Captain of M.L.B.'s Swingin' A's of the 1970s / SUN 11-12-23 / Robotic anime genre / Dark green Indian dish / 2022 culinary black comedy / Anton food critic in "Ratatouille" / Robotic anime genre / Firefighter famous for extinguishing burning wells

Constructor: Garrett Chalfin

Relative difficulty: Easy

THEME: "Right on the Money" — Down theme answers are double-clued; one clues is for the regular old Down answer (not really themed), but the other clue is for the answer that turns "right" and then descends again; the parts where the answers jog "right" (i.e. the horizontal/Across part) are all units of currency (or "money"):

Theme answers:

• DOES WELL BY / DOES WONDERS (3D: Treats favorably / Has a very good effect)
• MEMORABLE / MEMORANDUM (12D: Like a momentous occasion / Office communiqué)
• EXPERTS / EXPOUNDED (52D: Masters / Elaborated)
• FIRING / FIRE ALARMS (88D: Part of a potter's process / Parts of a building's safety system)
• "HAPPY NOW? / HAPPY ENDING (81D: "Are you satisfied?" / Common fairy tale conclusion)

Word of the Day: SAL BANDO (78D: Captain of M.L.B.'s Swingin' A's of the 1970s) —

Salvatore Leonard Bando (February 13, 1944 – January 20, 2023) was an American former professional baseball player and general manager. He played in Major League Baseball as a third baseman from 1966 to 1981, most prominently as the team captain for the Oakland Athletics dynasty known as the "Swingin' A's" that won three consecutive World Series championships between 1972 and 1974. // Bando was runner-up for the 1971 American League (AL) Most Valuable Player Award, won by teammate Vida Blue, after helping lead the team to the first of five straight division titles. // A four-time All-Star, Bando averaged 23 home runs and 90 runs batted in (RBI) in his last eight years in Oakland. Although he was often overshadowed by his contemporary, Hall of Fame third baseman Brooks Robinson, Bando remained a strong MVP candidate through Oakland's championship run, finishing third and fourth in the voting in 1973 and 1974. In 1973 he led the AL with 32 doubles and 295 total bases. (wikipedia)

• • •

I went to see Anatomy of a Fall (great) in Ithaca tonight, which means I got back home later than usual, which means I'm blogging later than usual, which means I'm tired, which means which means etc. Which is all to say that this may be a short affair, both because I want to cut things short so I can go to bed, but also because ... I don't know what there is to say about this. It's pretty self-explanatory. I think that if you wanted to you could probably have guessed the theme idea from the title (+ circles) alone. It's a one-note concept, a bit of wordplay that probably seemed inspired at first blush, but ... building an entire Sunday-sized puzzle around that wordplay, that's a tall, tall order, and the puzzle just isn't up to it. Yes, you go "right" on "the money"; and then you do it again; and you keep doing it; and once you know that's what you're doing, it gets very easy to do it, and sadly the theme answers themselves never really give you anything. It's all very workmanlike, adequate, fine. The theme answers are dull, and since there are technically two of them each time, they're doubly dull. I mean, MEMORANDUM? EXPOUNDED? How am I supposed to get excited about these, to say nothing of their even less exciting counterparts (MEMORABLE / EXPERTS). There's one semi-interesting thing about this gimmick, and that's that every one of the currency units is cluable in a non-currency way. That narrows the currency field, and maybe raises the construction difficulty a little. But sadly that has nothing to do with whether this puzzle was exciting to solve or not (it was not). You get the gimmick probably early, and then it's just a whole lot of methodical filling in of squares, with almost no wordplay payoff. Since the theme has this double / forked element to it, there's not a lot of room for additional, interesting, longer fill. HAD A GOOD TIME just sits up there, promising something the puzzle never manages to deliver.

