Area named for gynecologist Ernst Gräfenberg / THU 3-25-21 / China North Korea border river / Supercomputing pioneer Seymour / Five-point rugby play / Grocery product with orange packaging / Nick who voices Kuiil on The Mandalorian

Constructor: Alex Eaton-Salners

Relative difficulty: Challenging (but I got *very* stuck, so it might actually be more like Medium-Challenging)

THEME: Opposite of [circled letters] — that's the clue for six themers, each of which are words that contain their putative "opposites" inside them, in the circled letters. So:

Theme answers:

• WONDERFUL contains WOEFUL
• EFFECTIVE contains EFFETE (?)
• FEASTING contains FASTING 
• PRURIENT contains PURE
• ANIMOSITY contains AMITY

Word of the Day: Seymour CRAY (35D: Supercomputing pioneer Seymour) —

Seymour Roger Cray (September 28, 1925 – October 5, 1996) was an American electrical engineer and supercomputer architect who designed a series of computers that were the fastest in the world for decades, and founded Cray Research which built many of these machines. Called "the father of supercomputing", Cray has been credited with creating the supercomputer industry. Joel S. Birnbaum, then chief technology officer of Hewlett-Packard, said of him: "It seems impossible to exaggerate the effect he had on the industry; many of the things that high performance computers now do routinely were at the farthest edge of credibility when Seymour envisioned them." Larry Smarr, then director of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois said that Cray is "the Thomas Edison of the supercomputing industry." (wikipedia)

• • •

Just a chore. Whatever the opposite of "word-related fun" is, that's what this was. The thing that makes it deathly is the cluing—it's like being hit with a hammer, but more tiresome, if somewhat less violent. Same clue, over and over. And a clue that tells you nothing specific, that involves no wordplay, no cleverness, nothing. Just thud thud thud thud thud thud. You know exactly what you have to do from the very beginning, and then begins the extreme chore of doing it. Is my life improved by knowing that the letters in WOEFUL can be found sequentially inside of WONDERFUL? It is not. Did any of these bring even a glimmer of that "aha" feeling that makes solving tough clues so satisfying? No, not a one was able to do this. And EFFETE? We all use EFFECTIVE in our ordinary, daily lives. I doubt anyone uses EFFETE even 1/1000th as much. What a dismal pair of alleged "opposites." And hiding FASTING inside of FEASTING is not exactly what you'd call amazing. Thematically, this was dreary, and the drear permeated all other aspects of the solving experience.

The toughness lies mainly in sussing out the themers with nothing specific to go on from the clues. But I managed to add difficulty, and a lot of it, by making one tiny, plausible error, which resulted in an astonishing cascade of negative implications for my solving success. Once I got into the NE corner, I thought I made pretty quick work of the short Downs (10- through 13-Down). The crosses that I had seemed to work: ON ICE and NOLTE worked, EFFECTIVE and NED worked, so I thought everything was OK. But one letter was off. SNORT OCTAVE and TEEMED were fine, but I had FILE IN instead of PILE IN (11D: Enter all together), and as Robert Frost didn't exactly say, that made all the difference. I couldn't get rid of FILE IN because it seemed very right. All the correct crosses confirmed its rightness for me. So ... the gynecologist clue... I had -SFOT ... and I had no idea, truly, that "Area" was anatomical. So I thought maybe a geographical region, a cape or a peninsula, maybe (?), had been named for this guy. I don't know. I was like "Is U.S. FOT an 'area' ...?" This was all made infinitely worse by my struggles with *two* nearby longer phrases, each of which was missing only *one* letter, but *neither* of which I could parse. Here was the grid:

You see how 9D: Escalate to the extreme has a complete English word there at the end, the word CLEAR? Well let me tell you, when you see a complete English word like that at the end of your answer, it is very (very) hard to shake the idea that it is a stand-alone word in the answer that it is in. So I just kept wanting phrases ending in "CLEAR" (GONE CLEAR!?) instead of GO NUCLEAR. This is a very, very unfortunate thing to have happen around what is far and away the best answer in the grid. Further, the only possibility I could see at 21A: "You betcha!" ("I SURE AM!") was "I SCREAM." So there, I had the opposite of my CLEAR problem, which is that I *couldn't* see that there was a stand-alone word already in view at the end of that phrase. the word "AM." So, to recap, FILE IN => no idea about the gynecologist => a seemingly impossible double parsing catastrophe with GO NUCLEAR and "I SURE AM." I don't even remember how I finally came out of it. 

Bullets:

• 61A: Cry made while removing a jacket ("IT'S ON!") — is this supposed to be the prelude to a fight? People say "IT'S ON!" all the time but usually there's no actual physical fighting and only rarely (I imagine) removing of jackets. The phrasing on the clue is so bizarre (why not "one's jacket"?) that I thought maybe there was supposed to be jacket ambiguity. Seriously considered what one might cry upon removing a book's dust jacket. 
• 63A: Dispatch, in a way (SLAY) — Had the "S," wrote SEND. That corner was toughish, because, once again, parsing a longish phrase (SET A GOAL) was a slog.
• 45D: ___ conservative (FISCAL) — misread the clue, which is to say I ignored the blank and thought the clue was just [Conservative]. Brain was just all over the place this morning.
• 35D: Supercomputing pioneer Seymour (CRAY) — no idea, though I weirdly wanted CRAY pretty early on ... so maybe I knew without knowing I knew. That sometimes happens.

I get my first dose of the vaccine today, which is honestly thrilling. Hope you all have been doing your level best to get yours ASAP. Take care.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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