1994 single by Hole whose cover art depicts a miniature wedding dress and veil / SUN 2-18-24 / Hindu wedding adornment that's said to get darker the more the newlyweds love each other / Marine predator often seen near shorelines / Windy part of a kite? / Comedy character who once asked the U.N. secretary general if Disneyland was part of the U.N. / Lifesaving mission, for short / One fast-tracked in an interview pool / Eschewed pork and shellfish, say / Comics sound when something is snatched

Constructor: Sid Sivakumar

Relative difficulty: Very Easy

THEME: "The Inside Scoop" — parts of words that *sound* like another word for "gossip" ("scoop") can be found "inside" longer words and crossing grape varieties, which form a "vine" at the middle of the puzzle (running from top to bottom of the grid); thus, those word parts ("roomer" "tock" etc.) are HEARD THROUGH / THE GRAPEVINE (13D: With 61-Down, like some gossip ... as represented phonetically by each set of shaded squares?) in two senses; "gossip" (which those word parts represent) is heard through the grapevine (metaphorically), and the word parts, which literally run "through" (i.e. intersect) the "grapevine" in this puzzle, must be "heard" to be understood (as spelled, they are often gibberish and never look like the words they sound like): 

The "grapevine":

• MERLOT (8D: Variety used to make Bordeaux wine) 
• CONCORD (47D: Variety commonly found in jellies and pies)
• MUSCAT (96D: Variety that shares its name with a Mideast capital) 

The "scoop":

• GROOMERS ("rumor") (31A: Some kennel personnel)
• OVERSTOCKS ("talk") (44A: Orders more of than necessary)
• JUDICIOUS ("dish") (67A: Prudent)
• UNDERTONES ("dirt") (82A: Things that perceptive people might pick up)
• REVENUES ("news") (101A: Proceeds)

Word of the Day: "DOLL PARTS" (78D: 1994 single by Hole whose cover art depicts a miniature wedding dress and veil) —

"Doll Parts" is a song by American alternative rock band Hole, written by vocalist and rhythm guitarist Courtney Love. The song was released as the band's sixth single and second from their second studio album, Live Through This, in November 1994 to accompany the band's North American tour. It was also the first single to be released following the death of bassist Kristen Pfaff in June 1994.

Love wrote the song in late 1991, soon after she met Kurt Cobain, and has admitted that its lyrics were about her insecurity of his romantic interest in her. It became one of the band's most popular songs, peaking on the US Billboard Modern Rock Tracks at number 4, and is considered by fans and critics alike as one of Hole's signature tracks.

In September 2021, Rolling Stone ranked the track 208 in their list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time. [...] The music video for "Doll Parts" was directed by Samuel Bayer—who had also directed music videos for The Smashing Pumpkins and Nirvana—and who Hole commissioned following the death of bassist Kristen Pfaff. Jennifer Finch of L7 is featured as the bassist in the video. Bayer has said that he wanted it "evoke the feeling of death" and used ideas conceived by Love throughout the video.

Love's ideas included a large amount of doll imagery, herself "in a babydoll dress looking demure while playing guitar on a bed" and "walking in a bleak backyard passing a children's table set for a tea party." Bayer designed the garden scenes to be "decaying" and added "a hundred plaster-wrapped dolls dangling from trees." Other scenes [feature] a young blonde boy, a reference "meant to invoke Kurt [Cobain]", and footage of the band performing the song. Most of the video was shot in black-and-white and interspersed with various color shots. Two edits of "Doll Parts" have been broadcast—an original edit and a "producer's version."

The video for "Doll Parts" was nominated for Best Alternative Video at the 1995 MTV Video Music Awards but lost to "Buddy Holly" by Weezer. (wikipedia)

• • •

Hello. I am returned from my Great Minnesota Adventure, i.e. visiting my best friends and seeing Madonna—a concert we were *supposed* to see last summer, before the whole latter part of her tour got rescheduled due to health concerns. None of those health concerns were on display Tuesday, though, wow, please god let me look half that good and move a quarter that well at 65. Not terribly convenient to have the concert rescheduled to the middle of a work week in February, but oh well, best friends are best friends and Madonna is Madonna and teaching can be done remotely now and you do what you gotta do. But I'm glad to be back home and back to solving / blogging (thanks to Clare / Mali / Eli / Rafa for their usual great stand-in work). So the puzzle I get for my return to action is this one and ... hmm. It's a bit of a mess. Do three grape types, straight up and down, really make a "vine"? The puzzle relies very heavily on a visual that never quite comes into focus. Oh ... I see they've just drawn a vine on the grid in the app (and probably in the paper version as well). 