Further: SMALL ARMS???? (79D: What a Tyrannosaurus rex grapples with?). How ... in the World ... is that an acceptable standalone answer? That is nonsense. The green paintiest green paint answer that ever green painted its way into Green Paint* town. SMALL ARMS ... was that originally a military clue, and then they decided that the climate was not for warlike answers, so they went with ... a T-Rex? It's so bad. Is it worse or better than the nobody-has-ever-said-that "RIPER years"? Or the ill-advised and never not creepy LEERERS? You be the judge. You have hardly any long answers to work with outside the themers and you burn one on SMALL ARMS!?!?!? I'm at a loss. I guess SMALL ARMS technically *is* a themer, since the "right on the money" answer, FIRE ALARMS, merges with it, but still, oof and yuck. Also not great: standalone DRAGON TATTOO (112A: Titular feature of fiction's Lisbeth Salander). It's like if you clued LONELY HUNTER or TWO CITIES as a standalone answer, with vague reference to Carson McCullers or Charles Dickens, respectively. About the only answer I really enjoyed today, because its clue was so clever, was AMEX CARDS (58A: Where to see heads of gladiators, informally). Oh, and INDIANA JONES, he's fun (102A: Movie hero introduced in 1981). Not hard, but fun. Otherwise, yeah, there's just not much happening here today.

I'm slightly startled by LMFAO (67A: "That was hilarious!," in textspeak). The "F" stands for "fucking." I mean ... it just does, and everyone knows it does, unlike the "F" in SNAFU, which, yes, technically does stand for "fucked" but the initialism became an acronym became a full-on word, and so the "fucked" is mostly buried and forgotten, whereas the "fucking" in LMFAO is still right there on the surface. I'm all for a non-prudish NYTXW, but you may as well open the profanity floodgates now, because this coy "Oh, did I refer to a bad word? Well, aren't I naughty?" act is a little grating. Put "fucking" in your puzzles, you cowards, is what I'm saying. (And if you tell me that "F" stands for "freaking" I swear to god ...)


Some more notes:

• 47A: Prefix with sphere (HELIO-) — uh, ok, if you say so. I have no idea what that is, and the only time I've ever seen HELIO-, it's been followed by "-centric," but sure, "-sphere," whatever.
• 115A: #34 (IKE) — Oh, sure, everyone calls him "good ol' #34" (this convention of referring to presidents by their number in the sequence of presidents is tiresome).
• 9D: Jacinda ___, New Zealand prime minister who, at 37, was the world's youngest female head of government (ARDERN) — well it's about time. Took y'all long enough to get around to acknowledging this woman. I mean, she's already been out of office for nearly a year now. She and Benazir Bhutto are the only heads of state ever to give birth while in office. Please note that JACINDA has never appeared in the puzzle. Feel free to fix that, anyone.
• 65D: They're no longer "fresh" (SOPHS) — well, this is awkward. Who ever called freshmen "fresh"? I mean, FROSH, maybe. But the equivalency here seems very off.

One of the great joys in my puzzle-solving life is when Fireball Crosswords decides (once a year?) to a do a vowelless crossword. These are regular crossword puzzles in every respect but one—no vowels appear in the grid. You just omit them when entering the answers. I find this extra challenge delightful. It also means I get more bang for my puzzling buck, because these puzzles generally take me a little longer to solve. So I am happy to see that Peter Gordon and Frank Longo have a Kickstarter going for "B-t-Z Vwllss Crsswrds"—"Twice a week for 13 weeks you’ll get a 9×11 crossword puzzle in which you enter only the consonants. The letter Y is not part of any answer. Each puzzle will use all 20 consonants." That's 26 puzzles by two of the best puzzlemakers in the country for just $14 (!?). Trust me, I am not steering you wrong here. Go do the sample Vowelless puzzle on their site right now if you're not sure what the no-vowels solving experience is like. If you are even a little bit of a puzzle junkie, I'll be surprised if you aren't hooked. Also makes a very affordable gift for the puzzle-lover in your life. 

That's it, see you next time.  

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld 

P.S. MECHA (38D: Robotic anime genre) is just what it sounds like—anime that features robots, typically giant battling robots. Yes, it is a thing.

*Green paint = arbitrary adj/noun pairing that you might hear in conversation or see in the real world but that isn't really strong enough to stand on its own as a crossword answer

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