Captain Pierce portrayer on old TV / THU 11-18-21 / Its name comes from the Greek for uncuttable / City with slogan big things happen here / Oppressive authority informally / Marcille who won America's Next Top Model / Title character in an '80s sitcom / Cause of some orange fingers

Constructor: Ori Brian

Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium (probably easier if my version of the puzzle had been formatted correctly)

THEME: series placement — theme clues are lists of three things, all in the same category; arrows point to one of the items in the list, and the answer ends up being a familiar phrase following the pattern [place in the list the arrows are pointing to] + [category of the list], so: 

Theme answers:

• FIRST LADY (16A: --> Di <-- Gaga Godiva) (because the arrows point to "Di," who is the FIRST LADY ... in this list of ladies)
• SECOND-RATE (24A: R.p.m. --> m.p.h. <-- k.p.s.)
• MIDDLE CLASS (36A: Art --> Calculus <-- Spanish)
• THIRD PARTY (52A: Housewarming masquerade --> tailgate <--)
• LAST LAUGH (62A: Ha-ha chortle --> tee-hee <--)

Word of the Day: GAR (40A: Long-snouted fish) —

Gars are members of the family Lepisosteidae which are the only surviving members of Ginglymodi, an ancient holosteian group of ray-finned fish which first appeared during the Triassic, over 240 million years ago. Gars comprise seven living species of fish in two genera that inhabit fresh, brackish, and occasionally marine waters of eastern North America, Central America and Cuba in the Caribbean, though extinct members of the family were more widespread. Gars have elongated bodies that are heavily armored with ganoid scales,^[4]and fronted by similarly elongated jaws filled with long, sharp teeth. Gars are sometimes referred to as "garpike", but are not closely related to pike, which are in the fish family Esocidae. All of the gars are relatively large fish, but the alligator gar (Atractosteus spatula) is the largest – the alligator gar often grows to a length of over 2 m (6.5 ft) and a weight of over 45 kg (100 lb), and specimens of up to 3 m (9.8 ft) in length have been reported. Unusually, their vascularised swim bladders can function as lungs, and most gars surface periodically to take a gulp of air. Gar flesh is edible and the hard skin and scales of gars are used by humans, but gar eggs are highly toxic. (wikipedia)

• • •

I still solve the puzzle in .puz format, even though the NYT doesn't officially distribute it that way anymore. There's a Puzzle Scraper extension on Chrome that you can use ... *anyway* I solve in that format because it's what I've been solving in forever and it's familiar to me and I like it and I don't want to be *forced* to solve in a proprietary app where my data is being mined etc. But today yeah it would've helped to solve in the app because my software couldn't handle the arrows in the theme clues and just rendered them as hyphens, so my lists looked like weird equations, or lists with missing elements. For instance, the FIRST LADY clue looked like this: [— Di— Gaga Godiva] and I thought maybe it was a list of ladies where the FIRST LADY was just ... missing? Weirdly, the arrow problem didn't mess me up nearly as much as it seems like it should have. Once you get that the theme clues are lists of categories, and that the first word refers to placement position, then you can infer the answers pretty well. "Well, those are all rates, so ... and those are all classes, so ... etc." I like the theme concept a lot but I don't get the progression at all. It makes no sense. FIRST SECOND MIDDLE THIRD LAST??? What kind of a list is that? THIRD is in the fourth position. If you are going to go to the trouble of laying out a progression, the progression should make sense. I wouldn't be nearly as annoyed if the themers were in a shuffled order, where there was obviously not supposed to be a progression. But because a progression is so obviously intended (from FIRST to LAST), I find that misplaced THIRD completely intolerable. It's fourth. Your THIRD is fourth. I'm just stating facts here. Baffling.

The fill occasionally hits the crosswordese bottle a little hard (GAR IGOR SLR AYN BAA ALDA ILIA etc.) but it mostly keeps a low profile, and the longer non-theme stuff does a good job of staying interesting, so the puzzle was mostly a pleasure to solve, overall. I don't like the *idea* of a SEMI-NUDE VLOGGER, but I do love those answers alongside one another there (VLOGGER still feels like a term we all fever-dreamed in 2009 that just never disappeared from crosswords, but apparently vlogging is a very popular thing. How do people have time in their days to consume all these things?). OTTAWA / THE MAN / TIDBIT is an oddly appealing set of answers as well. I like it when the mid-range stuff (5-to-7 letters, say) manages to be colorful, rather than merely exist. I have no idea about modeling or most animated movie roles, so EVA and SID were ??? but I had a lot of other proper noun friends to get me by (ALF and ALDA and TED and Alice, I mean ANITA). I feel like I've been a lot of SASS lately. Which got me thinking about ROTI, which has been thriving since the 2010s, as more and more North Americans became familiar with the foods of South Asia. Used to be that ROTI only got clued as French for "roasted." [French roast] and [___ de boeuf] were the most common clues for a long time. You don't get a reference to the flatbread until 2010, and even then it takes a while for that clue to catch on. You don't see it again until 2015, and then a trickle turns into a river, as we've seen ROTI as the flatbread something like a dozen times in the just past three years, five times this year alone, and the French clue for ROTI hasn't been seen at all in over five years. So congrats to ROTI on muscling in and taking over. Expanding the crossword palate! I'm into it. Now I'm hungry. See you all later. Good day.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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