Betting emotionally, in poker slang / SAT 7-8-23 / Video game hurdle / Fictional group led by a Dark Lord / J.J. or T.J. of the N.F.L. / Targets of reflexology / Grass-roots marketing group / Holder of very small blueprints / Lincoln Harris early Black economist / Italian football coach Pioli

Constructor: Brandon Koppy

Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium

THEME: none 

Word of the Day: BOSS (51A: Video game hurdle) —

In video games, a boss is a significant computer-controlled opponent. A fight with a boss character is commonly referred to as a boss battle or boss fight. Bosses are generally far stronger than other opponents the player has faced up to that point. Boss battles are generally seen at climax points of particular sections of games, such as at the end of a level or stage or guarding a specific objective. A miniboss is a boss weaker or less significant than the main boss in the same area or level, though usually more powerful than the standard opponents and often fought alongside them. A superboss (sometimes 'secret' or 'hidden' boss) is generally much more powerful than the bosses encountered as part of the main game's plot and is often an optional encounter. A final boss is often the main antagonist of a game's story and the defeat of that character usually provides a positive conclusion to the game. A boss rush is a stage where the player faces multiple previous bosses again in succession. (wikipedia)

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Gaming, poker, Italian football ... lots of stuff I know and/or care nothing about. You could add the N.F.L. and The Big Lebowski to that list too, though those answers didn't trip me up. I don't know why Lebowski and I just didn't click. I've never been more out of step with my general age cohort on a movie. I have watched and loved (and taught!) Coen Bros. films for a long time, so I feel like I should've been the perfect audience for The Big Lebowski. I'd heard it was supposed to be their Chandler film (!), and no author is more important to me (true story); also, I'd just seen Fargo (an all-time great movie), so I went into Lebowski psyched ... and left deflated and confused. And *then* the movie became a cult classic. I can't even remember much about the movie, or why I found it so disappointing. Maybe because it's a "stoner comedy," and those have never had any appeal for me ... and yet I've seen Dazed & Confused more than I have seen any other movie (only Psycho comes close), and that's allegedly a "stoner comedy," so once again, I have no good explanation for what happened with me and Lebowski. I just know that every time anyone favorably mentions "The DUDE" some little part of me goes "ugh, not that guy again" (55A: "The Big Lebowski" protagonist, with "the") I'll have to rewatch, clearly. Maybe my adoration of Fargo and my adoration of Chandler meant that my expectations were way, way too high, or way ... different from what I ended up seeing. I didn't like The Royal Tenenbaums either, and that's many people's favorite Wes Anderson film, so sometimes my reaction to the work of beloved (by me) directors just goes sideways (sidenote: I realized, after seeing the wonderful Asteroid City this week, that I've seen more films by Wes Anderson than by any other living director; I had no idea this was the case until I looked at his filmography and thought "Hmm, OK, I've seen ... all of them??") (actually, scratch that: never seen Bottle Rocket). Dang it, why did I write all this junk about Lebowski and my anomalous (bad?) movie tastes? I'm already pressed for time—heading back to Saratoga Springs to pick up my wife from her writers workshop this morning (cats and I are very excited), and I have to leave by 7am, and it's nearly 5am now, so, OK, OK, here we go, back to the puzzle. Short version: seems fine, if not exactly up my alley, content-wise.

The video game stuff was, by far, the hardest for me, in that even after getting both answers (RIOT (?) Games, BOSS), I had no idea what I was looking at. Just had to assume they were right because the crosses all worked. BOSS was a very funny way to end the solve—just me and BOSS staring at each other like "Really?" "Yep, it's me, BOSS." "What are you?" "I'm BOSS." "What does that even mean?" "DUDE, you have google, look it up." And so I did. The puzzle felt loaded with "?" clues, which are like gnats after a while, but none of these presented any real difficulty. I kinda liked imagining what [Milk duds?] could be, before I had anything in the grid. My first thought was that "duds" would, in fact, be clothing, but I was trying to think of a term for the suit that the stereotypical milkman wore. Crisp, white, with maybe a little cap, something like this:

Or this:

But when I couldn't figure that out, I went after the short crosses, and as usual, those paid off. In fact the first two were very easy, which meant I had the front ends of all the long Acrosses in the NW very quickly, which meant that corner didn't last long. The hardest part of the puzzle for me was the NE, where STEFANO was a giant "???" (11D: Italian football coach ___ Pioli), and where I'd written in TREE SWING before TIRE SWING (13D: One going out on a limb?), as well as HEAP before HOST (14D: Whole bunch). I almost wrote in "ELLEN" before "E*NEWS" but couldn't believe they'd actually clue her talk show as a "gossip show" (29A: Longtime celebrity gossip show). And I was correct, they could not, and they did not. In that same corner, "IRRELEVANT" was also hard (12D: "That's beside the point!"), in that the clue makes you think you're looking for some colloquial phrase (given the quotation marks in the clue, and how long the answer is), but the answer just ends up being a single, ordinary word! I usually get flummoxed in the other direction, i.e. with my brain assuming an answer is one word when it turns out to be many. But today: looking for many, got just the one. Outside of that corner, there were really no struggles. I even managed to no-look one of the marquee answers: MADE-FOR-TV MOVIE! That is, I filled it in without ever looking at the clue. Such a great feeling to just ... see it. That "RTVM" string actually made the answer *easy* to parse (I mentally sequestered "TV" instinctively), and then the "D" and "F" were all I needed to see the whole answer, clue unseen.

Absolute dumb luck that a wrong answer (THUS instead of THEN at 32D: Consequently) ended up providing a correct letter ("T"), which allowed me to parse MADE-FOR-TV MOVIE correctly. Sometimes accidents work for you. Anyway, I liked MADE-FOR-TV MOVIE a lot. Strongest thing in the grid besides "I FEEL SILLY" (my favorite answer of the day). 

Other mistakes? Wrote in SO-SO for 28D: B-worthy (GOOD). The clue assumes a pre-grade-inflation world. Cute. Those were the days. Everyone went to church on Sunday. Crewcuts were all the rage. Milkmen roamed the streets. And Johnny would run home from school, proud of the "B" that he'd earned in SCIENCE LAB. Simpler times. [continues rocking in rocking chair and sipping ice tea on porch, camera pans over neighboring little league field, American flag on flagpole, waving in the breeze, children frolic, dusk approaches, fade out]

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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