Korean word for cooked rice / SUN 4-23-23 / TikTok persona typified by floppy hair and grunge clothing / W-4 collector for short / Accidental subject of certain snapshots / Portmanteau expressions popularized by Tyra Banks / Industrious animal in a classic fable

Constructor: Katie Hale and Scott Hogan

Relative difficulty: Medium

THEME: "Punctuation Matters" — 3rd-person indicative verb phrases are turned into wacky phrases by imagining that the "S" at the end of the first word is actually an "apostrophe S"; so "verb" is reimagined as "noun IS," basically:

Theme answers:

• "PLAY'S A TRICK" (25A: "Oh, now I understand the significance of the troupe's performance in 'Hamlet'!")
• "STAND'S IN THE WAY" (32A: "I can't get past this witness box!")
• "JERK'S AROUND" (41A: "Watch out for that bully!")
• "FALL'S OUT OF FAVOR" (58A: "Everyone dislikes autumn now!")
• "BAT'S FIVE HUNDRED" (76A: "Dracula has lived half a millennium!")
• "BEAR'S IN MIND" (87A: "I'm thinking of a grizzly!")
• "PLANT'S EVIDENCE" (98A: "Careful, the shrub may have fingerprints on it!")
• "PUZZLE'S OVER" (110A: "I finished this crossword!")

Word of the Day: LOCS (97A: Twisted do) —

Dreadlocks, also known as locs or dreads, are rope-like strands of hair formed by matting or braiding hair. (wikipedia)

• • •

Every week I want to come bearing good news about the Sunday puzzle. I really do. I yearn for a Sunday puzzle that even modestly tips the scale in the direction of "Enjoyment." And every week, no dice. I'm like Charlie Brown and the NYTXW editor is Lucy and the puzzle is the damn football. I truly don't understand how a puzzle with a theme this thin, with wordplay this basic and weak, could sustain even a 15x15 puzzle, let alone a 21x21. Sometimes simple gimmicks yield big results; you can get big laughs from little changes. Sometimes. Sometimes. But this just isn't one of those times. Leaving aside the fact that I don't know why these answers are all clued as *spoken* phrases, or why every one of the clues is shouted! ("!") ... there's just not enough juice to squeeze in any of these "jokes." The first time you see the gimmick, you get a little "oh, I see." But unfortunately you then have to "see" that same "joke" seven more times. At best, what you get is "oh yeah, that works." Like, with "FALL'S OUT OF FAVOR"—solid verb phrase to start, and then there's the cute little apostrophic switcheroo, very natural to say, OK. But that is Peak Theme. "BAT'S FIVE HUNDRED" makes no sense. No one just calls him "BAT." Maybe (maybe???) "The Bat," but that's more Batman. I really (really) thought COUNT was going to be in that answer, somehow, but no. And "BEAR'S IN MIND." I mean, in the wackiest scenario, you cannot imagine that as an actual phrase one might say. You'd have to have some specific bear in mind, and even then there'd be a "THE" before the "BEAR" and you'd probably actually say "on my mind" or something ... you'd definitely need the "my." "FALL'S OUT OF FAVOR" is on the money. "BEAR'S IN MIND" is nonsense. "PUZZLE'S OVER" works (and I guess it's supposed to be a kind of self-referential final themer, cute). But "JERK'S AROUND" just doesn't. Which jerk? Who? What? But honestly, none of my quibbles about plausibility or grammar mean that much, because again, this concept is never gonna max out at anything more than a "yeah, I guess that works." That's it. There are other reasons the puzzle was a chore to finish, but the main one is the lifeless theme.

I honestly had *no idea* how "PLAY'S A TRICK" was even supposed to work ... until I realized "omg they're making a very specific reference to a Hamlet plot point ... are people even going to remember or even be familiar with that plot point? So weird ..." So, in case you forgot, or never knew, Hamlet stages a play (called "The Murder of Gonzago") with a plot that parallels the murder of Hamlet's father; he does this so he can watch Claudius's reaction to the play. He's hoping to see evidence of guilt. The line I remember is, "The play's the thing wherein I'll catch the conscience of the king" (the "king" being, at this point, Claudius, whom Hamlet believes murdered his father). Sooooooooo the play (-within-a-play) is, in fact, A TRICK, of sorts. Deep, deep cut. Respect. Hope that clue didn't lose / confuse too many people (definitely confused me there for a bit). 

