Law enforcer in the Harry Potter universe / SUN 1-14-24 / Disney villain who's the grand vizier of Agrabah / Emulate Jack Sprat / Old SeaWorld mascot / Albatross, metaphorically

Constructor: John Kugelman

Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium

THEME: "Er, In Other Words" — clues for familiar phrases reimagine the meaning of various "-ER" words—so, wacky clues for normal phrases:

Theme answers:

• SUPER DUPER (20A: Great ape?) (a "duper" dupes (i.e. "apes" or "imitates") ... people)
• JUNK DRAWER (22A: Erotic artist?) (a "drawer" draws ... genitalia, in this case ("junk"))
• WANDER AROUND TOWN (37A: Street magician?) (a "wander" wands ... wait, what?)
• CHICKEN TENDERS (60A: Farmers?) ("tenders" tend ... livestock)
• FLICKER OF LIGHT (71A: Switch hitter?) (a "flicker" flicks ... a light switch)
• NUMBER OF THE BEAST (95A: Animal tranquilizer?) (a "number" numbs ... pets, in this case)
• AN OFFER YOU / CAN'T REFUSE (113A: With 117-Across, the Grim Reaper?) (an "offer" offs ... people)

Word of the Day: AUROR (79D: Law enforcer in the Harry Potter universe) —

The Aurors are an elite group of witches and wizards who battle the Dark Arts. They operate in some ways as soldiers but more often as intelligence agents, seeking out Dark wizards and defeating them, often in fierce wizard duels. Alastor Moody and Frank and Alice Longbottom were famous Aurors, and after leaving Hogwarts Harry Potter and Ron Weasley became Aurors. Aurors are sometimes refered to as Dark Wizard catchers. (The Harry Potter Lexicon)

• • •

***THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU*** Today is the last day of my annual week-long pitch for financial contributions to the blog. This week is always a bit overwhelming for me, as I usually only have a very vague idea of who my audience is, where they live, etc. And then all of a sudden, in a gush, I get a bunch of messages from actual people with actual names from actual places on the map (Portugal!? Portugal!). I'm usually very content to live my life just writing (and teaching) and not otherwise interacting with humans too too much. This is the one week of the year when I feel the most ... visible, and it's not necessarily the most comfortable feeling in the world for me, if I'm being honest, but you all have been So Nice—so generous, so encouraging, that any social anxiety I might've felt has been dwarfed by feelings of gratitude and good fortune. I have said every possible permutation of "Thank you" this week, and it still doesn't feel like enough. I can't tell you what your readership and support means to me. Your cards and letters began arriving this week, and I'm excited to dig into those (I'm expecting many cat cards, cat pictures, and cat stories, and I couldn't be happier about that prospect). For those who contributed via regular mail, my thank-you cards are a bit late coming from the printers, but they should arrive early this week and I'll start mailing them out immediately. 

[They're coming ...]

If you were able to contribute this year, that is thrilling to me, but if you weren't able, that's also OK. Money is tight for many and you can only manage what you can manage. This blog is free to anyone who wants it or needs it, whether you are a financial backer or not. I just want you to keep solving and keep reading. Thanks for taking the time to pay attention to any of this. One last time, here are the various ways you can contribute (now, or at any time during the year). 

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OK. That's it. To all my readers (and my hate-readers)—You're a strange lot of beautiful puzzle-obsessed people and I'm really glad you're here. Mwah! You're the best. Thank you thank you. Now here's your Sunday puzzle!

• • •

Er, no. By which I mean, sometimes yes, mostly no. There's an element of Forcing the Issue here, which makes the theme not quite work. Even the marquee, climactic themer, the one that I think is supposed to be the coup de grace, has to be tweaked to come out right. "AN OFFER YOU / CAN'T REFUSE" ... is not the quote. I mean, maybe it comes up again in the sequels, but Don Corleone's line is definitely "I'm gonna make him an offer he can't refuse." There's no "you" to it. I get that the phrase has entered the general lexicon and you can modify it yadda yadda yadda, but the puzzle was already playing pretty fast and loose with phrasing, elsewhere in the grid, so by the time I got down there, instead of being duly impressed by that last themer, I was left a little cold. The puzzle had already lost a lot of my good will on a similar issue of phrasing, much earlier in the grid, when it tried to convince me that anyone would say "I NAILED IT." If you want it to stand alone, the phrase is: "NAILED IT!" That is the phrase. That is what people actually say. What is this formal "I" nonsense (besides evidence of a bloated and uncurated wordlist)? I can imagine someone saying the full "I NAILED IT," but the phrase You Want, the one that's On The Money, is just "NAILED IT!" Apparently there is a cake-decorating reality show on Netflix called "Nailed It!" which makes it exceedingly hard to find real-life examples of "Nailed it!" on the Internet that are not cake-related, but I'll see what I can do ... OK here's a long, earnest discussion of "Nailed it!" with hilariously specific examples...

