Manhattan neighborhood next to SoHo / WED 1-11-23 / Oceanfront district of Los Angeles / Fulfill mundane but necessary responsibilities in modern lingo / Saffron-flavored dishes / Hawaiian island shaped like an apostrophe / Beauty pageant founded in 1959 as a mail-in photo contest / Bell Atlantic merger partner of 2000

Constructor: Victor Barocas

Relative difficulty: Easy

THEME: LIES / UNDER / OATH (70A: With 71- and 72-Across, commits perjury ... or what can be found four times in this puzzle) — literally, the word "LIE" can be found directly underneath an "OATH" (i.e. a mild swear word) four times in this puzzle

The quote-unquote OATHS:

• CAR GOSH IPS (18A: Vessels with large containers)
• M EGAD EALS (37A: Front-page mergers and acquisitions, e.g.)
• BON DRAT IO (44A: Investment guide calculation)
• DANG ERSIGN (59A: Exclamation point inside a yellow triangle, for one)

Word of the Day: NOLITA (35A: Manhattan neighborhood next to SoHo) —

Nolita, sometimes written as NoLIta and deriving from "North of Little Italy", is a neighborhood in the borough of Manhattan in New York City. Nolita is situated in Lower Manhattan, bounded on the north by Houston Street, on the east by the Bowery, on the south roughly by Broome Street, and on the west by Lafayette Street. It lies east of SoHo, south of NoHo, west of the Lower East Side, and north of Little Italy and Chinatown. // The neighborhood was long regarded as part of Little Italy, but has lost its recognizable Italian character in recent decades because of rapidly rising rents. [...] In the second half of the 1990s, the neighborhood saw an influx of yuppies and an explosion of expensive retail boutiques and restaurants and bars. After unsuccessful tries to pitch it as part of SoHo, real estate promoters and others came up with several different names for consideration for this newly upscale neighborhood. The name that stuck, as documented in an article on May 5, 1996, in the New York Times city section debating various monikers for the newly trendy area, was Nolita, an abbreviation for North of Little Italy. This name follows the pattern started by SoHo (South of Houston Street) and TriBeCa (Triangle Below Canal Street). (wikipedia)

• • •

***HELLO, READERS AND FELLOW SOLVERS*** How is the new year treating you? Well, I hope. Me, uh, not great so far (COVID, you know), but I'm 95% better, and was never terribly sick to begin with, so I have every reason to believe things will turn around for me shortly, thank God (and vaccines). Anyway, it's early January, which means it's time once again for my annual week-long pitch for financial contributions to the blog. Every year I ask readers to consider what the blog is worth to them on an annual basis and give accordingly. I'm not sure what to say about this past year. This will sound weird, or melodramatic—or maybe it won't—but every time I try to write about 2022, all I can think is "well, my cat died." She (Olive) died this past October, very young, of a stupid congenital heart problem that we just couldn't fix (thank you all for your kind words of condolence, by the way). I'm looking at the photo I used for last year's fundraising pitch, and it's a picture of me sitting at my desk (this desk, the one I'm typing at right now, the one I write at every day) with Olive sitting on my shoulder, staring at me, and making me laugh. It's a joyous picture. Here, I'm just gonna post it again:

I love the photo both because you can tell how goofy she is, and how goofy she made me. Her loss hurt for the obvious reasons, but also because she was so much a part of my daily routine, my daily rhythms and rituals. She was everyday. Quotidian. Just ... on me, near me, being a weirdo, especially in the (very) early mornings when I was writing this blog. She took me out of myself. She also made me aware of how much the quotidian matters, how daily rituals break up and organize the day, mark time, ground you. They're easy to trivialize, these rituals, precisely because they *aren't* special. Feed the cats again, make the coffee again, solve the crossword again, etc. But losing Olive made me reevaluate the daily, the quotidian, the apparently trivial. In a fundamental way, those small daily things *are* life. No one day is so important, or so different from the others, but cumulatively, they add up, and through the days upon days you develop a practice—a practice of love, care, and attention given to the things that matter. If you're reading this, then crossword puzzles are undoubtedly an important ritual for you, just as writing about crosswords for you all is an important ritual for me. It gives me so much. I hope that even at my most critical, my genuine love for crosswords—for the way my brain lights up on crosswords—comes through. I also hope that the blog brings you entertainment, insight, laughter ... even (especially) if you disagree with me much (most? all?) of the time. 

