Word from the French for "high wood" / SUN 3-20-2022 / It lands on the White House's South Lawn / So-called "Father of Liberalism" / Academic journal with a "Breakthrough of the Year" award / Journalist who was the first woman to guest-host "Jeopardy!"

Constructor: Brad Wiegmann

Relative difficulty: medium (eight minutes here)



THEME: Exs and Nos — a series of bad puns involving dating various people (also, why are all these clues needlessly gendered? Just 👏 use 👏 the 👏 singular 👏 they 👏 here 👏 ffs.)

Theme answers:

• HAD NO PRAYER ["It's tough finding the right person. My first boyfriend was a perfectly nice atheist, but he ..."]
• DIDN'T WORK OUT ["So then I dated a fun couch potato, but he ..."]
• CAME TO NOTHING ["Then my friend set me up with a recluse, but he ..."]
• LET ME DOWN ["I dated my rock climbing instructor for a while, but he just ..."]
• WOULD NEVER FLY ["Then I had a fling with a Pittsburgh Penguin, but I knew he ..."]
• MISSED THE CUT ["I was in a serious relationship with a hippie, but he ..."]
• DID THE TRICK ["Finally, I started seeing a charming magician, and he ..."]

Word of the Day: JELLO SHOT (Hard stuff that jiggles) —

A Jell-O shot, colloquially known as a jello shot, is a gelatin and alcohol mixture consumed as a shot. The shot is commonly made with vodka or other hard liqours, and is commonly associated with spring break. Shots made with non-branded or unflavored gelatin are sometimes known as jelly shots or gelatin shots.

... 

Modern jello shots originated in the 1950s when Jell-O was at the height of its popularity in the United States. Multiple sources attribute the creation of the modern jello shot to American satirist and musician Tom Lehrer, who claimed to have invented the jello shot as a way to circumvent a ban on alcohol at a navy base he was stationed at. According to Lehrer, he and a friend were barred from bringing alcoholic beverages to a Christmas party at a naval base, and so the two mixed orange Jell-O with vodka in cups so that the mixture could be smuggled into the party.

• • •

No...just, no. I imagine people's reactions to this will center on whether they found these clues charming, and this just did not hit the spot at all for me, so this was a slog of an eight minute solve (really, more like twenty, I had to pause the puzzle and walk away in the middle of it to compose myself, and if I didn't have to blog this, I would not have finished; life's too short to spend solving puzzles you don't enjoy, and I 100% give you permission to leave puzzles unfinished if they don't spark joy). 

Anyway, other than the series of dates here, there's no real tightness to this set—you can pick a profession and find a way to make a pun out of it. Hell, you could have just as easily dumped that charming magician, because it WASN'T IN THE CARDS, or said yes to the Penguin because they were #BAEGOALS, or...you get the picture. There's nothing tying these together other than the bad puns, which mostly just feel like long partial phrases in the grid and (more often than not) aren't funny to me. YMMV here, but with so many potential ways of making theme entries, I would've liked to see something tighter here, or at least funnier ones, rather than "yup, these fit symmetrically". But as it is, it's a lot of squares to fill in, and very little compelling reason to actually do so today.

elle king's "ex's & oh's" is such a banger (and the video ain't bad either)

At least the clues were (outside of the theme entries) more entertaining today than yesterday, for a variety of reasons; a sample of the ones I liked below:

• TONGUE [One getting depressed during exams?] — as in getting pushed down, and not like the depression caused by *gestures vaguely around at everything going on*
• MIN [The 1 in {1,2,3}: Abbr.] — yay for math!
• LATS [They're found near traps] — I had a few different things here at first (raise your hand if you, too, had RATS for the longest time) but nope, we're talking about muscles
• DUEL [Conflict taking a couple of seconds?] — as in the people that are the seconds for the people who are shooting at each other; also, obligatory comment about how "Hamilton" is overrated (which is not to say that it's bad! just overrated!)
• ABACUS [You can't say it doesn't count] — yay for more math!
• GENESIS [Book with a notable world premiere?] — "In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move."

Also some good long fill here, especially in the downs (LIKE HELL IT IS, MARINE ONE, TITLE BOUT, JELLO SHOT, ALL-STAR BREAK) but not enough to overcome the shortcomings of the theme. Anyway, Rex will be back tomorrow, and hopefully there will be a good puzzle waiting for him.

Olio:

• ULAN (___ Bator, Mongolia) — No. This word should not be in the puzzle, nor in your wordlists if you're a constructor; the preferred / correct Anglicization is Ulaanbataar, one word, stop using the other spelling.
• ETS (Superman and others, for short) — Also no. IMO there is only one ET (the title character of said movie) and the only valid cluing angles are the lawful good / lawful neutral ones from this chart.
• DNA (Crispr material) — Also also no; CRISPR should be in all caps, regardless of what your house style guide says.
• IRL (Happening offline, to a texter) — Surprised (but very pleased) to see this in the puzzle (and apparently this is the second time it's been in the Times) given Will's general aversion to modern slang (especially acronyms and initialisms); it stands for "in real life".
• ORSON BEAN (Actor/comedian who was a regular on Johnny Carson's "Tonight Show") — glad to see we're continuing yesterday's trend of old-timey white dudes filling in nine-letter entries in the downs </sarcasm>.
• PET (Something that all but three U.S. presidents have had while in office) — specifically, James Knox Polk and two people who were impeached three times in total...so, uh, overall a pretty bad group of people to (implicitly) namecheck here. 
• OSHA (Org. issuing vaccine standards starting in 2021) — if you aren't already, get vaxxed, get boosted, full stop, no argument.

Yours in puzzling, Christopher Adams, Court Jester of CrossWorld

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