Old Toyota coupe / WED 1-26-22 / Sacred Indian plant also called the strangler fig / Minecraft block made from gunpowder and sand

Constructor: Michael Schlossberg

Relative difficulty: Medium (only because of the made-up, completely improbable "message"; otherwise, Easy)

THEME: "CONGRATULATIONS / ON PASSING YOUR / EYE TEST" (17A / 28A / 47A: "a message suggested by this puzzle's circled letters") — circled squares contain and are arranged like the letters found on a standard eye exam chart. That's it, that's the theme.

Word of the Day: OLAF Scholz (5D: German chancellor Scholz) —

Olaf Scholz (German: [ˈoːlaf ˈʃɔlts] [...] ; born 14 June 1958) is a German politician serving as chancellor of Germany since 8 December 2021. A member of the Social Democratic Party (SPD), he previously served as Vice Chancellor of Germany under Angela Merkel and as Federal Minister of Finance from 2018 to 2021. He was also First Mayor of Hamburg from 2011 to 2018 and deputy leader of the SPD from 2009 to 2019. Following the 2021 German federal election, Scholz's federal government is a traffic light coalition composed of his SPD, the Greens and the Free Democratic Party (FDP). (wikipedia)

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I don't understand making a puzzle like this, mainly because once you conceive of making the eye chart pattern with the letters ... well, there's nowhere to go. You can't use wordplay to get to those letters—they don't function as letters, they spell nothing, they just sit in a fairly arbitrary (if widely standardized) pattern. So what you're left with is this completely absurd message that neither your optometrist nor the person working at the DMV nor anyone would ever say. At an actual eye exam, you don't "pass," so that's out. At the DMV they just make you read a line on the chart, and trust me, they are not so excited about it that they would bother to congratulate you. In any case, solving this puzzle doesn't feel like passing anything, let alone an EYE TEST. I didn't pass that. I just solved a puzzle and some of its letters happened to be arranged in the pattern of an EYE TEST, a pattern that helped me precisely zero because who the hell knows the letters of the EYE TEST chart after that top "E"?! Now, PASSING YOUR / EYE TEST / UNADORNED (as in "naked"), that, that would be something worthy of congratulations! [this is another way of saying putting a long non-theme Across answer directly under your final theme answer is really visually distracting; it overwhelms the shorter answer and takes some of the punch out of it. Better to turn UNADORNED into a 4 and a 4, with the central square made black—if the theme is everything (and in this case, sadly, it is) then design the grid in a way that really sets off the theme. UNADORNED visually smothers the "punchline" of the "message"]

[14A: Blend of black tea, honey, spices and milk]

The puzzle feels a little bit like it was designed for anyone old enough to have driven a PASEO (36A: Old Toyota coupe) or seen "Bedtime for BONZO" in the theater (27D: "Bedtime for ___"). Except for ALTPOP, it stays in pretty familiar, slightly olden crossword territory, though some of the cluing keeps us reasonably up to date: e.g. OLAF Scholz only just took office, and TOBY Keith is ... still alive, presumably. Speaking of OLAF, I made a specific note to remember that there was a new OLAF on the crossword clue horizon and I *still* forgot his name today. Or, rather, I thought, "well it can't be OLAF, that's a Scandinavian name..." Wrong. Well, right, it is a Norwegian name, but apparently it's a name in lots of countries, so ... welcome, New OLAF. I'm guessing you'll be with us for a Very long time. Aside from the hesitation around OLAF, the only other slower-downer I hit today was BANYAN TREE, and only because I figured I didn't know what it was (3D: Sacred Indian plant also called the strangler fig)—I thought "plant" was going to refer to some kind of herb or spice. I don't usually think of trees as plants, though, of course, they are. I left that side of the grid alone, but while I was solving the *other* side of the grid, some background program running in my brain went "psst, buddy—it's BANYAN TREE." And *that*, I've heard of. Seen BANYAN in crosswords. May actually have *learned* BANYAN from crosswords. After that, the only challenge was piecing together the ridiculous theme "message," and that was not, ultimately, that difficult. 

I realized I'm never going to like SPITS clued as a verb (25D: Barely rains). Give me the roasting sticks or give me ... well, nothing. Cluing it in reference to rain doesn't de-salivate the answer, so, no, pass. Not sure why the PROM QUEENS clue (11D: These women "rule" the dance) wasn't something more playful and question-marky like [Women who rule the dance floor?] (that way, the phrasing is more natural and there's no need for the glaring quotation marks around "rule") Also, I think a. increasingly you are seeing PROM QUEENS who are not women (nonbinary and genderfluid people have "won" these "titles" in recent years), and b. schools are starting to do away with the heterosexist king/queen paradigm entirely. Still, I think PROM QUEENS is a good answer. It's a bright, original phrase, and it brings much needed pop to this otherwise fairly plain grid.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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