Brambles with edible purple fruit / THU 12-16-21 / South American arboreal snake / Setting for Shakespeare's "Twelfth Night"

Constructor: Trenton Charlson

Relative difficulty: Medium

THEME: BOGGLE (52A: Flummox ... or a classic word game represented by the central grid of shaded squares, in which 15-, 17- and 55-Across can be found) — 4x4 section of letters at center of grid represents a BOGGLE rack, and you can "find" the theme answers (all synonyms for "BOGGLE") in it simply by playing the rack the way you would in an actual game of BOGGLE, i.e. by connecting adjacent letters, like such:

BEWILDER (15A: Flummox)

BEMUSE (17A: Flummox)

BEFUDDLE (55A: Flummox)

Word of the Day: DEWBERRIES (36A: Brambles with edible purple fruit) —

The dewberries are a group of species in the genus Rubus, section Rubus, closely related to the blackberries. They are small trailing (rather than upright or high-arching) brambles with aggregate fruits, reminiscent of the raspberry, but are usually purple to black instead of red.

Dewberries are common throughout most of the Northern Hemisphere and are thought of as a beneficial weed. The leaves can be used to make a herbal tea, and the berries are edible and taste sweet. They can be eaten raw, or used to make cobbler, jam, or pie. Alternatively, they are sometimes referred to as ground berries. (wikipedia)

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***HELLO, READERS AND FELLOW SOLVERS IN SYNDICATION (if you're solving in January, that's you!)*** . Happy Newish Year! 2022! I hope you are holding up during these cold, dark days. It's early January, which means it's time for my annual week-long pitch for financial contributions to the blog. Every year I ask regular readers to consider what the blog is worth to them on an annual basis and give accordingly. 

2021 was an important year for me, as my blog (this blog, the one you are reading right now) turned 15 years old! [noisemaker sounds!!!!]. That's a lot of years old. For a blog, anyway. 15 is also a pretty important crossword-related anniversary—maybe the only important crossword-related anniversary. The standard US crossword grid is 15x15, and now Rex Parker is also 15! Rex Parker, spanning the grid to give you the constant variety of crossword commentary: the thrill of victory, and the agony of defeat (dum dum dum DUM!) The human drama of ... OK now I'm just channeling Jim McKay from the '70s-era introduction to "Wide World of Sports," but I do hope this blog has provided some insight, some entertainment, some commiseration, some solace, some sense of regularity during what are obviously pretty tumultuous and often lonely times. I hope it has enhanced your solving pleasure, giving you something to look forward to even (especially?) when the puzzle lets you down, and someone to celebrate with when the puzzle is wonderful. If it's also given you someone to shout at in disagreement, that's OK too.

A lot of labor goes into producing this blog every day (Every. Day.) and the hours are, let's say, less than ideal (I'm either solving and writing at night, after 10pm, or in the morning, before 6am). Most days, I really do love the writing, but it is work, and once a year (right now!) I acknowledge that fact. As I've said before, I have no interest in "monetizing" the blog beyond a simple, direct contribution request once a year. No ads, no gimmicks. Just here for you, every day, rain or shine, whether you like it or, perhaps, on occasion, not :) It's just me and my laptop and some free blogging software and, you know, a lot of rage, but hopefully there's illumination and levity along the way. I do genuinely love this gig, and whether you're an everyday reader or a Sunday-only reader or a flat-out hatereader, I appreciate you more than you'll ever know.

How much should you give? Whatever you think the blog is worth to you on a yearly basis. Whatever that amount is is fantastic. Some people refuse to pay for what they can get for free. Others just don't have money to spare. All are welcome to read the blog—the site will always be open and free. But if you are able to express your appreciation monetarily, here are two options. First, a Paypal button (which you can also find in the blog sidebar):

Second, a mailing address (checks should be made out to "Rex Parker"):

Rex Parker c/o Michael Sharp
54 Matthews St
Binghamton, NY 13905

I'll throw my Venmo handle in here too, just in case that's your preferred way of moving money around; it's @MichaelDavidSharp (the last four digits of my phone are 4878, in case Venmo asks you, which I guess it does sometimes, when it's not trying to push crypto on you, what the hell?!)

