1990s-2000s Volkswagen seven-seater / SUN 3-27-22 / Bellini opera that takes place in Gaul / High-arcing shots, in basketball lingo / One-act Oscar Wilde play / Most massive dwarf planet in the solar system / Harp-shaped constellation / New York town that's home to Playland amusement park

Constructor: August Lee-Kovach

Relative difficulty: Easy, mostly

THEME: KHUFU — circled squares form a pyramid shape that spells out "THE GREAT PYRAMID OF GIZA"; then there's a lot of trivia related to that. Further, there is an isolated part of the grid within the "pyramid" (the KING'S CHAMBER) where we find KHUFU ... I have no idea who that is (see Word of the Day, below):

Theme answers:

• SEVEN WONDERS / OF THE / ANCIENT WORLD (5D: With 51-Across and 15-Down, group in which [see circled letters] is the only one still largely intact)
• LIMESTONE (41A: Approximately 5.5 million tons of it was used to build [see circled squares])
• CHEOPS (10D: Greek name for this puzzle's enclosed answer)
• KING'S CHAMBER (74D: With 101-Across, where this puzzle's enclosed answer is located)
• THREE (79D: Number of 101-Acrosses in [see circled squares])

Word of the Day: KHUFU (121A in the grid pictured above) —

Khufu (/ˈkuːfuː/, full name Khnum Khufu /ˈknuːm ˈkuːfuː/, known to the ancient Greeks as Χέοψ, Khéops, and the ancient Romans as Cheops; Old Egyptian: ḫw.f-wj, Ḫawyafwī pronounced [χawˈjafwij]) was an ancient Egyptian monarch who was the second pharaoh of the Fourth Dynasty, in the first half of the Old Kingdom period (26th century BC). Khufu succeeded his father Sneferu as king. He is generally accepted as having commissioned the Great Pyramid of Giza, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, but many other aspects of his reign are poorly documented.

The only completely preserved portrait of the king is a three-inch high ivory figurine found in a temple ruin of a later period at Abydos in 1903. All other reliefs and statues were found in fragments, and many buildings of Khufu are lost. Everything known about Khufu comes from inscriptions in his necropolis at Giza and later documents. For example, Khufu is the main character noted in the Westcar Papyrus from the 13th dynasty.

Most documents that mention king Khufu were written by ancient Egyptian and Greek historians around 300 BC. Khufu's obituary is presented there in a conflicting way: while the king enjoyed a long-lasting cultural heritage preservation during the period of the Old Kingdom and the New Kingdom, the ancient historians Manetho, Diodorus and Herodotus hand down a very negative depiction of Khufu's character. Thanks to these documents, an obscure and critical picture of Khufu's personality persists.

• • •

It's hard to explain how tedious I find puzzles like this. There's a visual gag, so we can admire the architecture of the thing, sure, but solving it was mostly a dry and dull and trivia-laden experience. It is interesting to learn who KHUFU is. I know CHEOPS, as that is what the ancient Romans (apparently) called him, but KHUFU? Is that name exceedingly well known? If so, dear lord why does it not appear in the grid way, way more often. A five-letter answer ending in "U"!? You'd think we'd've seen that a lot (lot) by now. Instead, KHUFU is literally making its NYTXW debut here, today. If the name had made earlier crossword appearances, as I'd expect a name of real historical import to do, then I'd've seen the name before, which, as far as I know, I haven't, or hadn't, until the exact moment of solving this puzzle. Which means KHUFU is just ... more trivia. I can do further research ... but again, at the solving level, even if I know KHUFU's name, the whole "discovery" experience is more of a slog than a revelation. Felt like I was building the damn pyramids instead of admiring them. Filling in squares (or circled squares) in a kind of paint-by-numbers / programmatic way until the whole thing was filled in. THE GREAT PYRAMID OF GIZA, unlike KHUFU, is very familiar to me, and so filling in those squares was a cinch, even though I honestly didn't look to see what the letters were until late. I mostly just tried to solve this like a regular crossword, kind of a themeless. I could see it was about a pyramid and I just took the trivia answers as they came (was happy to remember CHEOPS, though to be honest I wrote in PELOPS in there at first...). Wrong -OPS. Anyway, I'm just never going to be a fan of the puzzle where I'm supposed to ooh and aah at the cleverness of the architecture, but where the pleasure of the solving experience itself seems not to have been given any consideration. Visual pyrotechnics are fine, but this is just a trivia test with two unusual visual elements; no wordplay, no actual trickery, no cleverness (beyond, again, the obvious cleverness of the visual design). Is ENCRYPT supposed to be a bonus theme answer, a kind of wink at the solver? (68A: Make secret, in a way). KHUFU is indeed ENCRYPTed, after all. If so, I think it's my favorite part of the whole puzzle. At least it shows a sense of humor.

