Rosebud ravager / SUN 7-24-22 / Downwind locales for ships / English landing spot / First pope to be called the great / NFL star Elliott to fans / Where all the people that come and go stop and say "hello," in a 1967 hit

Constructor: Jessie Trudeau and Ross Trudeau

Relative difficulty: Easy

THEME: "Going Somewhere?" — various famous roads go Down, where they intersect (at the "E") with answers that end in the letter string "ROME"; the revealer is ALL ROADS LEAD TO ROME (115A: Aphorism that's visually depicted five times in this grid):

Theme answers:

• MASS PIKE (7D: Easternmost leg of I-90, familiarly) / BICHROME (51A: Two-colored)
• PENNY LANE (24D: Where all the people that come and go stop and say "hello," in a 1967 hit) / AERODROME (68A: English landing spot)
• RODEO DRIVE (37D: Noted shopping mecca) / ETHAN FROME (88A: Edith Wharton's "ruin of a man")
• EVERGREEN TERRACE (13D: Home of the Simpson and Flanders households) / IMPOSTER SYNDROME (98A: Habitual fear of being exposed as a fraud)
• PENNSYLVANIA AVENUE (20D: One side of D.C.'s Federal Triangle) / ALL ROADS LEAD TO ROME

Word of the Day: Andrea BOCELLI (94D: Of whom Celine Dion said "If God would have a singing voice, he must sound a lot like ...") —

Andrea Bocelli OMRI OMDSM (Italian: [anˈdreːa boˈtʃɛlli]; born 22 September 1958) is an Italian operatic tenor and multi-instrumentalist. He was born visually impaired, and was born with congenital glaucoma, and at the age of 12, Bocelli became completely blind, following a brain hemorrhage resulting from a football accident. After performing evenings in piano bars and competing in local singing contests, Bocelli signed his first recording contract with the Sugar Music label. He rose to fame in 1994, winning the 44th Sanremo Music Festival performing "Il mare calmo della sera".

Since 1994, Bocelli has recorded 15 solo studio albums of both pop and classical music, three greatest hits albums, and nine complete operas, selling over 75 million records worldwide.^[4] He has had success as a crossover performer, bringing classical music to the top of international pop charts. His album, Romanza, is one of the best-selling albums of all time, while Sacred Arias is the biggest selling classical album by any solo artist in history. My Christmas was the best-selling holiday album of 2009 and one of the best-selling holiday albums in the United States. The 2019 album Sì debuted at number one on the UK Albums Chart and US Billboard 200, becoming Bocelli's first number-one album in both countries. His song "Con te partirò", included on his second album Bocelli, is one of the best-selling singles of all time. The track was licensed to feature in a series of television commercials for TIM in the late 1990s, which eventually became very popular in Italy. (wikipedia)

• • •

Dang, it even says "CARD" 
right there in the comic! Gah!

The first thing a proofreader or editor ought to have caught is that the "aphorism" in question is not "depicted five times in this grid"; it's depicted once. ALL ROADS LEAD TO ROME ... that's the theme. That describes all the themers taken as a group. There are five examples of roads leading to ROME, but ALL ROADS are not depicted "five times," as the clue claims. I don't care that it's a minor point—it's in the most major part of the puzzle, the revealer clue, so the phrasing ought to be Precise. [Aphorism represented visually by five answers in this puzzle], something like that; that would be accurate. The five long Downs together represent the aphorism. Once. Not separately five times. Yes, NERD, I know. Whatever, the phrasing on the revealer clue is nails + chalkboard to me. Aside from that hitch, the theme is interesting. Well, the grid is interesting, for sure—mirror symmetry along the NW to SE axis. The intersecting themers end up forming a kind of nesting arrowhead pattern, with all long answers meeting at their very tips (the "E" in "ROME" in each case). Structurally innovative. I was not a fan of the weird long non-themers just hanging on there non-thematically, but I guess that's the price you pay for this particular architectural gambit. WORSHIPPER with two "P"s is weird to me because I'm not British and the clue is not tagged as British. RORSCHACH CARDS was extremely weird to me because after TESTS and BLOTS I was completely out of ideas. I literally teach a comic with a protagonist named RORSCHACH who literally takes a RORSCHACH Test (in Book VI, administered by Dr. Malcolm Long, whose mind RORSCHACH just wrecks), and yet CARDS was absolutely brutal for me, even with the "C" in place. If it hadn't been for YODELS, I think that CARDS section would've destroyed me. I had TACK for FORK, largely because it's a way better answer for that clue (74A: Stick with it!). Had ORS instead of IFS (are ORS a thing???) (87A: Some coding statements). Just a disaster in there. Anyway, the cards are real things, just ... not the first thing that comes to mind when you see RORSCHACH (as Google here can tell you):

The British call airports "airports," so I had no idea what 68A: English landing spot was going for. I thought ... maybe the English landed ... on Plymouth Rock? I dunno. AERODROME is an odd one, as is BICHROME. Just not words I ever see or use or really ... know. See also LEESHORES (?) (80D: Downwind locales for ships). But as for AERODROME and BICHROME: you do what you gotta do to make your theme work, I guess. Outside the themers, the fill is pretty ordinary. The runaway highlight of the day for me was EVERGREEN TERRACE! That's gonna be a gimme or a lotta work, depending on your level of "Simpsons" fandom (mine: high). I liked that answer, and I thought the revealer itself was cute. 

A few more things:

• 94D: Of whom Celine Dion said "If God would have a singing voice, he must sound a lot like ..." (BOCELLI) — I knew this pretty quickly but ... could not decide if it was two "C"s one "L" or two "L"s one "C." As for who has the voice of God ... I'm gonna stick with Marianne Faithfull's assessment on this one:


I have to tell you, the voice of God, if you really want to know, is Aretha Franklin.

• 43A: One looking for missing persons (TRACER) — awkward way to clue this, but I guess it allows you to avoid the more probably bullet clue, so OK
• 124A: Apply (to) (REFER) — why doesn't this make sense to me? I'm sure there's an equivalency somewhere in the dictionary, but I can't really make this work in everyday speech.
• 1D: Rosebud ravager (APHID) — soooo hard for me. I was like "uh ... TIME? SNOW? FIRE? I haven't seen the movie in a long time!"

• 98A: Habitual fear of being exposed as a fraud (IMPOSTER SYNDROME)  — still haunted by IMPOSTOR ... which is how the NYTXW told me it was spelled two months ago.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]