Palindromist Jon of Sit on a potato pan Otis / WED 10-28-20 / Whispered name in The Raven / Frequent SNL role for Beck Bennett / US Navy builder / What members of the Church of the SubGenius parody religion claim to be descended from / Rare weather phenomenon that's white unlike its cousin

Constructor: Peter Gordon

Relative difficulty: Challenging (like, hilariously off-the-mark for a Wednesday ... high 5s, i.e. my average Friday time) (it is oversized, but still, yikes)

THEME: a quote from Carrie Bradshaw (of the TV show "Sex and the City," which, bizarrely, the puzzle never indicates) about men ("Men!") in their 40s and crossword puzzles — "Men in their 40s are like the New York Times Sunday crossword puzzle ... TRICKY, COMPLICATED, AND / YOU'RE NEVER / REALLY SURE / YOU GOT THE RIGHT / ANSWER"

Word of the Day: IMARET (18A: Turkish inn) —

Imaret is one of a few names used to identify the public soup kitchens built throughout the Ottoman Empire from the 14th to the 19th centuries. These public kitchens were often part of a larger complex known as a külliye, which could include hospices, mosques, caravanserais and colleges. The imarets gave out food that was free of charge to specific types of people and unfortunate individuals. Imarets were not invented by the Ottomans but developed under them as highly structured groups of buildings. Nonetheless, imarets indicate an appreciation of Muslim religious teachings about charity found in the Qur'an. (wikipedia)

• • •

I knew I was in for ... something ... when I rolled out of bed, picked up my phone, and saw this thread in my Twitter mentions:

Good morning!

***

Carrie Bradshaw*

If you crowdsourced ideas about how to make a crossword theme that's completely unpalatable to me, I'm not sure you could, in your collective wisdom, come up with a "better" theme than this. Let's start with "quote puzzle." We could end there, but today, we start. Next, make it a quote from "Sex and the City," a show ... well, look, different people enjoy different things, and surely many of you enjoy(ed) that particular television program, which is fine, but nothing smacks of a certain kind of smug NYC provincialism more than that show, and, for a variety of reasons, it has, uh, never been to my taste. Speaking of smug NYC provincialism, the NYTXW is so certain of the centrality of Carrie Bradshaw to everyone's everyday life that they don't even indicate, in the clue or anywhere, that she's a fictional character from a TV show. I knew who she was, but it's a weird assumption that everyone will. Also, "men are like ___" or "women are like ___" or "life is like a box of chocolates" or "men are from Mars" or whatever little aphorism you're putting down, yeah that's not likely to sit too great with me. But if you are going to lay down an analogy, dear lord, let it be somewhere near the mark. Where to begin with this quotation? I can't speak to "men in their 40s," but crosswords, I know. First, the Thursday puzzle is the "TRICKY, COMPLICATED" one. Can Sunday be like that? Sure, but if you're going to run a crossword quote in a crossword, for crossword solvers, best not to propagate myths about crossword difficulty (do you know how widespread the idea is that the Sunday is the hardest? do you!?). Next, what "right answer"? The puzzle is not *an* answer? Do you mean that you're never really sure you got the right overall solution? I thought it was gonna end with something like "you're never really sure if you're through," because maybe guys in their 40s leave things ambiguous a lot (?) and certainly you might *think* you've finished a puzzle, but you could have wrong answers somewhere. That's ... plausible. But "the right answer" is just the wrong phrasing here. Also, the internet exists (even in Carrie Bradshaw's day) and the solution key exists, so you do, in fact, know if you have the right answer, if you just wait. But to explain the thematic grief, again, we can just go back to "quote puzzle." It's a quote puzzle. 

Then there's the fill, by which I mean mostly the ridiculously hard (for a Wednesday) cluing. Clues on YETIS CORP DDAY HURT ICEAX etc. were more Friday/Saturday level, but the real problem was the dump truck full of proper names, my god. Peter is a huge trivia fan, creator of an app called Celebrity, which involves knowing famous names, but you know my feelings about proper names, especially in abundance and especially when they're, er, marginal, and especially especially when they're crossing or abutting. I'm not concerned about the total number of names today (though there are a lot), I'm concerned about the relative marginality of the names. Any one of these might be worthy individually, but all at once, yeesh, it's a lot: GABE AGEE (those ones cross) MAUREEN TESLA (fine answer, but as clued, yikes), LEVI KIDD IRA LENORE. I guess you could throw in Lil UZI Vert (the current go-to UZI clue for those who want to pretend they didn't put a murdering machine in the grid). Now, I knew roughly half those names, so I'm not pleading obscurity on every front. But when your names aren't of the household variety, things can and do get dicey. 

Filling this puzzle out was a chore on every front. Puzzle couldn't decide what it was, and ended up being a trivia-heavy Friday mashed up with a Tuesday-type theme, and the result was ... well, it's Halloween week, so maybe the horror was intentional, I don't know. But FOGBOW (!?) is not a Wednesday answer (54D: Rare weather phenomenon that's white, unlike its colorful cousin), and MIKE PENCE ... (19A: Frequent "S.N.L." role for Beck Bennett) what are you even doing here, NYTXW? The Mini included the horrible new Supreme Court justice yesterday, and today the actual grown-up crossword gives us ... this guy. This disgusting lickspittle. This walking embodiment of fraud and moral decay. This abetter of incompetence and, frankly, where the COVID response is concerned, murder. Fuck him. Pardon my French. See you tomorrow.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld 

*yeah, I know, just roll with it

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]