Then there was EAT NO FAT, which, come on (88D: Emulate Jack Sprat). That's just a long partial. If you want to clue FAT or NO FAT in relation to Sprat, be my guest, but when you get out to three words there, that's ... well, that's EAT A SANDWICH territory, frankly. Does not stand alone well at all. I guess I should be happy that it's not ATE NO FAT. But I'm not. The theme is already forcing me to deal with language pressed to its breaking point—like imagining that a DUPER is someone who does imitations, or that a WANDER is ... well, anything. A WANDER? Do magicians do a lot of wand...ing? 

I admire the boldness of JUNK DRAWER (as clued), and NUMBER OF THE BEAST is kind of cute (and deploys a time-tested trick use of "number," which is sometimes used in crosswords to clue things like ETHER, the way "flower" can be used to clue a river...).  So it wasn't all bad. There's an interesting idea here. And you could definitely argue that I should loosen up and just let the wackiness flow, man. You may have a point there. But that is not currently where my head is that. My head is stuck back at how bad "I NAILED IT!" sounds. 

One thing this puzzle has in its favor is a remarkable lack of esoterica or even highly unusual words. Everything felt very, very familiar. Before I got the answers, I was a little worried about the ELSIE / MESSI clues. Wasn't sure about either one at first glance, and crossing proper nouns ... always a potential disaster. But even if you don't know ELSIE (and I mostly did, in that that was the name I wanted—just wasn't sure), MESSI is one of the most famous athletes on the planet, so just a few letters from crosses should've been enough to tip solvers there. I don't really get [Straws in the wind] for OMENS. Are those ... a kind of omen? Looks like "straw in the wind" is an idiom meaning "something that suggests what might happen." I've heard of "Candle in the Wind" and "the straw that stirs the drink," but not this one, somehow. I also hadn't heard the Indigo Girls song, "POWER OF TWO," which is slightly weird, in that I have all those first Indigo Girls albums, and saw them in concert twice, once in Edinburgh, once in L.A. (also, relatedly, briefly dated the sister of an Indigo Girl, true story). I must've tuned out a bit in the mid-90s, though, because I missed 1994's Swamp Ophelia entirely (and that's the album "POWER OF TWO" appears on) (14D: Indigo Girls song with the chorus "Adding up the total of a love that's true / Multiply life by the ..."). The song title was easy to figure out from the clue, with the help of crosses, but it's arguably the most "obscure" thing in the grid today. Unless you've never read Harry Potter, in which case AUROR is definitely the most "obscure." Oof, I forgot about IN A PET (13D: Peeved). If you're younger, or a newish solver, *that's* the most "obscure" thing. I can't see any real sticking points in this grid beyond the stuff I've already described, although I will say I imagined that both a CAR and a BAR might be a [Bit of decoration at a beach house] before crosses forced me to alight on OAR.

One last thing about the theme—the clue on that first themer, SUPER DUPER, is a real outlier (20A: Great ape?). All the other clues imagine the -ER answers as jobs. The clues themselves aren't tricksy at all, it's just [Street magician?] [Farmers?] etc. But rather than just say [Master impressionist?] or something like that, we get the simian pun. It's not in keeping with the theme cluing conceit as a whole. Sometimes you gotta know when to lay off the wacky. I mean, in this case, you've Already Got Wacky baked in, why extra-whackify, especially when it breaks the cluing norms that you yourself have established?? OK, that's all. See you next time.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld 

P.S. Come On Now Social is an underrated Indigo Girls album

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