Chinese gambling game with dominoes / SUN 6-9-24 / Global bank headquartered in London / Short-tailed weasel / Bauhaus artist Paul

Constructor: Zachary Schiff

Relative difficulty: Easy

THEME: "Quiet Time" — each theme answer contains one circled "silent" letter; those letters end up spelling "AUCTION," which gives you an "AUCTION" made up of "silent" letters, or ... a SILENT AUCTION (117A: Popular charity event ... or a hint to this puzzle's circled letters):

Theme answers:

• CINNAMON BREAD (22A: Sweet loaf with a swirl)
• "TEARDROPS ON MY GUITAR" (31A: Triple-platinum song from Taylor Swift's debut album)
• SCIENCE PROJECT (49A: Potato battery or model volcano, e.g.)
• SIDE HUSTLE (58A: Extra source of income, slangily)
• FRUIT SALAD (76A: Side dish at a summer cookout)
• "THIS IS JEOPARDY" (84A: Classic game show intro)
• DAMN WITH FAINT PRAISE (103A: Pay a backhanded compliment, perhaps)

Word of the Day: PAI GOW (72D: Chinese gambling game with dominoes) —

Pai gow (/paɪ ˈɡaʊ/ py GOW; Chinese: 牌九; Jyutping: paai⁴ gau² [pʰaːi˩.kɐu˧˥]) is a Chinese gambling game, played with a set of 32 Chinese dominoes. It is played in major casinos in China (including Macau); the United States (including Boston, Massachusetts; Las Vegas, Nevada; Reno, Nevada; Connecticut; Atlantic City, New Jersey; Pennsylvania; Mississippi; and cardrooms in California); Canada (including Edmonton, Alberta and Calgary, Alberta); Australia; and New Zealand.

The name pai gow is sometimes used to refer to a card game called pai gow poker (or "double-hand poker"), which is loosely based on pai gow. The act of playing pai gow is also colloquially known as "eating dog meat". 

Pai Gow is the first documented form of dominoes, originating in China before or during the Song Dynasty. It is also the ancestor of modern, western dominoes. The name literally means "make nine" after the normal maximum hand, and the original game was modeled after both a Chinese creation myth, and military organization in China at that time (ranks one through nine).

• • •

The theme seems oddly thin. There's no reason you couldn't do this theme with a bunch of different phrases. SILENT NIGHT. SILENT TREATMENT. SILENT SPRING .SILENT MOVIE. Actually, you couldn't do SILENT MOVIE, as "V" (apparently!) is the only letter in the English language that won't ever shut up. So SILENT FILM, then. There's nothing specifically auction-y about this grid, no real auction content, just the silent letters in the eight theme answers. But ... this brings me to the other thing that makes the theme seem thin, which is that silent letters aren't special. They're everywhere. And the only restriction on your themers is that they contain ... a single specific silent letter? So ... *annnnnnny* answer with a silent "A" in it would work as the first answer, for instance. I mean, BREAD answers alone would give you a mountain of possibilities, and BREAD is hardly the only example of a silent "A" in the English language. Because you just need the one silent letter, you really just need one word—the rest of the (long) themer just takes up space. Doesn't have to be about auctions, or silence ... just sits there. And while several of the themers are bright and interesting answers, CINNAMON BREAD, SCIENCE PROJECT, and FRUIT SALAD just kinda lie there. I dunno. This theme just didn't seem to have narrow enough parameters to be at all interesting. Worse is the fact that several of the themers contain More Than One Silent Letter. The circles the one it wants you to see, but what about the "I"s in FAINT and "PRAISE"—if the "I" in FRUIT is silent (which the puzzle is telling me it is), then the "I"s in "FAINT and "PRAISE" are also silent. The "A" in TEARDROPS seems silent. There's also the "E" is SIDE, or even at the end of SCIENCE. If you are going to make the silent letter the hallmark of your theme, there really (really) should be just one silent letter per theme answer. It would be too much to ask that absolutely no other letters in your Sunday-sized grid be silent, but with the themers, you'd think you could manage that one tiny restriction (since your theme has so few restrictions to begin with).

Some of the themers do have enough personality to make you forget (briefly) how thin the theme is. I don't know what "TEARDROPS ON MY GUITAR" is, nor did I know singles went "platinum" at all, let alone thrice (I thought that was just for albums, and anyway who is buying singles —in those numbers— in the 21st century?). Still, at least the answer is original and vibrant, and provided some genuine suspense for me "Where ... where will the teardrops end up ...? On Her What!?!?! PILLOW!? TEAPOT!? PET CAT!?" I also liked "THIS ... IS ... JEOPARDY!" and DAMN WITH FAINT PRAISE, fine answers that would be a credit to any grid. I absolutely hate the term, the phrase, the concept, the very existence of SIDE HUSTLE, which is some capitalist propaganda designed to make the fact that you have to work two or more jobs just to survive sound cool, man! It's the Protestant Work Ethic distilled and weaponized for the 21st century consumer. Booooooo. But it is a term people use, so it's valid, I just hate it so much. The puzzle's main problem is that once you get beyond the handful of good themers, the vibrancy level really drops off. There aren't many longer answers at all, and while the grid does make decent use of many of the 7+ answers it does have (BURRATA, JUST ONCE, BUDDY COP), mostly what you get is a boatload of forgettable 3-4-5s. And again, the puzzle is playing way too easy. This has been a real trend of late, with the late-week puzzles, and the trend shows no signs of reversing. Today, I needed every cross for PAIGOW, and I had trouble remembering the seemingly arbitrary string of letters in HSBC, but other than that, there was no challenge, no bite. The clues didn't seem to be trying particularly hard to fool or even entertain you. Overall, everything works fine in this puzzle, but it all feels a bit flat. "Quiet Time," for sure. Too quiet.