[man, I really wear the hell 
out of this red fleece...]

The blog began years ago as an experiment in treating the ephemeral—the here-today, gone-tomorrow—like it really mattered. I wanted to stop and look at this 15x15 (or 21x21 thing) and take it seriously, listen to it, see what it was trying to do, think about what I liked or didn't like about it. In short, I gave the puzzle my time and attention. And I continue to do that, every day (Every! Day!). And it is work. A lot of work. Asking for money once a year (and only once a year) is an acknowledgment of that fact. There is nothing to subscribe to here ... no Substack or Kickstarter or Patreon ... and there are no ads, ever. I prefer to keep financial matters simple and direct. I have no "hustle" in me beyond putting my ass in this chair every morning and writing.

How much should you give? Whatever you think the blog is worth to you on a yearly basis. Whatever that amount is is fantastic. Some people refuse to pay for what they can get for free. Others just don't have money to spare. All are welcome to read the blog—the site will always be open and free. But if you are able to express your appreciation monetarily, here are three options. First, a Paypal button (which you can also find in the blog sidebar):

Second, a mailing address (checks should be made out to "Rex Parker"):

Rex Parker c/o Michael Sharp
54 Matthews St
Binghamton, NY 13905

The third, increasingly popular option is Venmo; if that's your preferred way of moving money around, my handle is @MichaelDavidSharp (the last four digits of my phone are 4878, in case Venmo asks you, which I guess it does sometimes, when it's not trying to push crypto on you, what the hell?!)

All Paypal contributions will be gratefully acknowledged by email. All snail mail contributions will be gratefully acknowledged with hand-written postcards. I. Love. Snail Mail. I love seeing your gorgeous handwriting and then sending you my awful handwriting. It's all so wonderful. My daughter (Ella Egan) has designed a cat-related thank-you postcard for 2023, just as she has for the past two years, but this year, there's a bonus. Because this year ... the postcard is also a crossword puzzle! Yes, I made a little 9x9 blog-themed crossword puzzle for you all. It's light and goofy and I hope you enjoy it. It looks like this (clues blurred for your protection):

I had fun making this puzzle (thanks to Rachel Fabi and Neville Fogarty for proofing it for me!). For non-snail-mailers who want to solve the puzzle, don't worry: I'll make the puzzle available for everyone some time next month. Please note: I don't keep a "mailing list" and don't share my contributor info with anyone. And if you give by snail mail and (for some reason) don't want a thank-you card, just indicate "NO CARD."  Again, as ever, I'm so grateful for your readership and support. Now on to today's puzzle...

• • •

I liked the placement of the revealer on this one, as it is really lying under ... well everything else in the grid. Just hanging out there at the bottom taking up the whole row. And that SW corner must hold some kind of record for Most Theme-Dense 3x4 section in NYTXW history, with the first "E" in ELIE being the only one of a dozen letters down there *not* involved in thematic material. So structurally, the puzzle is interesting, in at least a couple of ways. But overall, despite being (once again) very easy, this was something of a SLOG. Maybe the whole premise was just too quaint for me, or too repetitive. GOSH? I get that all these "oaths," in fact the very word "oath" in this since, is old-fashioned, and so we were never gonna see something like F*** or SH** over LIE, but ... GOSH? Wow. That is ... mild. I think the problem here is that GOSH EGAD DRAT and DANG aren't just "oaths"—they are specifically "minced oaths," i.e. "euphemistic expression(s) formed by deliberately misspelling, mispronouncing, or replacing a part of a profane, blasphemous, or taboo word or phrase to reduce the original term's objectionable characteristics" (wikipedia) (emph. mine). "Oaths" are out-and-out coarse or blasphemous words—"minced oaths" are the stupid things people do when they're pretending they're not actually swearing (like saying "frickin'" or "friggin'" or "a-hole"). So what you've really got here in this puzzle is LIES UNDER (MINCED) OATHS, and their ... mincedness ... was a little cloying. And, as I say, repetitive. LIE LIE LIE LIE sigh. And there are no proper "theme answers," since nothing thematic is going on in the answers themselves, or their clues. There's just something both cutesy and dreary about the whole endeavor.

