Meat-filled puff / SUN 6-30-24 / Two halves of a platonic whole / Preferring platonic relationships, in a way / River in a classic dad joke / Paul ___, Hungarian mathematician with over 1,500 published papers / Hindu god of death / Spanish wine region / Landlocked African country / Coke-ette? / "Mm-hmm, get a little nearer"?

Constructor: Ginny Too 

Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium

THEME: "Misstated" — US state puns ... that is it:

Theme answers:

• "FLOOR IT, DUH!" (Florida) (22A: Getaway driver's plan obviously?)
• "MISS IS ZIPPY" (Mississippi) (28A: "She sure runs fast!"?)
• TEN ASEA (Tennessee) (34A: Captain and nine crew members?)
• "ORE AGAIN!?" (Oregon) (45A: Jaded miner's remark?)
• MINI SODA (Minnesota) (51A: Coke-ette?)
• INDIE ANNA (Indiana) (60A: Actress Kendrick, when appearing in smaller films?)
• DELL-AWARE (Delaware) (70A: PC-sensitive, in a way?)
• "WHY OMING?" (Wyoming) (80A: "You realize this is a silent meditation, right?") 
• EYED A HOE (Idaho) (86A: Considered buying that garden tool?)
• "HUH, WHY 'E'?" (Hawaii) (96A: "Wait ... can we not play this in F sharp instead?")
• "VERGE IN, YEAH" (Virginia) (102A: "Mm-hmm, get a little nearer"?)
• "WHISK ON, SON!" (Wisconsin) (113A: Parent's encouragement to a budding chef?)

Word of the Day: RISSOLE (14D: Meat-filled puff) —

A rissole (from Latin russeolus, meaning reddish, via French in which "rissoler" means "to redden") is a small  patty enclosed in pastry or rolled in breadcrumbs, usually baked or deep fried. The filling has savory ingredients, most often minced meat, fish or cheese, and is served as an entrée, main course, or side dish.

In Australia and New Zealand, a rissole is patty of minced meat and other ingredients, without a pastry covering but often covered in a breadcrumb coating, similar to Hamburg steak and Salisbury steak. (wikipedia)

• • •

["Dude..."]

Once again, if you enjoy groaner puns, have I got a puzzle for you. Not so much for me. But for you, maybe. If so, lucky you. For me: painful from start to finish. Never not painful. I admire some of the more, uh, ambitious puns, I guess, because at least they had the courage to flop hard, but mostly, yeesh, these were rough. And off. So often just way off. Huge variations in aptness. Stuff like DELL-AWARE and INDIE ANNA are dead-on, soundwise, whereas "FLOOR IT, DUH"!?!? ... I have no idea what that answer thinks it's doing, or how it thinks it's anywhere close to punny. There's a damn "T" in there, what the hell? The worst (by far) was VERGE IN, YEAH ... I mean, I can't even begin to imagine any context, even the most fanciful context, where anyone would utter those words. I don't even know what "VERGE IN" means. Who says that? "Get a little nearer" = VERGE IN????? What are editors for if not to say "uh, no"? The clue and the answer there are both nth-degree tortured. As if dad joke-level puns weren't hard enough to endure over the course of a Very Large 21x21 canvas. "MINI SODA?" No One Pronounces The State Name That Way. It seems as if the idea today was volume. Dazzle them with ... density? Twelve themers!? When the theme is unsavory, more is not better. Why not all the states? Since quality of pun seems not to matter at all, why not keep going? "CALIPH OR NIA?" [Choice between a Muslim ruler and actress Peeples?] Or WASH IN TUN [Use wine cask for bathing?] MISHA GUN [Firearm belonging to Baryshnikov?]. Go to town. I think I almost liked EYED A HOE and "ORE AGAIN!?" and "WHISK ON, SON!" But twelve of these, in a grid that doesn't really have anything else to offer as far as marquee fill ... I was enduring fare more than I was enjoying. (You Sundays-only solvers should know that the puzzle was on a Very good run this week, from Wednesday through yesterday—there really is a Sunday-specific quality problem) (Also, there are two WHYs in the state puns... why? That kind of duplication seems ... bad.)

