Game island represented by hexagonal tiles / THU 2-29-24 / Boldly stylish, in slang / Mideast spice blend / Asymmetrical crustacean / Creature whose scientific name translates to "ice-lover from Greenland" / Pastries usually accompanied by chutney / What the 1660s Pascaline machine, named for Blaise Pascal, could do

Constructor: Esha Datta

Relative difficulty: Easy 

THEME: WILD PITCHES (57A: Mistakes in baseball ... or what 18-, 24-, 34- and 51-Across might produce?) — animals with instruments in their names, clued via pictures of said animals playing said instruments:

Theme answers:

FIDDLER CRAB

HARP SEAL

TRUMPETER SWAN

HORNBILL

Word of the Day: Jhumpa LAHIRI (62A: Jhumpa ___, Pulitzer-winning author of "Interpreter of Maladies") —

Nilanjana Sudeshna "Jhumpa" Lahiri (born July 11, 1967) is a British-American author known for her short stories, novels, and essays in English and, more recently, in Italian.

Her debut collection of short-stories Interpreter of Maladies (1999) won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the PEN/Hemingway Award, and her first novel, The Namesake (2003), was adapted into the popular film of the same name.

The Namesake was a New York Times Notable Book, a Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalist and was made into a major motion picture. Unaccustomed Earth (2008) won the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award, while her second novel, The Lowland (2013), was a finalist for both the Man Booker Prize and the National Book Award for Fiction. (wikipedia)

• • •

This would've been a pretty hard puzzle if they hadn't resorted to child's placemat cartoons for the clues. You wanna see the alternative, text-only clues (which showed up alongside the picture clues in my solving software, somehow)? Here, check it out:

• 18A: Asymmetrical crustacean*
• 24A: Creature whose scientific name translates to "ice-lover from Greenland"*
• 34A: North America's heaviest flying bird*
• 51A: Zazu from "The Lion King," e.g.*

Now *those* would've provided a proper Thursday challenge. As it was, I read the note in my software that said there were picture clues, and so I dutifully switched over and solved on the NYTXW website, where (as promised) I got the picture clues and ... yeah, I just filled in all the theme answers with hardly any thought at all (as hardly any was required):

You should not be able to do that with themers. Not on a Thursday. I can see why people might like the picture clues—they're "new," "fresh," "innovative," "cute," whatever. I don't think they're a flaw. But I hope you can see how someone (namely me) might be disappointed that difficulty was sacrificed for a visual gimmick. The non-theme stuff played like a Wednesday for me, and with the themers practically filling themselves in (faster than I could ever hope to fill in even a set of Monday themers), the puzzle ended up feeling very slight. Toothless.

In retrospect, I would've preferred the written-out clues. But there's at least one substantive reason to prefer the pictures to the written clues. The picture of a bird playing a horn kind of masks or distracts from the anomalousness of HORNBILL. It's the only answer that doesn't have an animal in its name. That is, you have CRAB playing a fiddle, a SEAL playing a harp, a SWAN playing a trumpet, but you do not have a BILL playing a horn. BILL is only a part of the animal playing the horn. A HORNBILL is a real bird, for sure, but you have to fudge the specific instrument (or instrument player) + animal wordplay of the theme to make it work. It's fine. All the answers are animals with instruments (or instrument players) in their names, and that's sufficiently coherent. But HORNBILL is, structurally, a bit of an odd-man-out. 

The fill on this one is average to slightly below. ESO PIA TSETSE AARE AGEE ÉTÉ ATA AVIA AWW have this one feeling pretty crosswordesey, and IN A TUB ... well, you know how awful I think that is, since we Just Had It In A Puzzle Last Week. And then there's COR, which is not only crosswordese, but also adds an extraneous instrument to an already instrument-themed puzzle. For elegance's sake, all instruments should be banished from the non-theme answers, especially ones that are clued Using Words That Are Actually In The Theme Answers (30D: ___ anglais (English horn) / HORNBILL). There's a doubling of "IT" ("I SWEAR IT" / "NAILED IT"), which is not that big a deal, and yet I noticed ... it. ZAATAR is pretty spicy, I like that (12D: Mideast spice blend). Seems conspicuously, if not gruesomely, understated to clue GAZA as simply a "site of conflict" right now. I mean, true, and yet ... kinda euphemistic. There are ways to clue GAZA that don't point straight at violence ([Largest city of Palestine], [Historic Mideast city where Samson died], etc.). Maybe one of those would've been preferable here. But maybe the clue doesn't matter because the very name GAZA is going to evoke images of violence right now, no matter how you clue it.

Notes and explanations:

• 26A: Game island represented by hexagonal tiles (CATAN) — I had trouble understanding what a "game island" even was. Like, what category of thing is that? Here, it's the title island in the game "Settlers of CATAN" (which is apparently now just called "CATAN")
• 19D: Pause to play? (RECESS) — I'm not sure what the surface-meaning is supposed to be here (why would you hit "pause" in order to "play" something?), but the clue ultimately wants you to understand the answer as a pause (from school during which children often go outside) to play, i.e. RECESS
• 1A: Line just above "total," maybe (TIP) — I had TAX, which had me wondering what kind of [Energizing snack] started with an "X"—maybe an XXTRA BAR ("20 Times The Protein Of Our Regular Bar!") (3D: Energizing snack = POWER BAR)
• 62A: Jhumpa ___, Pulitzer-winning author of "Interpreter of Maladies" (LAHIRI) — the only thing that really slowed me up today, and it was my own dumb fault—I misremembered her name as LAHARI and never bothered to check the cross, which should be HIT, but when you've got HAT in the grid, well, HAT doesn't exactly scream "Error!" at you, so ... I had to hunt my error after I was done, and didn't discover it until I'd checked every answer in the puzzle (since LAHARI didn't register as wrong, I didn't see my error til I got to HIT, which is the very last answer in the grid, 59D: Popular song).
• 33D: More quickly? (ETC.) —the idea being that if you want to indicate that there are "more" things in your list, but you want to do so economically (without enumerating every single item), then you use the abbreviation ETC. It indicates "more" ... quickly (i.e. in a short abbr.)
• 42D: Place for soap? (MELROSE) — kind of a deep cut: this is a reference to the '90s primetime soap opera MELROSE Place.

Please enjoy the rest of your Leap Day.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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