I talked recently (Friday) about the seeming explosion of answers in the UH / OH / UM category, the ones that open with a two-letter exclamation or hesitation. "UH, NO," "OH, OK," stuff like that. From Friday (6/7):

• 47D: "Is the pope Catholic?!" ("UH, YES!") — I have mixed feelings about the "UH / OH" genre of answer, especially now that the number of such answers seems to be getting out of control. You've got two of them crossing here today, with "UH, YES!" cutting through "OH HELL NO!" and I can hear both of today's phrases perfectly fine in my head but especially when you throw "UM" in the mix it can be very hard to know which two-letter sound the speaker is opening with. "UH, YES!" is kinda pushing the boundaries of feasibility.

And here just two days later we've got "UM, BYE" going "... 'pushing the boundaries of feasibility," eh? ... um, hold my beer." I do not really buy "UM, BYE." I buy "UH, YES" about ten times as much as "UM, BYE." "UM, BYE" opens the floodgates on some increasingly absurd combinations, things one might very well say but that don't exactly make great standalone answers. "UH, SURE." "UM, WHY?" "OH, THAT." LOL I just looked it up and "OH THAT" has already appeared three times! Anyway, there's nothing terribly alarming about the UH / OH / UM creep, I just want to point it out. Just asking us to collectively keep our eye on the situation and think about whether limits exist and what they are. "OH SHUT UP." I will not, sir, or ma'am, how dare you.

 

Not a fan of NOAIR (111A: Flat's problem), for a host of reasons (surely there's some air even in the worst flat, this isn't really a thing you'd say about a flat, there's another NO answer just a couple inches away (NO DISC), etc.). Also not a fan of the arbitrary definite article in THE SUNS (I had THE HEAT in there at first) (48D: Fitting N.B.A. team to go on a hot streak?). 'EM ALL may be the worst five-letter answer I've ever seen in a grid, and I've seen TO POT (several times!). My guess is that this was in the constructor's database because of previous instances where EMALL had appeared in crosswords, clued as E-MALL (yes, as in "electronic mall"). Let me just look it up ... Oof, no. I mean, yes, EMALL has been clued that way, but it's also been clued this way, with the elided "TH"—did you know there was a "hit song" from 1941 called "Bless 'EM ALL"? Probably not. Seems much more likely that you would've heard of Metallica's triple-platinum debut album (take that, Taylor Swift!) Kill 'EM ALL. Both 'EM ALL titles have been used in NYTXW clues. In light of this unfortunate information, I have to revise my assessment slightly:  'EM ALL is still godawful, but in all of 'EM ALL history, I have to admit that Pokémon's "Gotta Catch 'EM ALL" is King 'EM ALL. Well, as Satan famously said, "Better to reign in crossword hell than serve in crossword heaven!" (I added the "crossword" part, sorry Milton). Ironic congratulations to King 'EM ALL!

Notes:

• 36D: One of four in a grand slam (RBI) — I wrote in RUN. Yesterday I saw the movie RUN LOLA RUN (on the big screen!). Coincidence? Yes. I also wrote in BUDDY COM at 12D: Genre for "Turner & Hooch" and "21 Jump Street" and was briefly Very mad. Then I got BUDDY COP, and my madness abated for a time.

• 10A: T'Challa ___ Black Panther (AKA) — I absolutely had a moment of "How the &*$% am I supposed to remember this *&$%"s middle damn name!?"
• 64D: "Wheel of Fortune" buy (AN I) — a weak clue on any day, but especially on a day where the (unspecified!) vowel is one of your circled silent letters! I mean, it wasn't hard to get from the cross, but still, boo. At least make the clue "I"-specific. The NYTXW has had some good ones in the past. [What makes cream creamier?], for instance. That was nice.
• 58D: Short-tailed weasel (STOAT) — had the first "T," wrote in OTTER. This has caused me to learn (just now) that otters typically have long, muscular tails, except the sea otter, whose tail is "fairly short, thick, slightly flattened, and muscular" (wikipedia). The OTTER is also a member of the weasel family. So though I feel bad about my wrong answer, I feel less bad than I did before looking up these otter facts. The only otters I know are sea otters. You see them all the time in the Monterey/Carmel area of CA (where much of my family now lives). I don't know any STOATs (that I'm aware of).

P.S. crossword constructor extraordinaire Matt Gaffney has a new game over at Merriam-Webster dot com called "Pilfer." Matt writes:

There's a how-to there, but in a nutshell: you make words from a given set of constantly-replenished tiles, but then can also make new words by stealing an opponent's word by adding at least one letter to it. So if your opponent had ZOO for three points, you could use a B to make it BOZO, giving yourself four points and causing your hapless opponent to lose three points with the loss of ZOO. Ruthless and the point totals can swing wildly back and forth. 

You can play the game three ways: as a public game (against up to three other people), as a private game against friends, or just you-vs-computer. Check it out here.

OK, uh, UM, BYE!

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld 

P.S. "Touch 'EM ALL" is reasonably common baseball slang, a post-homerun declaration / exclamation favored by some announcers. So look out for "Touch 'EM ALL"—coming to an E-MALL near you soon, I'm sure.

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