The puzzle was mostly easy. The theme, despite having some bonkers entries, was very easy to work out, in general, so all the difficulty really came from the fill, which was fine but forgettable, with some occasionally ugly answers and forced cluing. It's weird how often I'm asked to know this ERDOS guy's name (7D: Paul ___, Hungarian mathematician with over 1,500 published papers). OK, only eight times in twenty years, but that seems like a lot. ERDOS makes me miss MS/DOS. Seems like you'd do everything you could to keep that name out of your puzzle. ERDOS makes EULER seem like a household name. A moratorium on five-letter "E" mathematicians, I beg you. Never heard of RISSOLE, so that was easily the scariest / diciest / iffiest part of the solve for me. TATAR / RISSOLE ... that cross wasn't exactly in doubt, since at least TATAR meant *something* to me, but in general, RISSOLE was a yikes for me. I did like the juxtaposition of RISSOLE and ZOLA. If there's not a ZOLA RISSOLE, there should be. The clue on GEESE is 49D: V-six or V-twelve?). I mean, yes, they fly in "V" shapes, vaguely, but 6? 12? Arbitrary numbers. I mean, why not V-eight? Bizarre. Also, GEESE crosses OASES, which (as clued) could easily (or so it seemed to me) have been OASIS (56A: Sandy springs)—that's what I wrote in at first, and that made GEESE very hard to see. I also had what felt like a close call at ABS / "BOOYA!" The spelling on the latter one felt odd, and ABS had a tricky / vague clue (67A: Core components) (I think I wanted CPU there at first). Do people really use the term "COHEIR?" (77A: One of several named in a will). You just refer to the heirs as "heirs", right? Normally? Like normal people do, when they say things? I don't know that I've ever heard of YAMA (105D: Hindu god of death). I had RAMA. Not a great feeling to discover YAMA via uncovering the absolute worst themer of the bunch ("VERGE IN, YEAH!"). I still can't fathom this answer. The tone, the context, nothing. "VERGE, ENYA!," while still nonsensical, would have been so much more pleasing.

There were some bizarre clues today. Like the one on WOOD. Such a nice, versatile, ordinary word, you could clue it any number of ways, but today you clue it as a synonym of ... "woods" (33A: Where fairy tale creatures often live)? I haven't heard the woods called a "WOOD" outside of the Winnie-the-Pooh stories (set in the Hundred Acre WOOD). Fairy tale characters live in the woods. With the "S" on the end. The fairy tale-based Sondheim musical (starring INDIE ANNA Kendrick!) is called Into the Woods, for god's sake, not Into the WOOD. Appropriate that that answer crosses LAID EGGS. Boo to that answer. You have to really do some heavy imaginative lifting to make "AND?" work at 119A: Sassy retort. Specifically, you have to mentally add the "?" And the sass. You end up with a kind of substitute for "Your point being?" ("YOUR POINT BEING?" would be a top-tier crossword answer, by the way, if you're looking to pad your wordlist). Do people really "frown upon" BURPs (15A: Frowned-upon sound)? I guess in some contexts it's considered rude, still, but fewer and fewer things are, and seems to me people are as apt to laugh at or ignore as "frown upon" a BURP.  As I learned the last time BURP appeared in the grid (yesterday? two days ago?), there's a whole kid-lit industry dedicated to how funny BURPs are. 

Additional notes:

• 98A: River in a classic dad joke (NILE) — wait, you've made a puzzle that's inundated with dad jokes, but you're gonna be coy about this one? Weird. Does the "joke" involve calling someone "Cleopatra Queen of Denial?" If so, the first person I heard say that was Roseanne, I think. Famously not a dad. There's also this Pam Tillis song:

• 1D: Two halves of a platonic whole (BFFS) — weird to refer to BFFS as "platonic" (how do you know they're not making out in private?) and also a "whole." I get that you want to make some kind of philosophy joke here, but like many of the "dad jokes" in this puzzle, it doesn't quite land.
• 61D: Poet who wrote "Behold the duck / It does not cluck" (NASH) — as in Ogden NASH. Without crosswords, I wouldn't know he existed. His rhymes seem to have been very popular in the last century. "A one-L lama, he's a priest," etc.

The one-l lama,
He's a priest.
The two-l llama,
He's a beast.
And I will bet
A silk pajama
There isn't any
Three-l lllama.

• 87D: Certain camarade (AMIE) — French spelling of "comrade." Some of your "comrades" are friends. Friends who are female. Hence AMIE. 
• 101D: What's left of the Colosseum (RUINS) — ever get misdirected by a clue that's actually being straightforward? I was thinking "left" was a direction ... and then I thought maybe the answer was going to be the word for "left" in Latin (but that's "sinister," so no fit). But "What's left" here is just "what remains."

I forgot to do Puzzles of the Month for May, so here's May *and* June 

Themed (two from May, two from June)

• Joe DiPietro, "in old Rome" (letter strings "ONE" "TWO" "FOUR" and "EIGHT" rendered in grid as Roman numerals) (Thursday, 5/9)
• Jack Scherban, "YOU AND WHAT ARMY?" (non-military figures with military titles) (Monday, 5/20)
• Rebecca Goldstein, "I'M WALKIN' HERE" (famous walkers) (Wednesday, 6/26)
• Paolo Pasco and Sarah Sinclair, STUFFED CRUST pizza (edges of the pizza-shaped grid are "stuffed" — two letters in each square) (Thursday, 6/27)

Themeless (one from May, one from June)

• Billy Bratton, Saturday, 5/11 (SAMANTHA WHO?, GOAT YOGA, SAMESIES)
• Alice Liang and Christina Iverson, Friday, 6/7 (TRIPLE SEC, SATANISM, IN A GOOD WAY)

See you next time.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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