Grilled Japanese dish on skewers / MON 7-12-21 / TV cable channel with Impractical Jokers / Appeasing idiomatically / Transform using mobile technology as a market / Fancy work from a manicurist

Constructor: Kevin Christian

Relative difficulty: Challenging (a minute over my Monday average, more of a Tuesday or easy Wednesday)

THEME: AFRICA (62A: Where this puzzle's circled letters can be found) — circled letters contain African countries:

Theme answers:

• I'M A LITTLE TEAPOT (17A: Song lyric before "short and stout")
• ALBERTO GONZALES (26A: Attorney general under George W. Bush)
• THROWING A BONE TO (43A: Appeasing, idiomatically)
• CHICKEN YAKITORI (56A: Grilled Japanese dish on skewers)

Word of the Day: CHICKEN YAKITORI (56A: Grilled Japanese dish on skewers) —

Yakitori (Japanese: 焼き鳥) (literally 'grilled bird') is a Japanese type of skewered pork or chicken. Its preparation involves skewering the meat with kushi (串), a type of skewer typically made of steel, bamboo, or similar materials. Afterwards, they are grilled over a charcoal fire. During or after cooking, the meat is typically seasoned with tare sauce or salt. The term is sometimes used informally for kushiyaki (grilled and skewered foods) in general. (wikipedia)

• • •

You gotta do better than this. Random African countries? Why? Why these countries? Why is AFRICA sitting in this weird non-revealer place? Why in the world would you drag TOTO into it!? Ugh. It's like with the JIM MORRISON stuff yesterday: what are you doing? And why is this running on Monday? It's a Tuesday / Wednesday-type theme. I feel like the NYTXW is really desperate for good Monday puzzles, because they keep running Mondays that aren't Mondays, Mondays that end up harder than Tuesdays and even some Wednesdays. Random African countries ... by way of TOTO ... not really feeling this one. Plus TEAPOT in the first themer and TO in the third themer are just left out to dry, not involved in the African country stuff at all. Also, this puzzle made me have to remember a Bush II administration figure, ick. Just because the last administration was somehow much much worse does not mean I'm gonna be happy to see those Bush II ***holes again. And we're still doing NIP??? You know you can take that out with almost no effort, right? I mean, Anaïs NIN called, she wants to know why you never call any more? Or, just rewrite that whole tiny section, a million different ways, most of which don't contain any words that can be used as racial slurs. OK? Here try this:

Or this:

It's So Easy. You just have to care. And when your idea of "fun" fill is UBERIZE, well, we are not going to get along very well (10D: Transform using mobile technology, as a market). What an awful word (which I didn't know existed until just now). I liked NAIL ART (5D: Fancy work from a manicurist). That is about all I liked. AFRICA (the continent, not the song) deserves better than this. And how, how in the world do you leave MANGO LASSI on the table???? 

So much slow-down stuff. The theme type, for starters. And the themers themselves, yikes, I just needed lots and lots of help with the crosses. Well, not the first, that one I could get from the clue, but I couldn't remember if GONZALES was "Z" or "S" at the end, so that caused some hesitation. THROWING A BONE TO took a ton of work, as the clue is Saturday-hard (43A: Appeasing, idiomatically). And confession: I've never heard of CHICKEN YAKITORI. Teriyaki, yes. Cacciatore, yes. But YAKITORI was not, from my position, Monday fare. Totally fine answer, not disputing its legitimacy or validity. But that slowed me down. Also couldn't make sense of LAUGH from the clue (27D: Ha-ha) (a LAUGH is a ... ha-ha?) and as for AGE, that clue was a riddle, and I don't really do those (well, or happily) (40A: Number that never goes down). TWERKED had a "?" clue that, again, just stalled things mightily (41D: Brought up the rear?). The worst wound, though, was entirely self-inflicted (those wounds are always the worst because the only one I have to yell at is me): I had BAL- at 46D: Southeast Europe's ___ Peninsula (BALKAN), and I just put in the first six-letter European BAL- answer that came to my mind: BALTIC. Total disaster, mostly because it crossed YAKITORI, which, as we've established, I didn't know. Ugh. Also hesitated over spelling of JIBED (as I always do) (G? J? G? J?), and GO BIG wasn't exactly a slam dunk (29D: Pull out all the stops). So, in short: not the right day of the week, not a tight enough concept, TOTO tie-in is colonialist violence ... the end.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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