Japanese bread crumb coating / MON 7-11-22 / Piece of greenery for a winner's wreath / Like a ride that has one holding on for dear life / Venue for Stevie Nicks or the Knicks / Coconut oil and butter for two

Constructor: Roy Greim

Relative difficulty: Easy

THEME: FINGER PAINTS (51A: Materials for a preschool artist ... or a hint to 20-, 32- and 40-Across) — theme answers contain both colors and hand parts, and so suggest the theoretical results of finger-painting:

Theme answers:

• WHITE-KNUCKLE (20A: Like a ride that has one holding on for dear life)
• BLUEPRINTS (32A: Architectural diagrams)
• GREEN THUMB (40A: Knack for gardening)

Word of the Day: PANKO (49D: Japanese bread crumb coating) —

NOUN

• (in Japanese cooking) breadcrumbs with a light, flaky texture, typically used as a coating for fried or baked food. (lexico.com)

• • •

Short write-up tonight because my daughter is home for just 24 hours and I love you all but the Monday write-up is not my top top priority at this very moment. You understand. I actually think this theme is adorable, though yeesh how the hell did you get paint on your *knuckles*, kid? That's some creative painting. Sure, there's some redundancy here (your THUMB has both a PRINT and a KNUCKLE, probably), but the theme is so tight, and narrow, that I don't care much about either anatomical redundancies or improbable paint application techniques. The theme works: non-finger-painting answers that the revealer asks us to reimagine as finger-painting answers: just fine! My guess is that most people won't even notice the theme (much) because they'll be too busy crowing about their record Monday times. This really was, very, very easy, even for a Monday. I couldn't even come up with a decent Word of the Day candidate. I had to reuse (I think) PANKO, which is the most "obscure" thing in the grid (not actually obscure). It's worth noting that this puzzle is not just extremely easy, it is extremely clean, from end to end. No wincing. Very careful attention to making the fill smooth. You don't get a lot of non-themer pizzazz, but HOTWIRES and SHIP'S LOG and NPR NEWS are solid longer answers, and I can't say enough good things about a grid that doesn't make me wince even once. NAE is the closest to Wincetown, and meh, I've seen it too much to be bothered, and anyway, if a single NAE is as bad as it gets, count yourself very lucky.

Errors? Trouble spots? No, not really. I got a bit stalled / distracted by the specificity of the clue on MARRED (26A: Damaged, as a surface). Like, wtf is "as a surface" doing there, besides making me overthink the answer? [Damaged] is quite enough, thanks. My brain can take it from there. The link between MARRED and "surface" feels very slight, and anyway, the addition of "surface" here is not obviously clarifying. Just weird, that bit. I also don't know why Shakira was added to the SHE clue—maybe it's just a fun little bit of trivia, and that's enough, but once you give me Cyndi Lauper and "-Bop," I'm good. I got it. I see that there's a similar cluing technique used with ARENA, where two examples are used in the clue in order to highlight some similarity between those examples (in the ARENA clue, it's the "Nicks" "Knicks" homophone). I guess since it's Monday, and there's not a hell of a lot else going on, why not have a little wordplay fun. But the "fun" feels a little anemic today. I wish the clues had a little more life in them, as well as a little more teeth. Tiny teeth. Tiny Monday teeth. Woulda been nice. But this is OK, too. Good day.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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