Jaguar spot, for example / WED 7-6-22 / Worker with books, for short / Big hot dog?

Constructor: Sam Koperwas and Jeff Chen

Relative difficulty: HARD!! (37:30!!!!!!!)

Word of the Day: Sonia BRAGA —

She is known in the English-speaking world for her Golden Globe Award–nominated performances in Kiss of the Spider Woman (1985) and Moon over Parador (1988). She also received a BAFTA Award nomination in 1981 for Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands (first released in 1976). For the 1994 television film The Burning Season, she was nominated for an Emmy Award and a third Golden Globe Award. Her other television and film credits include The Cosby Show (1986), Sex and the City (2001), American Family (2002), Alias (2005), Aquarius (2016), Bacurau (2019), and Fatima (2020). In 2020, The New York Times ranked her #24 in its list of the 25 Greatest Actors of the 21st Century.

• • •

Hi it's Malaika, here for a Malaika MWednesday. How has your evening been? During my evening I purchased cocktails and the profits went towards funding women's healthcare. After my third cocktail I bought this shirt and after my fourth cocktail, I solved this puzzle and wrote this post. So like, that's where we're at. (Solving music was Confessions Part II from here like truly a dozen times in a row.) (Do y'all like ((heh)) how much I'm using the word "like"? It's because a commenter from last time made fun of me for it. So I figured I'd, like, lean in.)

THEME: Rabbits and.... hats? — There are types of rabbits (BRER, ROGER, and PETER) crossing types of hats (BEANIE, DERBY, and BOATER). I got the rabbit part, but the hat part was totally lost on me! I had to look it up to make sure I wasn't missing anything.

THIS PUZZLE WAS SO HARD!!! Wednesdays usually take me about 11mins and I "Check Puzzle" zero or one times. This one was well past half an hour and I "Check Puzzle"d nine times, and even then finished with four boxes where I had zero idea what letters went in. (This is wild to me. I mean, I'm not a fantastic solver, but I'm pretty solid!! I have solved many NYT themeless puzzles in around ten minutes without checking-- yes, even after four cocktails!)

There are lots of things that make a puzzle hard! I like to try to pinpoint them because I have found that a bad puzzle is often hard, but a hard puzzle is not necessarily bad. That makes sense, right? Like, a puzzle can be hard because the constructor is sloppy with fill, or messes up their clue grammar... or a puzzle can be hard simply because their clues are asking knowledge of me (that is; me, the solver) that I do not have. This puzzle felt like the latter, and I am very excited to read the experiences of the commenters.

Mountains of things I did not know. I do not know Sonia BRAGA, or the term KEN meaning "knowledge," or "fuddy-duddy" as a phrase, or Santa ROSA, California, or what "portage" means. Or the shampoo brand PRELL (I experimented with a rebus and "L'oreal" for a bit) or that a YEW is an evergreen or what on earth the Jaguar clue was talking about. (Please explain?? CARAD??? What?) CPA is a word that I have learned from crossword puzzles and literally never seen out-and-about* and ETAS was ambiguous with ETDS. [Kind of vote] for PROXY and [Person with talent] (with no question mark!) for [AGENT] are vague and mis-direct-y in a way that I expect for a Saturday, not a Wednesday. THE UN was incredibly hard to parse, as was ATTRACTIVE since for a while I had [A??? ACTIVE] and was expecting a two-word phrase. (Jeff looooooves to talk about how long answers should be more than one word.)

The last thing that made this hard for me was the revealer, due to both the clue and the software. The clue was worded in a non-obvious way. [Pulling a rabbit out of a hat, e.g. ...which happens three times in this puzzle] was the clue for MAGIC TRICK, and made me think that I should be searching for that specific term to come into play. Instead, I was searching for "rabbits" and "hats" which were communicated plainly via the clue itself. Is this a little odd? It seemed off for me (weirdly, it felt "too easy" which is hilarious given how much I struggled with this puzzle), in terms of how revealers usually work. Meanwhile, the software did not highlight any of the rabbits or any of the hats. This led me to believe there was a rebus situation which I had totally missed, especially with entries like BRAGA and CARAD that were foreign to me.

Bullets:

• [Small-arms runner of years past?] for T-REX — I begrudgingly admit that this clue is absolutely ingenious. (I am begrudging because it did not click until well after I had entered the letters-- I had ARES for a long time.)
• [Pot seeds?] for ANTES — Same as above-- very good, very hard.
• [Term of address in colonial India] for SAHIB — I am (half) Indian but don't know as much as I should. I knew this entry from the novel "A Little Princess," where a white American girl is referred to with this title by an Indian immigrant.
• Here's a superrrrr petty bullet for you! I submit puzzles to the Times, and one of my rejections said that it was a no because they don't like corners that are only "connected" to the rest of the puzzle by a single square. So now whenever I see a puzzle that has this (here it's the 50A/48D crossing) I am like "HMMM!!!"

xoxo Malaika

*I contrast this with words I have learned from crosswords, and then have seen out-and-about, like ATOLL or RCA or ARIA (outside of the Pretty Little Liars-verse). 

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]