Brain-enhancing device used by Professor X / THU 3-18-21 / Dance featuring jerky arm movements / Daisy Mae's man in old comics / Salk and Pepper in brief

Constructor: Tom McCoy

Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium

THEME: MUCH ADO / ABOUT / NOTHING (33A: With 39- and 44-Across, dramatic work depicted in this puzzle's grid) — circled squares (containing words synonymous with "ADO") surround empty squares (i.e. "NOTHING"). So there is MUCH ADO ABOUT (in the sense of "surrounding") NOTHING:

The ADOs:

• FRACAS
• FUSS
• HUBBUB
• UPROAR
• STIR
• RUMPUS

Word of the Day: ORGO (64A: Notoriously difficult chem class) —

It does seem to be a regional thing. On the west coast (of US) and Texas I have only ever heard it as Ochem, but I have had students from the east come back and ask me why we don’t call it orgo. I could say “because it sounds funny” but I don’t. ;) I would guess that it wasn’t [shortened] to orga because that had too many other possibilities. (Barbara Murray, Ph.D. Organic Chemistry, Univ. of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (1984), answering a question about "ORGO" on Quora)

• • •

I don't have much to say about this one beyond the fact that I think it's probably the best themed puzzle of the year so far. I don't keep track of such things—no Top Tens or Best Ofs or "Rex's Favorites" or whatever—but this one unfolded perfectly for me, with a "huh, interesting" when I figured out the gimmick, and then a genuine "wow" when I got the revealer (that answer takes up a Lot of real estate, and contributes mightily to the puzzle's skewing Easy). Conceptually it's just ... perfect? I was just thinking, and often think (seriously, I do often think about this), that there are So Many Damn Words for ADO, all of which I know because they appear as clues for ADO, a very common crossword answer. So in addition to just being a great idea, this theme also seems like a kind of shout-out to the word ADO, to the vocabulary of ADO, which all constant solvers know well. It's like "hey, you know what word you see all the time in your puzzles ... let's do something fun with it," and then all the old familiar Hall-of-Fame ADO clues (Stir! Uproar! etc.) get to do a little victory lap in a golf cart, like old-timers being honored before a baseball game or something. We do get a lot of short fill, which usually saps a puzzle of its interestingness, but here, because so much of that short fill occurs in and around the theme stuff, I was sufficiently distracted by the theme stuff, i.e. navigating the empty squares, seeing what ADO word was coming into view in the circled squares, that I didn't care much that stuff like UPS and SIB and OFA is not terribly scintillating on its own. Also, where the circled squares are concerned, it is Not easy to navigate that many fixed squares cleanly when they aren't all on the same plane. That is, not hard to build a corner around FRACAS if it's just a simple, regular answer; but when you run its letters through four Acrosses and three Downs, getting the surrounding fill to come out acceptably, let alone entertainingly, gets a lot harder. And to have to handle not only the circled squares, but the stacked revealer in the center ... this grid is just thick with theme material. And yet it's smooth as hell. So this just was just very well done, stem to stern. NICE ONE, indeed.

This puzzle makes me realize that the key to a great solve isn't just a great theme, but a great theme that unfolds in the right way. There's obviously no way a constructor can completely control the path you take through the grid, but if you take a pretty standard falling-water path (i.e. start in the NW and just ... fall down and out of that section, as the gravitational pull of your answers takes you), you go from FRACAS surround empty squares (intriguing! mysterious!) right into the revealer (huge aha!). Now, maybe it's more fun to have the revealer hit you late, so that the mystery of the empty squares comes together in one climactic whomp, but I have to say I really enjoyed getting that whomp early and then riding the joyful feeling it gave me all the way to the finish line. There were some interesting non-theme moments along the way. Briefly got stuck thinking about lard or Crisco at 37A: Shortening, for short (ABBR.)—it's nice for otherwise unremarkable fill to get a clever little clue like that. My one big mistake of the day was actually small: I thought the [Cousin of a club] was a BAT. Makes sense. But there's no such thing as an AALEN wrench (42A: Kind of wrench); so I changed BAT to BLT, and tada. Semi-wicked that only the one letter separates two perfectly reasonable answers there. I'm very grateful AALEN looks as insane as it does, or I might not have noticed my error. 

I always find the "I WIN" v. "I WON" dilemma tiresome (esp. as I rarely hear anyone "cry" either) (45D: Exultant cry), and I initially blanked on Professor X's brain-enhancing device (CEREBRO), but "O" seemed a more likely terminal vowel than "I," and crosses eventually proved me right. The only thing about the puzzle I don't really care for is also its most original answer, which means I almost like it. Almost. That answer is ORGO. I just wouldn't go with ORGO in that position. I think it's an OK term to use, but only in a pinch, when you can't get more ordinary (and broadly clueable) stuff to work. Even leaving ÊTRE and SIB in place, you have lots of different options for filling that southernmost section, none of which involve semi-regional collegiate slang (only slang I ever head for Organic Chemistry when I was in college was O-CHEM, which I would also accept as crossword fill ... but also only in a pinch). Just changing SON to SEW gives you nice answers all around, but there are many, many other options for redoing that section as well. And yet, as I say, ORGO is bizarro in a way that I find almost charming, and it wasn't tough to get, so maybe it's just fine. 

Finished up with 60D: Salk and Pepper, in brief (DRS), which keeps making me smile every time I think about it. The salt & pepper pun combined with the odd-couple doctors is just ... mwah! Good stuff. Hope you enjoyed yourself at least half as much as I did. See you tomorrow.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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