Lawless figure with legendary fighting skills / WED 12-23-20 / Blizzards are produced in them familiarly / Overindulger of the grape / Locale of 1974's Rumble in the Jungle / Roebuck's onetime partner / Enemy of Antony in ancient Rome

Constructor: Juliana Tringali Golden

Relative difficulty: Medium-Challenging (?????) (I co-solved on Zoom ten minutes after waking up so I have no idea)

THEME: WEATHER BALLOONS (40A: Carriers of meteorological instruments ... as suggested by this puzzle's theme) — types of WEATHER are rebused inside four little BALLOONS (or circles):

Theme answers:

• LAUNCH WINDOW / REWINDS
• EXTRA INNINGS / EL TRAINS
• TEAR ASUNDER / TSUNAMI
• SLICED BREAD / CICERO 

Word of the Day: SENNA (34D: Ingredient in some medicinal teas) —

1: any of a genus (Cassia synonym Senna) of leguminous herbs, shrubs, and trees native to warm regions : CASSIAsense 2especially : one used medicinally

2: the dried leaflets or pods of various sennas (especially Cassia angustifolia synonym Senna alexandrina) used as a purgative (merriam-webster.com)

• • •

Good morning. It's getting late so I'm just gonna sketch the highlights and then refer you to the VIDEO SOLVE I did just now (sooooo early in the morning) with my friend and fellow crossword blogger (and fellow Central New Yorker) Rachel Fabi. I'll post the video at the end of the write-up. Aw, heck, I'll just post it here:

My main thoughts were that the theme was cute and well executed but the fill could've used some cleaning up. Weird (though not unheard of) to see a rebus on a Wednesday, but in this case the rebus squares are clearly flagged by the circles, which have been integrated into the theme *as circles*. Usually circles don't have any intrinsic value, puzzlewise; they just indicate letters that we are meant to notice for some reason. But here, the actual circle itself becomes part of the theme: clever. WEATHER BALLOONS is a perfect revealer and a perfect grid-spanner and so conceptually, this works. The one issue I have with the theme (and I didn't mention this in the video) is that with an embedded word (like the weather words today), the elegant thing to do is have that word touching both elements in the theme answer, the way RAIN, for instances, touches both EXTRA (RA-) and INNINGS (-IN). You break the word across the two elements of the theme answer. Today, that happened only once. Hiding WIND inside WINDOW ... meh. Not hard. There should be a reason you've hidden these inside flashy longer themers instead of just any old place on the grid. But here, LAUNCH and TEAR and BREAD are just hanging out with nothing to do—not touching the "weather" at all. Part of what makes themers in puzzles like this special is that the hidden word is hidden in this particular way, touching all the answer elements. To have one themer do this and the other three ... not ... makes this seem less polished, less carefully made. 

Fillwise, the puzzle is actually pretty rough, but there are some reasons for that, most notably that the theme is pretty dense and puts pretty severe restrictions on the grid. You have the five themers plus the rebus element, which means the crosses of those rebus squares are all fixed parts of the theme as well. I still think the fill should've been a lot smoother, but it's definitely passable. The one huge no-no is the fault of the editor (yet again). You can't (canNOT) cross DQS and QUEEN at the "Q" if you are going to clue DQS as "Dairy Queens" plural. You can't even have DQS and QUEEN in the same puzzle if that is how you're going to clue DQS. That is a dupe. A duplication. An editing mistake. Incredibly shoddy. DQS can be an abbr. for "disqualifications," esp. in sports, so either a different clue should've been used for DQS or that whole section should've been redone. Again, you absolutely cannot have "Q" meaning "queen" in an answer and then have the actual word QUEEN as an entirely different answer, and you *especially* can't do this if the answers cross at the "Q" LOL who's steering the ship over there!? Somebody mutiny, please!

Today's constructor, Juliana Tringali Golden, is an editor at the The Inkubator Crossword, a 3x/month independent crossword made entirely by women ("cis women, trans women, and women-allied constructors"). You can subscribe here!

OK, bye. 

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld 

P.S. looks like some things need extra explaining: ANAG is short for ANAGram, yes, awful. And EGOT = all the awards (Emmy Grammy Oscar Tony). Thank you, bye again!

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