Joel's smuggling partner in HBO's The Last of Us / SUN 5-21-23 / Pirate fodder once / Equipment used to make pizza slices and french fries / Auto racing champion Sébastien / Animal that resembles a raccoon more than a bear despite its name / Classic Hasbro toy that debuted in 1964 / Japanese fried pork cutlet / Brussels administrative official, informally

Constructor: Robert Ryan

Relative difficulty: Medium (Easy theme, some challenging fill)

THEME: "Stitchin' Time" — familiar phrases that follow a "___ IN ___" pattern are imagined as if the "IN" were fused to the first word in the phrase, as a slangy, g-droppin' "-ing":

Theme answers:

• PARTNERIN' CRIME (23A: Bigamy, legally speakin'?)
• CHECKIN' DESK (36A: Where copy editors are workin'?)
• WAITIN' LINE (56A: "Enjoyin' your meal?" or "I'll be servin' you today"?)
• ENDIN' TEARS (83A: Reaction to the climax of a heartbreakin' movie?)
• MOTHERIN' LAW (102A: Statute regulatin' surrogacy?)
• BACKIN' BUSINESS (117A: Financin' Broadway shows?)
• TALKIN' CIRCLES (16D: Bubbles featurin' comic book dialogue?)
• RESPONDIN' KIND (55D: One tendin' to reply quickly?)

Word of the Day: TONKATSU (109A: Japanese fried pork cutlet) —

Tonkatsu (豚カツ, とんかつ or トンカツ, pronounced [toŋkatsɯ]; "pork cutlet") is a Japanese dish that consists of a breaded, deep-fried pork cutlet. It involves coating slices of pork with panko (bread crumbs), and then frying them in oil. The two main types are fillet and loin. Tonkatsu is also the basis of other dishes such as katsukarē and katsudon. // The word tonkatsu is a combination of the Sino-Japanese word ton (豚) meaning "pig", and katsu (カツ), which is a shortened form of katsuretsu (カツレツ), an old transliteration of the English word cutlet. (wikipedia)

• • •

This was grim. Here is the exact point where I let out a literal "oh ... no":

As you can see: pretty early. I grasped the gimmick and suddenly realized that I would have to endure a Sunday-sized expanse of this corny wordplay. This *exact* kind of corny wordplay, this one "joke," over and over and over. It feels very much a like a theme that might've played 25 years ago, that I might've actually seen 25 years ago. It's very tired, dad-joke-level wordplay, and I realized, as I filled that first themer in, that nothing awaited me in that vast, vast, yawningly empty grid but more of the same. It was a bad feeling. And, not that it matters, but the title absolutely gives the whole game away, before you've ever even started. Not that the theme would've been hard to unravel—it's not exactly complicated. But still, that title makes the whole endeavor feel even more remedial and phoned-in. Also, the nature of the theme made the theme answers all very, very easy to get. The puzzle tried to compensate for this easiness by making the clues on the non-theme fill harder, and I wish I could say this was pleasing, it mostly wasn't. Just added a feeling of slogginess to an already inherently unhappy experience. I think I was most impressed by the clue on BLANK CDS (28A: Pirate fodder, once). That was brutal in a way that I could ultimately appreciate. I could not appreciate most of the rest of this. Really hard to appreciate something like EUROCRAT, yuck (64A: Brussels administrative official, informally). ONE-TOED *and* STRIKE ONE. YES AND NO *and* NO HIT (practically on top of each other). This one didn't feel like it was trying hard enough. Sunday being Sunday, i.e. regrettable, once again. 

I struggled most in the BLANK CDS area, unsure of the "B" in LOEB (who?) (13D: Auto racing champion Sébastien) and needing every other cross to be able to see BLANK CDS. Real trouble with the -CRAT part of EUROCRAT because wow what a stupid word. I own Vans but struggled with SKOOL for sure (79D: Vans Old ___ (classic sneaker)), as well as with that clue for SKIS, wtf (87A: Equipment used to make "pizza slices" or "French fries"). Skiing lingo, eh? I used to ski when I was a kid. I missed those terms. Or they just weren't using them yet (see below). Had ATILT before ASKEW, so that whole little SKOOL section was a mess. Also, that OPCITS section—OPCITS? (103D: Some cross-references in a research paper, informally). "Informally"? No one has ever, ever, ever used "op cit" "informally." The idea that awkwardly pluralizing your Latin bibliog. terms is "informal" is Hi-Larious. That really mucked up that lower section for me. And yet none of this was very hard. It was more of a hassle, largely joyless, something you had to do to get from beginning to end. BLANK CDS and TONKATSU—symmetrical exceptions to the otherwise bleak quality of most of the rest of the grid. I'd rather not spend any more time dwelling on this one, so I won't. 

Well, maybe I'll explain a few things, in case that might be useful to someone:

• Looks like "pizza slices" and "french fries" are just what I knew as "snowplow" and "parallel skiing"—has to do with the shape your skis make as you turn / descend:

• Wednesday is named for the god ODIN (also Woden) (8D: Wednesday eponym)
• IMACS rhymes with IMAX (17D: Products with screens ... or a homophone of a type of big screen)
• "Of the cloth" is a religious term meaning "ordained"; LAY refers to the unordained (we often use LAY metaphorically, e.g. "to put something in layman's terms") (29D: Not of the cloth)
• At the end of the actual title "Citizen Kane" is a SILENT "E" (that "e" in "Kane") (51D: What's found at the end of "Citizen Kane"?)
• The PEA causes insomnia in the fairy tale "The Princess and the Pea" (70D: Cause of insomnia in a fairy tale)

You probably didn't need all that, but there it is. Good day.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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