the clue on AWARE??? (27D: Mono no ___, Japanese term for a gentle sadness at life's impermanence). I appreciate the attempt to broaden the puzzle's cultural frame of reference, but as a rule you don't take a perfectly good English word, for which you might come up with roughly a zillion different interesting clues, and turn it into a foreign fill-in-the-blank (!?) for which the vast majority of solvers are going to have to guess Every Single Letter. In the end, I haven't really learned anything. It's not gonna stick. I'm not gonna hear it enough. And an opportunity for a clever and tough but ultimately accessible clue goes by the wayside. You've already got three proper nouns in the puzzle that are gonna be tough going for a good portion of solvers ("DESPACITO," "RIDIN'," DENIS). You can keep things difficult without turning a basic English word like AWARE into an obscurity. That clue was a non-bright spot in an otherwise entertaining and appropriately toughish puzzle.


Hey, if you were paying attention to my write-ups of late, then you have no good excuse for not (eventually?) getting "DESPACITO," which I included on the blog back in March, when it was used in a clue for its singer, Luis FONSI. Here are the exact words I wrote:

"I expect to see FONSI again, or (maybe on a Fri or Sat) to see LUIS clued this way. And, perhaps more obviously, look for "DESPACITO" to come your way, eventually."

I told you to look for it to come your way, eventually! And here we are. Look, I'm not saying I'm prophetic, but I'm kind of saying that, a little. Truth be told, even I blanked on the song's name at first (though I knew immediately the song in question ... just not the name of it) (1A: 2017 #1 song whose music video has over 6.5 billion views on YouTube). I was also lucky enough to know the name of the [2006 #1 Chamillionaire hit that begins "They see me rollin'"]—that song, "RIDIN'," was made especially famous by the extremely popular Weird Al parody, "White & Nerdy" (which had me thinking that the Chamillionaire song title was actually "RIDIN' dirty" ... I guess "dirty" is just in the lyrics, not in the title). If you somehow have never heard either song, well, here you go:

[Wow, did *not* realize that Key & Peele were the dudes in the car at the beginning of the Weird Al video]

[Simple craft] is a very very vague clue for DORY (a kind of boat), and yet somehow I got it Fast (off the "D"). Got destroyed, however, by HALOGEN, which has a stunningly deceptive clue (10D: I, for one). First, there's the fact that "I, for one..." is a common opinion starter. Then there's the fact that I is the Roman numeral that stands for "one," so that's an angle to consider. But then "I" is a pronoun and "I" is a chemical symbol and on and on. Endless possibilities. But sadly for me I (still) haven't fully learned what HALOGEN is—I still know the term only as an adjective modifying "lamp" or "headlights"—so the fact that it's a whole category of element, let alone what those elements are ... yeah, don't know that yet. Maybe next time? I knew ORGEAT because I did a whole crossword podcast about MAI / TAIs a few years back, and I can still clearly hear the voice of my friend / podcast partner Lena expounding on ORGEAT (22A: Syrup in a mai tai). I thought BAILBOND was BAILOUTS (35D: Possible instance of predatory lending). Had real trouble with the MAP part of STREET MAP (31D: Holder of miniature blocks). Wrote in UNCLE before I GIVE (11D: Cry for mercy). But mostly I moved through this one fairly steadily, and mostly I enjoyed the ride.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

P.S. please read this blog post by the great Liz Gorski, a wonderful crossword constructor whose name you might recognize from NYT crosswords past. She stopped submitting to the NYTXW a while back. The blog post explains why. Her words (which, trust me, are diplomatic) provide a complementary perspective to that of the recent Open Letter to the Executive Director of Puzzles at the NYT, calling for, among other things, increased diversity among the test-solving and editorial staff. But Liz is writing from a place of longtime personal experience, and she's demonstrably (and understandably) less sanguine about the likelihood that small editorial policy changes are likely to seriously address the problems with gender parity and overall inclusivity at the NYTXW. Anyway, it's worth a read. She's a legendary constructor, and I'm happy she's added her voice to this discussion.

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]