Series of steps in Spain / SAT 11-25-2023 / Something often containing a single parenthesis / Qatar left it in 2019 / Ending with hot or honey / Legal checks / Illinois city near St. Louis / To us, in Latin

Constructor: Jeff Stillman

Relative difficulty: Hard

THEME: None

Word of the Day: CHER (54D: Singer whose likeness was the highest-selling doll of 1976, surpassing Barbie) —

Cher (/ʃɛər/; born Cherilyn Sarkisian; May 20, 1946) is an American singer, actress and television personality. Often referred to by the media as the "Goddess of Pop", she has been described as embodying female autonomy in a male-dominated industry. Known for her distinctive contralto singing voice and for having worked in numerous areas of entertainment, as well as adopting a variety of styles and appearances, Cher rose to fame in 1965 as one half of the folk rock husband-wife duo Sonny & Cher before launching a successful, six-decade-long solo career.

• • •

Hi everyone, it's Rafa back for another guest blog. Hope you enjoyed my puzzle yesterday, and Eli's guest post about it. Rex should be back tomorrow in case you are tired of us!

The license plate does say TREASURE STATE

I've always thought that blogging about a puzzle you disliked is a lot harder than blogging about a puzzle you loved. This is going to be a difficult post to write because this puzzle was absolutely not for me in any way! I think the best format here is to just have some bullet points going over some of the aspects here that didn't work for me:

• -ENNE is bad fill to me in three (!) ways. It's a suffix, which is gluey, and way less satisfying to fill in than an actual word. But it's also very rare ... what words even use the -ENNE suffix? Comedienne??? Which is a segue into reason number three ... it's weird to have gendered suffixes like this for things that do not have to be gendered! A comedian who is a woman is just ... a comedian! Really I could not be less into this piece of fill.
• EEEE is also really, really, really not great. It feels so goopy, just a string of four Es in the grid like that, somehow worse than an abbreviation or suffix or prefix in my brain. But also, most importantly, is it even a thing, really? I've bought shoes many times in my life and have never seen EEEE out in the wild. EEE (also bad, don't get me wrong!) has been a bit more of a crossword staple ... but a fourth E? No, no, no.
• WOOERS feels like a really awkward -ER form to me.
• DNAS plural is pretty tortured. "DNA samples" sure. But DNAS? I just don't really buy it as a thing.
• This one is probably on me, but I'd never seen HISSY stand alone like that. "Hissy fit" feels very in-the-language to me, but HISSY felt a bit off and, so, not as satisfying (though it has strong dictionary support, so as I said, probably on me).
• The ALTON / MALONE crossing could have plausibly been any vowel to me. ALTON is a city of 25,000 in Illinois ... okay. I know Cheers is a well-known show, but I've never watched it.
• The entire NOBIS / ASTRA / ABEL / SCOTTS / HAUER situation was just a laugh-out-loud Natick-fest to me. Never heard of any of these the way they were clued! ASTRA was inferable, but tough when so many crossings were unknown ... it's pretty rare that I have to look things up but there was just absolutely no way this section (particularly the NOBIS crossings with ABEL and SCOTTS) was going to come together.
• MIS and RES are both super gluey use-only-if-very-desperate pieces of fill, and the clue echo didn't really rescue it as much as make it more visible.
• KOTO was new to me, and I couldn't quite remember BLUTO, so that crossing was also a complete guess. I think KOTO is totally fine fill ... good even! It's fun to learn a new instrument from a puzzle! But it's important to make sure all the crosses are rock-solid.
• This is really the least of our worries here, but ISM and GEO are two more suffix/prefix type entries. (Though I loved the angle on GEO! Have you guys seen the TikTok-famous guy who always knows exactly where he is after seeing a blurry, pixelated, upside-down photo for 0.1 seconds? He's iconic!)
• I get that it's Saturday, and again I love learning things from puzzles, but LAI felt like gluey fill that I didn't find particularly interesting.
• I see it has pretty good dictionary/Google support, but E-CRIMEs do not feel like a thing to me. Some e- things are things! Like e-bike, that's a thing! e-commerce, that's a thing! e-file, becoming less and less of a thing, I think (who *doesn't* e-file their taxes these days? do we really need to specify anymore?) but still, yes, a thing. But some e- things are not things. e-money: not a thing! E-CRIME (IMO): not a thing, etc.
• BAD ONE doesn't really stand alone as a crossword answer. Would [any adjective] ONE work as fill? It just came across as a bit made up.
• X-ray SPEX only really Googles as an English rock band. There is a Wikipedia page for "X-ray Specs" ... but SPEX doesn't really feel super in-the-language to me. (I might be wrong ... does anyone actually use "spex" when referring to glasses? Maybe!)
• ICBMS: don't love nuclear weaponry in my puzzle, but also this acronym is pretty much impossible to infer to someone who might (understandably, I'd say) not have brushed up on their nuclear weapon acronyms recently.
• UGHS is a really weird plural. It doesn't really feel natural to say or write "ughs." Something like "ahas" is way better in my book, because "aha" can be used colloquially as a noun ... something like "what a satisfying aha at the end of that puzzle!" ... but not really with UGHS.
• MILLION MOM MARCH is a wonderful answer, but I think it would have been a stronger marquee closer to when it actually happened, 23 years ago. I really wanted MARCH FOR OUR LIVES here, which feels a lot more recent and relevant, and I was sad when that didn't quite fit!
• CIS labeled as a "modern" descriptor felt a bit weird ... I understand that "cis man" and "cis woman" were a lot less widespread terms in the past but cis men and cis women have been a thing for all of recorded history! Not a super huge deal, but the modifier didn't really work for me.
• And, finally, RECTI: yet another 5-letter (!) uncommon prefix.

Soooooo, with all that out of the way ... there were some very nice longer entries! IMAGE AWARDS, YES I SUPPOSE, THE PLOT THICKENS are all fantastic! But it just really was not worth it for me today.

Neptune is, indeed, an ORB

Oh, and there were two outstanding clues in this puzzle: SIMON (22D: Says who?) and CHER (54D: Singer whose likeness was the highest-selling doll of 1976, surpassing Barbie). Good wordplay! A fun fact! That's what I come to crosswords for.

This is a KOTO

I'm afraid I don't really have much else nice to say about this one, so I'll stop here. I hope you were able to ENJOY this one a lot more than I did!

Signed, Rafa

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