I solved the puzzle using my Black Ink solving software, which warned me there would be visual elements that couldn't be reproduced, and suggested maybe I'd like to solve on the website itself. But the last time it gave me that warning was the magnet puzzle (from early last week), and I actually didn't end up liking having the "visual element" (in that case, a literal picture of a "magnet") presented for me. Would've been more fun / more of a challenge without it. So I thought I'd go ahead and solve in my software and just take my chances ... which was fine until the very end, when the only clue I had for KHUFU was 121A: This puzzle's subject. Me: "Uh ... CRYPT? MUMMY? How the hell should I know?!" So I had to go to the website after all, in the end, and there you got it completely spelled out for you, in a child's placement game sort of way: just transfer the letters from the numbered squares in the grid to their corresponding numbers in the KING'S CHAMBER, and you get K, H, U, F, U. No thought involved. Hardly a satisfying conclusion.

[This is the grid numeration as it appears in the newspaper]

There are some interesting non-theme answers in the grid. I especially liked THE BORG (I'm watching my way through "Star Trek: The Next Generation" at the moment) and HALF-READ (like half the books lying around my house at the moment) and WEE BIT, which is charmingly rather than irksomely quaint (58D: Tad). Weird that GERI and GERRY are both in this grid. Not offensive weird, just oddly coincidental weird. Not many trouble areas in the grid today. The EUROVAN (?) GROCERY TRACT area was a bit tough, but starting the puzzle is often the toughest part, so that's not too weird. Other than that, I think I was slowest in and around the KING'S part of KING'S / CHAMBER. Didn't know KING'S, and then the Oscar Wilde play ("SALÔME") took a while to see (100A: One-act Oscar Wilde play), and also I wrote in MUJERES instead of SEÑORAS, which is several levels of bizarre, the first level being that "Mujeres" is actually in the clue (!)  (66D: Mujeres con esposos) (and yes, I did also consider ESPOSAS, thanks for asking). But all other mistakes I made were trivial. FAVA for SOYA, that kind of thing (106A: ___ bean). Quickly fixed, insignificant. The grid is really quite clean, especially considering the demands placed upon it by the complicated architecture. It's also reasonably interesting. Not scintillating, but by no means dull. 

There's not much that needs explaining. I don't think I get the phrasing on the clue for SAP (87A: Frequent victim of an April fool). I thought the SAP was the "April fool." Is "fool" supposed to be a synonym for "trick" or "prank" here? Because the pranker can't possibly be the "fool." Whatever—the clue would make more sense if it were longer: [Frequent victim of an April Fools' joke], something like that. Not that anyone is going to stumble on that. I just like clear, precise phrasing is all. I don't know why a horse should be voting ... I mean, I get the "neigh" / NAY thing, but it's a very weird premise for a "?" clue (63A: Opposing vote from a horse?). Usually "?" have plays on words, but this one's just like "hay ... what if horses voted, what would that be like?" Weird. I think that's it. Hope you enjoyed this more than I did. Happy KHUFU to you. Enjoy the rest of your day.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld 

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