"Groom and board" locale / WED 10-18-23 / Unit of doubt, so to speak / Vegetarian's demand / Name seen going down the drain?

Constructor: Joseph Gangi

Relative difficulty: Medium

THEME: "Watch me pull a RABBIT out of my hat!" (15D: Visual representation of this puzzle's trick (go to 38-Down) [38D: "Presto!" ("IT'S MAGIC!")] — visual representation is a RABBIT (upside-down) being pulled out of a hat (represented by the black squares at the center of the grid); there's also a whole magician's spiel:

Theme answers:

• "FOR THE FIRST TIME!" (17A: "Ladies and gentlemen, you are about to witness something extraordinary that has never been seen or attempted before!" (go to 34-Down))
• "BE AMAZED!" (34D: "You will experience a great and unexpected surprise!" (go to 48-Across))
• "ABRACADABRA!" (48A: "The spell is cast! Don't blink or you'll miss it!" (go to 15-Down))

Word of the Day: Patrick EWING (36A: Patrick on the 1992 Dream Team) —

Patrick Aloysius Ewing Sr. (born August 5, 1962) is a Jamaican-American basketball coach and former professional player who last coached for the Georgetown University men's team. He played most of his career as the starting center for the New York Knicks of the National Basketball Association (NBA) before ending his playing career with brief stints with the Seattle SuperSonics and Orlando Magic. Ewing is regarded as one of the greatest centers of all time, playing a dominant role in the New York Knicks 1990s success.

Highly recruited out of Cambridge, Massachusetts, Ewing played center for Georgetown for four years—in three of which the team reached the NCAA Championship Game. ESPN in 2008 designated him the 16th-greatest college basketball player of all time. He had a seventeen-year NBA career, predominantly playing for the New York Knicks, where he was an eleven-time all-star and named to seven All-NBA teams. The Knicks appeared in the NBA Finals twice (1994 and 1999) during his tenure. He won Olympic gold medals as a member of the 1984 and 1992 United States men's Olympic basketball teams. Ewing was selected as one of the 50 Greatest Players in NBA History in 1996 and as one of the 75 Greatest Players in NBA History in 2021. He is a two-time inductee into the Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield, Massachusetts (in 2008 for his individual career and in 2010 as a member of the 1992 Olympic team). Additionally he was inducted into the U.S. Olympic Hall of Fame as a member of the "Dream Team" in 2009. His number 33 was retired by the Knicks in 2003. (wikipedia)

• • •

The visual gag here is great, but the patter is All Wrong, starting from the awkward first claim: "FOR THE FIRST TIME!" That phrase does not stand alone well at all. It does not lead well into the other phrases. And it is an absurdly hyperbolic claim for what ends up being the most hackneyed trick in the book. Again, I *love* the trick as it is represented in the grid—the upside-down TIBBAR, mwah, nice—but the magician talk here is just clutter. Nobody would say These things, in This order, before pulling a mere rabbit out of a hat, let alone follow it up with the completely unnecessary explanation, "IT'S MAGIC!" Everything that sits dead center in this grid—the TIBBAR, the hat, "ABRACADABRA!"—that all works great. Tight, neat, perfect. The rest, blargh. Also, blargh to the theme clues *telling* me where to go next. "Go here, go there!" No, I will not. That is not how I solve crossword puzzles. You go here and there. I'm gonna solve my own way and check the theme out on my own time, thanks. And to boss me around like that for a bunch of weak-ass cliché magician talk. No. Shoulda kept your mouth shut and done the trick with the one flourish: "ABRACADABRA!" That bit is solid. If you want to go on and on, you could at least do some more tricks. Guess my card or saw a LA/DY in half or something. 

The grid is fairly thematically demanding, so I should probably give the weak fill a break. ANI ARIANA ASANA is everyday stuff, but somehow, heaped in one corner, with an IDEATE on top, it felt lazy. UnTIDY. And REDEAR, wtf is that? I'll tell you what it is, it's something you learned about while constructing, because it has very favorable letters and some constructor had used it before and it fit in that space so sure, Presto! RED EAR! Then there's ILLER ALIA, which is also not good. Great sophomore album title, if you're a rapper named ALIA, but otherwise, nah. But I think the grid holds up OK, and as I say, the theme is overwhelmingly The Thing today, so the grid just has to stand there and not fall over. The SW and SE corners probably could've been a lot brighter if they hadn't had those implausible and purely decorative theme answers in them. But you get what you get.

The cluing irked me a bunch, especially around biblical issues. First of all, the clue on PARTED (3D: Like some hair and seas). I'm no bible-ologist, or sea-ologist, but what are these seas, plural, that are being PARTED, besides the obvious (i.e. the Red)? Is "part the seas" a general metaphor for sailing? That clue felt very forced, as did the clue on BIBLE (32A: Kind of belt). Something about it feels cheap. Is this kind of "belt" really its own category? [checks internet] Oh ... OK, wow, I spoke too soon. Or rather, I asked the right question, one I was *not* prepared for the answer to. I could've told you there's a Bible Belt, Rust Belt, Sun Belt ... at that point, I'm pretty much out of belts. But it turns out there are so many more belts. So Many. I have to believe some of these are just alleged or regional, but my god, there's a Jell-O Belt around Utah (also known as the Mormon Belt), and a Pretzel Belt in Pennsylvania, and a Stroke Belt in the southeast, where apparently there is an unusually high incidence of cardiovascular disease, and on and on. So I take it back. There's a whole damn menu of belts. Their "B"s are all capitalized, but I guess as a general category, "belt" wouldn't be, so the uncapitalized "belt" in the clue is fine.. Alrighty, then. Blog and learn!

Hardest thing for me today was parsing PETSPA (45A: "Groom and board" locale). Pets!? That was not my first frame of reference for "groom." Thought this clue had something to do with your fiancé still living at home with his mother. I was like "there's a term for that?" But no, there isn't. There should be, but there isn't. See you tomorrow.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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