Also, the fill was off-putting, over and over. BOND RATIO was like watching paint dry. MISS TEEN USA, ew, very high creep factor (29D: Beauty pageant founded in 1959 as a mail-in photo contest). Wasn't that the pageant where a certain former president walked in on a bunch of the contestants while they were changing and when they scrambled to cover up imperiously told them, "don't worry ladies, I've seen it all before"? ... [Fires up Google] ...  Yup, that's the one alright. Ugh. Shoot that answer into outer space and explode it. On a somewhat less objectionable note, I think I would just take TONTO out of my wordlist. There isn't really a way to come at it that doesn't evoke the history of condescending / sentimentalized representation of Native Americans in US popular culture. As for ADULT as a verb, ugh, always repulsive, this self-infantilizing baby-talk about how being a gwown-up is hawd (15A: Fulfill mundane but necessary responsibilities in modern lingo). Yeah, it's hard, and if you're under 40, I get that everyone older than you helped destroy the economy and the planet and made the assumption of ADULT responsibilities even harder, but please talk normal, please. I beg. The theme is already dripping with euphemism, I don't need naive-sounding neologisms thrown in on top of it all. I think the thing that put me off the most in this puzzle (OK, second-most after that pageant, yikes) is the clue on ATHEIST (30D: One who doesn't have a prayer?). I see what you're doing there with the word play, i.e. ATHEISTs don't pray because they don't believe in God, so they don't "have a prayer," and maybe that seems clever, but the way it *reads* is that ATHEISTs are doomed because they don't believe in God. It seems to be oddly celebrating their presumed future demise. I'm not offended, I just think the puzzle has a tin ear when it comes to atheism, and this is another example. (They've been clued as ones without "belief" in the past, which is just ... inaccurate, frankly)

"Get Lost!" sounds absolutely ridiculous in anything but the imperative voice. GETTING LOST? I'm trying to imagine using that in a (realistic) sentence. "Why are you still here!? When will you be GETTING LOST!? I told you to get lost and yet here you still are, not GETTING LOST, it's maddening!" I can imagine "Scramming" much more easily than GETTING LOST because "scramming" doesn't have another literal meaning to make things confusing. "Get lost!" is what you tell someone you want to go away. GETTING LOST is what used to happen when you traveled through rural Wisconsin without a map (not that that ever happened to me and my friend Kathy on our cross-country trip in 1992, no sir, just a random example involving me, my friend, the non-existence of cellphones, and a few cows). No one says USH, why does the puzzle keep saying USH? It's nuts. But again, the puzzle was easy easy easy. I didn't know who Lil REL Howery was (28A: Actor/comedian Lil ___ Howery), and I briefly thought 9D: Lifted (STOLEN) was ARISEN (???), so that created a hold-up of, what, a few seconds there up near the top of the grid? And I guess BOND RA...zzzzzz.... sorry, where was I? Oh, BOND RATIO took me some crosses to figure out. And I didn't really know NOLITA because it is some made-up yuppie real estate term that didn't even exist before the rents started rising in the '90s (you really wanna live in a neighborhood that rhymes with LOLITA?). But none of these problems constituted real problems. Most of the puzzle was just read clue / write answer, without much of anything to make you pause and think, let alone struggle. Hoping for better luck tomorrow. Take care.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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