Human-shaped board game piece / SAT 1-7-23 / Bell of the synth-pop duo Erasure / Eco-centric college class, informally? / Bit of casino restaurant fare? / Word at the center of Rhode Island's flag / J. M. Barrie boatswain / Produced as digital currency / 1996 horror classic originally titled Scary Movie

Constructor: Adam Aaronson

Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium

THEME: none 

Word of the Day: MEEPLE (43D: Human-shaped board game piece) —

A meeple is the playing piece or token in a board game, usually having an extremely stylized human form. The word meeple comes from blending the words my and people. A word consisting of blended words is called a portmanteau. Meeple was coined in the year 2000 by Alison Hansel to describe the wooden figures in the game Carcassonne. Since the year 2000, the term meeple has spread to describe the token in any board game, it was added to the Oxford English Dictionary in 2015. The plural form of meeple may be rendered as meeple or meeples. (grammarist.com)

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Yeah, this was definitely the Friday puzzle, or at least more the Friday puzzle than the actual Friday puzzle was. The NW (i.e. the start) and the SE gave me some trouble, but not too much, and the rest of it fell like a souflée would fall if I made a souflée, for sure (though one of my New Year's resolutions is to cook more, so maybe unfallen souflées are in the cards for me, who knows!?). This puzzle also had the whoosh-whoosh that I look for / want / expect on a Friday, with longer answers just shooting everywhere, pew pew pew. I mean, look at this opening—this is less than a minute after I got the NW corner under control:

AT A MINIMUM led quickly to STAND-UP GUY and "DID YOU HEAR...?" Just a lovely, lively set of longer answers comes pouring out of that NW corner. They aren't all stunners, but, well, one of them literally is STUNNERS, and they're all really very good. Being able to get feelers into every quadrant early seemed to bode well for my likely solving success and ... bode well it did. It boded, alright. Harbingered and omened and boded. I destroyed the NE section so fast I had ITALIAN LIT all the way filled in before I ever even saw the (great) clue (33A: Eco-centric college class, informally?)—Umberto Eco is the "Eco" here. They hid the capital "E" on you and everything. Wicked. But not wicked, I guess, in that I never even had to struggle with it. Still a good clue. The SW was about as easy as the NE. Which leaves the SE, where ... OK, look. I don't play modern board games, or board games at all, so my having no clue about MEEPLE (a common term if you play said games) is irrelevant here. What is relevant to anyone with ears and a sense of how words work is—how in the world is that term a singular!? Who let that happen? That is a collective term. It comes from the blending of "my" and "people," so GOSH DARN IT, who turned that term singular, and why did the rest of you not say, "No, David [I assume that was the culprit's name], we are not doing that." And it looks like SHEEPLE, too, ugh, it's so awful (esp. as a singular). MEEPLE—OK (though still uncomfortably infantilizing) as a collective, but completely ****ing ridiculous in the singular (at least one person on Reddit agrees with me, so I feel vindicated) (I assume MEEPLE was clued in the singular because, well, this is Friday and they wanted to **** with us non-gamers. Wait, is it ... "gamers"? Are board game players also (like video game players) gamers? Well, you're all MEEPLE to me now. I mean, MEEPLE, what in the world ...?)

I grew up with Cookie Monster and today is the first I'm hearing that he is named SID (57D: Cookie Monster's real name). Sigh. "C" is for "Cookie," and that is, indeed, good enough for me. You could've put any three-letter name there and I'd've had the same reaction, i.e. [shrug] OK, whatever. As for THE U. ... Miami? Lots of universities are referred to "casually" as THE U. The University of Minnesota, for instance. All over the Twin Cities it's just "casually" called THE U. I'm sure there is some college football angle here that makes Miami THE more iconic U., but I still say 'bah' to this clue. The MEEPLE / SID / THEU onslaught made parsing THESE PARTS really hard for a little bit there. This was the source of most of my post-getting-started difficulty today. Very, very localized trouble. The NW and the SE: THESE PARTS were kinda tough. The rest, not even close.

Loved the clue on TIN. I think I actually laughed at its resigned self-awareness (22A: Only chemical element whose name fits this answer's length). Like, "It's an element, it's three letters, you've only got one option, genius." It's good when clues taunt you. I was thrilled to see ANDY Bell—kind of niche, as music names go, but right up my alley, as Erasure played on my stereo a *lot* in my first years of college. And if ANDY Bell is "obscure" to those who never cared about '80s / '90s college-radio synth-pop, he's only four letters and the crosses are extremely fair and it's Saturday, so there. 

I started this puzzle with "NOT IT!" / "TMI!" where "GOOSE!" / "EEK!" are supposed to be (1D: Kids' game cry / 21A: "Yikes!"). I don't normally "enjoy" starting so badly, but that particular pair of mistakes made me laugh, particularly the TMI-for-["Yikes!"] bit. Pretty creative answer, I thought. I love the SCARE AWAY / SCREAM / EEK! collective, though I guess I don't love EEK! and EKED in the same grid. A minor flaw. Overall, tasty, not GAMY, thumbs-up, see you tomorrow.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld 

P.S. a single BAKED CLAM is ... odd (11D: Bit of casino restaurant fare?). I think the clue is referring to the dish "clams casino" (?), which, according to Merriam-Webster.com, are "clams on the half shell typically topped with bacon, bread crumbs, green pepper, and Parmesan cheese and baked or broiled." (my emph.)

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