All Paypal contributions will be gratefully acknowledged by email. All snail mail contributions will be gratefully acknowledged with hand-written postcards. I. Love. Snail Mail. I love seeing your gorgeous handwriting and then sending you my awful handwriting. It's all so wonderful. Last year's thank-you postcards featured various portraits of my cat, Alfie, designed by artist Ella Egan, a.k.a. my daughter. They were such a hit that I asked Ella to design this year's thank-you postcard as well, this time featuring both my cats. And this is the result. Behold this year's thank-you card: "Alfie and Olive: Exploring the Grid":

We went back and forth on whether she should add more black squares to make the grid look more plausibly fillable (that's a Lot of white space), but in the end we decided not to crowd the jumping (or hanging?) Olive with more black squares, and instead just to leave the card as is, with the idea that the cats are exploring a grid that is ... under construction. Anyway, this card is personally meaningful to me, and also, I believe, objectively lovely. I can't wait to share it with snail-mailers (and oh, what the hell, if you are a PayPal / Venmo donor and you want one too, just say so in the message). Please note: I don't keep a "mailing list" and don't share my contributor info with anyone. And if you give by snail mail and (for some reason) don't want a thank-you card, just indicate "NO CARD."  Again, as ever, I'm so grateful for your readership and support. Now on to today's puzzle...

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[apparently there's some animation (?) in the app that appears once you've finished this one; if it doesn't work on paper, it doesn't work for me, but enjoy the post-solve animation if that's your thing!]

I enjoy BOGGLE. I used to play with my friend Kathy a lot, back in the Later Grad School years, when I would do anything, literally anything, not to be writing my dissertation (see my 2700-book vintage paperback collection, for instance). Kathy and I also played the Charlie's Angels board game, but that's another story. When Kathy got a job and moved away from Ann Arbor, we would play BOGGLE over email*—shake out a grid, send a representation of it to the other person, then set the timer and send our answers to each other when the time runs out. I'd forgotten we did this until this very moment. The early internet was Great. If I played BOGGLE online today, there'd just be some app that was mining my computer or phone for data it could sell to Facebook or something . . . Anyway, the point is I like BOGGLE. I also like crosswords. I don't (it turns out) so much like BOGGLE in my crosswords. This is a classic example of a "look at my architectural feat!" puzzle that doesn't really hold any actual *solving* interest for the solver. I don't want to play a game after I'm done solving. Again, the puzzle is not a child's placemat. It is a sacred space where cool *crossword* things happen. The grid has a ton of visual interest, i.e. it's got that grid, and all the longer answers running through it. But the answers themselves aren't that interesting—two of them (SNAFUED, DEWBERRIES) basically scream "I Have A Giant Wordlist In My Constructing Software" (see also TREEBOA). They're not cool words, they're either f'd up versions of words (SNAFUED?) or compound words made out of words you know even if the results are not (in my case) words you know. The rest of the grid is just flat. Little heavier on gunk (ABOU, EENY, ASSTDA, GSU, OBE, etc.) than I'd like, but essentially inoffensive. The main point is that conceptually, this is interesting, but as a solver, it was mostly irksome. Solving basically just involves building a platform on which I'm supposed to play an entirely different game that I have no interest in playing, and anyway it's less that you "play" it than that you look at it and go "huh, yeah, look at that." Total dissociation between conceptual complexity and solver enjoyment.

Only real tough part for me was MEWLING / DEWBERRIES, since I'd never heard of the latter and I did not think that babies "mewled." Or that cats slept in "cribs." MEWLING sounds like a cat word. I know that it's not, necessarily, but it sounds like it. Cats MEW and MEOW. In Britain (I think) they MIAOW (That's the title of an album I own by The Beautiful South, which are a British band, so I assume it's a British cat sound). Anyway, The MEWLING DEWBERRIES would make a great name for a Traveling Wilburys cover band. "Ladies & gentlemen, the MEWLING DEWBERRIES!" [the crowd whimpers]

I forgot ILLYRIA was a thing (43A: Setting for Shakespeare's "Twelfth Night"). My mental Shakespeare atlas has ELSINORE and the Forest of ARDEN in it, and a few other places (VERONA, I guess), but ILLYRIA slipped out of my memory basket. I also forgot HODADS was a word. I remembered HAOLES (white Hawaiians), because surfing made me think of Hawaii, but HODADS I plum forgot. It's an aurally ugly word. Kind of like SNAFUED (which in my head I'm pronouncing "SNAFEWED" because when I say dumb non-words, I like to say them fancy). My favorite thing in the grid is SONNETEER (18A: Shakespeare, notably), by far my favorite of the -EERs (take that, musket- and Mousket-!). I like this puzzle's ambition and creativity; I just wish it had been turned toward making a good crossword instead of a poor game of BOGGLE.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld 

*now I'm starting to think maybe we played BOGGLE over the phone ... ? Hmmm ... stupid memory. At any rate, we played some kind of remote unorthodox BOGGLE, and we liked it.

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