Huh. Seems like a cheat. Three straight up-and-down grape types—not a compelling vine. I mean, if you're just gonna draw the vine on there, why do you need the grape types at all? Just draw some grapes on there too and be done with it. Those grape types are totally arbitrary anyway. These visuals that the NYTXW seems to be relying on more and more—whistles and bells and pasted-on decorations—seems like so much shiny spangle designed to distract you from the fact that the puzzle is actually no better than it ever was. Gamify the puzzle, that seems to be the idea. Shrug. If you like that sort of thing...

I was vaguely aware of italicized clues on grape varieties, but otherwise had no idea what I was supposed to be seeing until I got the revealer, which (thankfully) was very easy to get. I could see, after ROOMER and TOK, that there was some kind of "gossip" pun theme going on .... and I could tell from the italicized clues on the grapes that grapes ... were involved. But I needed that revealer to tie it together. Playing on the meaning of "heard" does elevate the theme somewhat. Would likely have been easy (easier?) to have the actual words themselves ("rumor," "talk," etc.) run "THROUGH / THE GRAPEVINE," and you'd still have had a coherent theme, but this puzzle is more ambitious, taking those words and allowing us to see them only by hearing them. So the gossip must be literally heard to be understood. It's a nice touch. I mean, DIC really does look ridiculous on its own, and had me wondering what "dick!" had to do with any of this, but within the word itself, DIC = "dish," so, fair. The puzzle title also does a reasonable job this week of conveying the theme, as the shaded letters sound like synonyms for "scoop" (i.e. "gossip") and are buried "inside" longer answers. So there are things to admire thematically. I'm just not buying the drawn-on "vine" bit.

The fill was a mixed bag. No real SLOP, but some sloppy repetition ("I PLAN TO" almost alongside SPEAK TO across the grid from AKIN TO, with TOO semi-ironically in between) and some forced colloquialism ("AIN'T SO" / ONE PER / RESCUE OP) and some dated slang (HATERADE). SAND SHARK feels super-"My Uncurated Wordlist Taught Me This" (4D: Marine predator often seen near shorelines) (it's a debut, though it did appear in a Cox/Rathvon cryptic back in 2011). I liked YOINK (hard not to like YOINK) (28D: Comics sound when something is snatched) and parsing GOONIN was a not uncompelling adventure (41D: "Well, don't wait out here!"). My favorite answer was probably the most absurd answer in the grid—absurd for being easily the most ... I wanna say "arcane" or "obscure" thing in the grid, which seem like appropriate enough words for a song that peaked at #58 on the Billboard Hot 100 29 years ago, but if you're a Gen-Xer (guilty), then "DOLL PARTS" will loom somewhat larger in your memory, perhaps, than the middling chart success would seem to warrant. That song was everywhere in the mid-90s. I wasn't particularly a Hole fan in 1994 (that wouldn't happen til Celebrity Skin (1998)), but the album that "DOLL PARTS" was on (Live Through This) came out the same week (!) that Kurt Cobain died, and since Hole was fronted by Cobain's wife (Courtney Love)—well, the drama of the moment seemed to shine a spotlight on the song, especially once it was released as a single later in the year. Of course, if you were too old for this moment, or too young, there's a good chance that this song title was meaningless to you. These things happen. If it didn't make you happy, I understand. But for me, remembering that Hole song was one of the more pleasurable parts of the solving experience.

My favorite wrong answer of the day was a doozy. I didn't know that the vine answers were grapes, necessarily, or that a "vine" was involved at all, so when I saw [47D: Variety commonly found in jellies and pies] and I had CON- already in place, I went with what to me seemed like the only sensible answer: CONGERS! (i.e. eels). Jellied eel ... is a thing. A thing that traditionally accompanies pie & mash. It's all very British. I blame Dickens (whom I'm currently reading ... though I don't think there are any eel pies in David Copperfield—not yet, anyway; I've got a few pages left, so there's still hope!)

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld 

P.S. OK, I'm still stuck on dick, I mean DIC ("dish"). It's the subsequent "I" that really gives the "C" its "sh" sound, so ... DIC really seems incomplete. "Tea" is a word for "gossip"—would've been easy to bury "inside" another answer in disguised form ("TI"? "TEE"?), and wouldn't have had that awkward, DIC-ish quality that DIC has. 

P.P.S. The [Windy part of a kite?] is the REEL because it's the part that ... winds (rhymes with "binds"). It's "windy" as in winding, not "windy" as in blowing.

P.P.P.S. [Little lifter] is TEE because a (golf) TEE is little and lifts your ball above ground level.

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