Food item, quaintly / WED 7-10-24 / Device identifier, in computing / Tuscan red wines / Three-week bike race / Literature Nobelist born in French Algeria / Hard patterns to break / Box filled with bags / Prez's proxy

Constructor: Hal Moore

Relative difficulty: Medium

THEME: Tour de France? I think? — Bunch of bicycle race terms, as well as a couple of mountain ranges (on diagonals, in circled squares), which appear to be related to the Tour de France. I guess it's a long race up mountains, and so it's grueling, and so that's why the (punny) revealer is VICIOUS CYCLES (40A: Hard patterns to break ... or a punny description of the climbs up the circled letters):

Theme answers:

• TIME TRIAL (8D: Segment of this puzzle's race)
• CHAMPS-ELYSÉES (16D: Typical ending point for this puzzle's race)
• GRAND TOUR (48A: Three-week bike race, such as the one featured in this puzzle)

Mountain ranges:

• ALPS 
• PYRENEES

Word of the Day: IP ADDRESS (3D: Device identifier, in computing) —

An Internet Protocol address (IP address) is a numerical label such as 192.0.2.1 that is assigned to a device connected to a computer network that uses the Internet Protocol for communication. IP addresses serve two main functions: network interface identification, and location addressing.

Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4) defines an IP address as a 32-bit number. However, because of the growth of the Internet and the depletion of available IPv4 addresses, a new version of IP (IPv6), using 128 bits for the IP address, was standardized in 1998. IPv6 deployment has been ongoing since the mid-2000s. [...] The IP address space is managed globally by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA), and by five regional Internet registries(RIRs) responsible in their designated territories for assignment to local Internet registries, such as Internet service providers (ISPs), and other end users. IPv4 addresses were distributed by IANA to the RIRs in blocks of approximately 16.8 million addresses each, but have been exhausted at the IANA level since 2011. Only one of the RIRs still has a supply for local assignments in Africa. Some IPv4 addresses are reserved for private networks and are not globally unique.

Network administrators assign an IP address to each device connected to a network. Such assignments may be on a static (fixed or permanent) or dynamic basis, depending on network practices and software features. Some jurisdictions consider IP addresses to be personal data. (wikipedia)

• • •

[Best Director, Cannes 2024: Miguel GOMES] 

If it's not TOUR DE FRANCE, then I really don't know what we're talking about, cycling-wise. TIME TRIAL? Did not know that a "trial" was just a leg of the race. GRAND TOUR? That's something young rich guys take through Europe in order to become "cultured" or whatever. A longish European voyage. See the great art and architecture, etc. It was a thing. A "finishing school for young aristocrats." I associate it with Henry James, for some reason. But a cycling term? I mean, if you say so, OK, but it's bizarre not to have the words "DE" or "FRANCE" in this puzzle, and to have the revealer, instead, be this punny whatever it is. The theme answers feel arbitrary. That is, they seem like a random bunch of Tour de France-related terms, but they appear to be picked solely because they would fit symmetrically in this grid. It's not a tight set. And the mountains, yeesh. The problem here is location and proportion, which is to say, those ranges are neither oriented toward one another that way on a map (unless the Alps moved to the NW of the Pyrenees and I didn't hear about it), nor do they appear to scale in this grid (last I checked, the Alps were the much bigger range). The mountain ranges do convey ... slope, I'll give them that. But all in all this feels like a first draft, a valiant attempt to get a concept down on paper, but with none of the kinks worked out. It's trying to do a lot, but it's a mess. 

The pun also didn't quite land for me. Are "bike rides" called "cycles" in bike jargon? "That was a good cycle today, team!" This puzzle is asking me to know cycling terminology that ... well, as I say, I know the term TOUR DE FRANCE, and after that, my cycling vocabulary gets very wobbly. Yellow jersey, that's a thing, right? Palme d'Or? No, that's Cannes. Oh well. I'm sure cycling enthusiasts felt seen, and that's nice for them.  There were some high points (!) in this puzzle's fill, specifically STEP CLASS, SAT SHIVA, and Cloris LEACHMAN (34D: Cloris ___, Emmy-winning actress on "The Mary Tyler Moore Show"), who is the best. Just the best. In everything she ever did. From the opening scenes of Kiss Me, Deadly (1955!) to her Academy Award-winning performance in The Last Picture Show, to Mary Tyler Moore, she was never not great. Underrated, undercelebrated, legitimately great. Eight Emmys! Eight! With 22 nominations! Those are Julia Louis-Dreyfus numbers! I think I showed this clip from MTM before, but I don't care; her total commitment to this totally non-plot-related performance, all while Mary and Rhoda are half-ignoring her and half-looking-at-her-like-she's-nuts... it floored me. I have watched it too many times to count.

There's also this (her line readings, her gestures, every little thing, right on the money):

But after LEACHMAN and a few other answers, the fill quality drops off, sometimes precipitously. I've got two sections of my print-out that are particularly ink-covered today. The first is EELED ADE NED. Actually, ADE and NED are pretty innocent, but when you hang out with a (very) bad element like EELED, well, you're bound to be implicated. EELED! In the olden days, you used to have to be familiar with so much eel terminology. I know way more eel vocabulary than I do Tour de France vocabulary. Did you know that you catch eels in an EELPOT and that eeling is also referred to as "sniggling"!? If you solved puzzles before, say, 2010, then you definitely do know those things. EEL(S) EELING EELER(S) EELED EELPOT ... it's all redolent of ... a time. Bygone. Yore. (This article on glass eel fishing in Maine appeared in The New Yorker just last month and is actually pretty fascinating ...  though I don't think you'll find "EELED" or "EELPOT" or "sniggling" anywhere in it)

Hey, are EELS considered a VIAND? (40D: Food item, quaintly) (Segue!). Because I like EELED and VIAND about the same amount (i.e. naught, no amount, none). Also TINA'S in the ... possessive? ... not familiar to me (46A: "Tony n' ___ Wedding" (Off Broadway hit)). This is the same area of the puzzle with VICIOUS and GRAND, both theme answer parts that were not intuitive to me at all (CYCLES and TOUR, sure, those made sense, but the words that came before them, ????). And then running through (and near) alllll that, the VIAND and Tina and the front ends of the themers, was TEA CADDY (32D: Box filled with bags). Sigh. TEA CADDY. It's a thing, I know, but you know what else is a thing, a thing that is also much more "box"-like than a "CADDY"? A damned TEA CHEST, that's what! CHEST, also five letters, also starts with "C," bah humbug to CADDY. So anyway .... yeah, that section was a combination of ugly and difficult. As for the rest of the puzzle—besides the theme, I don't really remember it. See you next time.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld 

P.S. best error of the day was my complete misparsing of the answer at 3D: Device identifier, in computing. I had IPAD up front and assumed that I was looking for some kind of IPAD equivalent to the "Find My iPhone" app. And then I ended up with an IPAD [space] DRESS and wondered if maybe people were "dressing" their IPADs (!?) and that's how they "identified" them??? Anyway, the IPAD DRESS—there's a money-making idea for some enterprising soul. You're welcome. 

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