The fill is on the miserable side in this one, largely because the grid is super-choppy and mostly choked with 3-4-5-6-letter answers. Just a sea of short stuff. Hard to be interesting with so few longer (non-thematic) answers to work with. I was sour on this one right away, at the OPAHS / HRREP crossing. Hard wince. Brightly colored food fish = OPAH, not OPAHS. And HRREP is an answer only an HRREP could love. Combines the glamor of routine bureaucracy with the beauty of a bunch of letters smashed together. Woof. And while the rest of the grid isn't so terrible, neither is it very interesting, and when it tries to get interesting ... mostly it's just bad fill trying to *pass* as interesting. See AGENTK and EBOY. I kinda sorta remembered the TikTok phenomenon, but I remain never entirely sure about the "E" before BOY and as for the "K" in AGENT K, how in the hell am I supposed to remember that. Absolutely random letter from where I was standing. Thankfully JERK'S was pretty clear, because with both the "E" from E-BOY and the "K" from AGENT K as crosses, JERK'S feels very dicey and potentially disastrous. And then SMIZES is another that seems to be trying to be current (-ish), but in the plural that word somehow seems totally implausible and silly. SMIZE has been in the puzzle before ("smiling with the eyes"), but this is the first time it's appeared in the NYTXW as a plural. For a reason. Because it's bad as a plural. Some terms are bad as plurals, and this is one. The plural that really really got me today is also a debut, but it isn't actually bad. It's definitely a thing. I just couldn't make any sense of it. At all. Probably because I've never seen the term *written*, only spoken, so ... when I got LOCS (eennttiirreellyy from crosses), I assumed I had an error, first because the clue seemed to want a singular, not a plural, and second because that letter combination seemed impossible. LOCS? But I went over all four crosses, over and over, and they were unimpeachable, so I just crossed my fingers. Looked it up after I was done and ... "dreadlocks." That's it. No "K" in the abbr. spelling, it seems. I've heard the abbr. as "dreads," not "locs," but whatever, as you can see from the definition above ("Word of the Day") both "LOCS" and "dreads" are valid. My brain just glitched. Hard.

If Bert LAHR weren't old school crosswordese, I'd be real real upset about the LAHR / DAFOE crossing, because LEHR is definitely a name, as is DEFOE (I still haven't managed to keep the actor and the 18th-century novelist straight when it comes to spelling their names). But even though LAHR is a gimme for me and probably lots of solvers, that cross still doesn't feel ... great. I really like BLIND CURVE, both answer and clue (15D: Something you shouldn't pass on). GO PLACES also has good energy. Like BLIND CURVE, it's zippy, kinetic. AIR GUITAR and DARK HUMOR are also better than solid answers. I just wish there'd been more like them, more fun in the fill to make up for the tepid theme. Sorry to HATE ON yet another Sunday. Again, other days of the week manage to be good much of the time. Monday's puzzle was good. Saturday's was good. Thursday's was at least interesting, and certainly daring. I thought there were problems with the Thursday, but it was Trying. It had a boldness of vision and an ambition that I almost never see in the Sunday any more. I don't get it. The Sunday is supposed to the NYTXW's Big Day. Why does it so often feel phoned in? 

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld 

P.S. What is this "classic" HEN fable?? (86A: Industrious animal in a classic fable). I thought the ant was industrious and the grasshopper was lazy. What's the hen doing?? Oh, it's an "American" fable, "The Little Red Hen" ... She makes bread and then invites other animals to eat it with her and when they agree she's like "sorry, suckers, you didn't help, so you can starve, bwahhahahaha." Protestant Work Ethic at its most moralistic. "Politically themed revisions of the story include a conservative version based on a 1976 monologue from Ronald Reagan" (wikipedia). LOL, you don't say! Ugh. I thank my parents for never reading it to me. 

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