French trick-taking game / Prognosticate with a crystal ball / Traditional folk song played by British and Australian ice cream trucks / Worker designation coined by Upton Sinclair / Hindi for palace / Steve with eight NBA championships

Constructor: Rich Proulx

Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium

THEME: COAT OF MANY COLORS (38A: Envy source in Genesis 37 that hints at 18-, 24-, 49- and 58-Across) — familiar two-part theme answers all happen to follow a similar pattern: [color] + [coat part]:

Word of the Day: Jonathan Safran FOER (39D: Author Jonathan Safran ___) —

Jonathan Safran Foer (/fɔːr/; born February 21, 1977) is an American novelist. He is known for his novels Everything Is Illuminated (2002), Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close (2005), Here I Am (2016), and for his non-fiction works Eating Animals (2009) and We Are the Weather: Saving the Planet Begins at Breakfast (2019). He teaches creative writing at New York University. (wikipedia)

• • •

JOYLESS? (28A: Devoid of pleasure). No, it would be very unfair to call this puzzle JOYLESS, but for a while there, I was worried. The fill set off alarm bells very early, and that alarm was not a false one. I spent the top half of the solve repeatedly wincing, stunned at all the repeaters, all the crosswordese, old and new, that kept scurrying out from every clue I turned over. Scurrying, SCREE-ing, and SCRY-ing they came. I knew right *here* that I was in trouble (I was so certain that I stopped to take a screenshot, just so I could document the exact moment that dread kicked in):

Actually, this isn't the first screenshot I took. the first one just had OHIO (fine) SRO (pfffff...) and LAHR (pffffffffffff...), but then when I *immediately* thereafter ran into a *partial* palace name (MAHAL), I took another shot. After that it was a rough run through SCRY LAIC AER across ECARTE and ARIEL up to SCREE ECCE, down to "PSST, EROS" and so on and so on. TORI TARSI. I'll stop now, but it really was like having garbage thrown at me while I solved. Like running some kind of unpleasant obstacle course. The only lucky thing that happened was that I didn't actually see the theme for the longest time. I got a couple theme answers and thought "yeah yeah, first words are colors, fine," and I went down the east side all the way to the bottom before eventually doubling back and, with all the theme answers now in place, looking at the revealer clue for the first time (with only the back end filled in). And why was this solving pattern "lucky?" Because the theme ... is good. Turned a JOYLESS solve into something much more tolerable. I'm not sure I'd say the theme was "worth it," but I felt like it got me within shouting distance of "worth it," at least. I had a real "aha" or "OH I GET IT" (*or* "I SEE!") moment. Nice wordplay twist on a familiar biblical phrase. The one thing I don't really like about the theme is YELLOW TAILS—I love it as a standalone answer, but "TAILS" forces me to think of this as old-fashioned men's formalwear (a dress coat), whereas COLLAR, SLEEVES, and LINING are generic enough that I can imagine whatever kind of coat I want. Why not lose YELLOW TAILS, turn the WHITE collar BLUE, and add RED BUTTONS as your fourth themer? Now my coat imagination is free!

No real trouble with this one. No difficulty, that is. I wanted POP-UP before BLOOP for the very first clue I saw (1A: Weak hit), but that was one of the very few answers that caused me to slow down much at all. When you solve a lot of crosswords, and have been solving them since well before the end of the 20th century, ECARTE is just there in your bag of tricks, so if it baffled you, just remember: you are normal (32A: French trick-taking game). I didn't know Simu LIU but I do know Lucy LIU so the name was easy to infer. I wanted SELLS to be SELL because of the clue wording (14D: What sex does, they say). What sex does is sell. The fact that I can write that sentence and that it makes total sense shows why SELL seemed right. But sex SELLS, yes, I SEE. I was just following your lead on the cluing, but if you want me to start the sentence over for myself, then yes, sex SELLS. Why not just use the clue [Sex ___]. That would've been wicked. Maybe you need quotation marks: ["Sex ___"]. Think of the fun wrong answers people could've written in!

That's enough for today. See you tomorrow.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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