Beats me in textspeak / WED 9-22-21 / Member of the South Asian diaspora / Page NFL Hall of Famer turned justice on the Minnesota Supreme Court / Dweller east of the North Atlantic / Black hole for socks facetiously / Tiramisu topper / Ship built with help of Athena

Constructor: Grant Boroughs

Relative difficulty: Very Easy

THEME: Crossword add-iCS —  -ICS is tacked to the end of familiar phrases to create wacky phrases, clued wackily ("?"-style!):

Theme answers:

• DOT COMICS (17A: Much of Roy Lichtenstein's work?)
• MATH CLASSICS (28A: Euclid's "Elements," Descartes's "La Géométrie," etc.?)
• CARPENTER ANTICS (38A: Wacky shenanigans of a woodworker?)
• FRYING PANICS (46A: Frights upon waking up from sunbathing naps?)
• POP TOPICS (64A: Things that dad likes to discuss?)

Word of the Day: Roy Lichtenstein (17A) —

Roy Fox Lichtenstein (/ˈlɪktənˌstaɪn/; October 27, 1923 – September 29, 1997) was an American pop artist. During the 1960s, along with Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, and James Rosenquist among others, he became a leading figure in the new art movement. His work defined the premise of pop art through parody. Inspired by the comic strip, Lichtenstein produced precise compositions that documented while they parodied, often in a tongue-in-cheek manner. His work was influenced by popular advertising and the comic book style. His artwork was considered to be "disruptive". He described pop art as "not 'American' painting but actually industrial painting". His paintings were exhibited at the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York City.

Whaam! and Drowning Girl are generally regarded as Lichtenstein's most famous works.^]Drowning Girl, Whaam!, and Look Mickey are regarded as his most influential works. His most expensive piece is Masterpiece, which was sold for $165 million in January 2017. (wikipedia)

• • •

Well that's two days in a row now that we've had a Very old-fashioned theme concept and very old-fashioned and fairly tired fill. You add -ICS to words to get new words. OK. How does that work out for you? Nothing is particularly hilarious or even funny about the results, and the core concept doesn't even have a real hook. There's no reason for -ICS, no pun on "I SEE" or "ICY" or ... I dunno what you do to get "-ICS" to be special, but whatever it is, this puzzle isn't doing it. The Lichtenstein answer DOTCOMICS has some liveliness and cleverness, but the rest just thud into place, and once you know they all end in -ICS, an already-easy puzzle becomes that much easier. Just an exercise in filling in boxes. The only themer I had any trouble with was MATH CLASSICS, because I was fixated on the Frenchness of the Descartes title and wanted it to be FRENCH CLASSICS, which obv wouldn't fit. Actually, now that I look at the themers in the bottom half of the grid, I'm not sure I looked at their clues at all. There was no need. The short fill was so easy that those longer answers eventually just came into view. This puzzle didn't even have any vibrant or fresh longer fill to at least add some character and interest to the solving experience. AMERICAN ... EUROPEAN ... is there some inside joke there? A continental identity joke? Maybe an immigration theme of some sort? Wait, is this a hidden "Perfect Strangers" theme!? You've got an AMERICAN named Larry APPLETON who now lives in Chicago and gets an unexpected visit from his EUROPEAN cousin, Balki, and then, as with this puzzle, wackiness ensues. Oh this is much better than the surface theme. Much better.

This puzzle was so easy that before I ever got a theme answer I got bored and set myself a challenge to see if I could go corner to corner, NW to SE, in an unbroken string, having to use crosses all the way. And voila!

Now as you can see, I had an error there ("All the SAME" instead of "All the RAGE" at 41D), but whatever, I still got there. Mission accomplished. 

This puzzle had a few OK moments. I enjoyed IDK (don't see that enough ... beats, say, IMHO, imho) and GAMEPLAN. But there's just too much gunk, ATEST and ASIT and ALLOF, and that's just the partials. You've also got an RRN (random Roman numeral) at MIII, and that's right next door to a plural scolding sound, TSKS ... it's rough all over. Some of this is clearly a product of grid design, where the (fixed) themers are forcing some very tough choices in the short crosses (both MIII and TSKS, for instance, run through *two* themers, so there really aren't a ton of great options there). I had no trouble with anything but ALAN Page, who ... yeah, let's just say my knowledge of Minnesota Supreme Court justices is limited. Limited to zero. Zero knowledge. ALAN Page rings a very, very faint bell (it turns out he's a really remarkable guy and kind of a big deal in Minnesota). I guess the "Minnesota Supreme Court" bit was to alert me that he was a Minnesota Viking. Yeah, that didn't help much. But it's a four-letter common name, it did no harm. What did do harm, though, was crossing AVI- with AVIATOR. You can't do that. Same root. AVIATOR already had AVI- in it. Look:

aviator (n.)

"aircraft pilot," 1887, from French aviateur, from Latin avis "bird" (from PIE root *awi- "bird") + -ateur. Also used c. 1891 in a sense of "aircraft, flying-machine." Feminine form aviatrix is from 1927; earlier aviatrice (1910), aviatress (1911). (etymonline.com)

So now you're just crossing the prefix with itself. Awful. This puzzle should really get an editor. OK, bye now.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld 

P.S. Happy birthday to my dear daughter, who can now drink (legally). Or go to casinos, I guess, though that seems unlikely.

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