Shady, in modern slang / WED 7-3-24 / Japanese rice cake often filled with ice cream / Totally tubular pasta / Three-player trick-taking game / Feature of high heels popularized in the 1920s /

Constructor: Juliana Tringali Golden

Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium (Easy, were it not for one answer)

THEME: Prognostication puns — things used to tell the future get wacky pun clues:

Theme answers:

• TAROT CARDS (17A: Observation deck?)
• CRYSTAL BALL (33A: Glass eye?)
• I CHING COINS (41A: Metal detectors?)
• OUIJA BOARD (61A: Predictive text?)

Word of the Day: I CHING COINS (41A) —

The I Ching or Yijing [...]  usually translated Book of Changes or Classic of Changes, is an ancient Chinese divination text that is among the oldest of the Chinese classics. The I Ching was originally a divination manual in the Western Zhou period (1000–750 BC). Over the course of the Warring States and early imperial periods (500–200 BC), it transformed into a cosmological text with a series of philosophical commentaries known as the Ten Wings. After becoming part of the Chinese Five Classicsin the 2nd century BC, the I Ching was the basis for divination practice for centuries across the Far East and was the subject of scholarly commentary. Between the 18th and 20th centuries, it took on an influential role in Western understanding of East Asian philosophical thought.

As a divination text, the I Ching is used for a Chinese form of cleromancy known as I Ching divination in which bundles of yarrow stalks are manipulated to produce sets of six apparently random numbers ranging from 6 to 9. Each of the 64 possible sets corresponds to a hexagram, which can be looked up in the I Ching. The hexagrams are arranged in an order known as the King Wen sequence. The interpretation of the readings found in the I Ching has been discussed and debated over the centuries. Many commentators have used the book symbolically, often to provide guidance for moral decision-making, as informed by Confucianism, Taoism and Buddhism. The hexagrams themselves have often acquired cosmological significance and been paralleled with many other traditional names for the processes of change such as yin and yang and Wu Xing. [...] 

The most common form of divination with the I Ching in use today is a reconstruction of the method described in these histories, in the 300 BC Great Commentary, and later in the Huainanzi and the Lunheng. From the Great Commentary's description, the Neo-Confucian Zhu Xi reconstructed a method of yarrow stalk divination that is still used throughout the Far East. In the modern period, Gao Heng attempted his own reconstruction, which varies from Zhu Xi in places. Another divination method, employing coins, became widely used in the Tang dynasty and is still used today. In the modern period; alternative methods such as specialized dice and cartomancy have also appeared. (wikipedia)

• • •

This isn't much of a theme. It's just ... four of the same kind of thing. Four things from the same general category. It's like BUS CAR TRUCK VAN. Or four baseball player names. Or author names. Or U.S. states. True, it's drawing from a category with fewer items in it (not sure how many prognostication devices there are in the world). But still, this is just "Here are four items that are used for similar purposes." That doesn't really get us to Theme Territory. There's no hook, no revealer, nothing at all to make it make sense as a theme. The theme clues are just ... regular crossword clues!?!? I mean, yes, they're wacky "?" clues, but we see those Every Day. The first one was actually used by this very outlet back in August of 2017 (TAROT CARDS = [Observation deck of the future?]). The cluing is giving us nothing in terms of making the theme cohere. I'm baffled at how this made the grade. I would also say that I CHING COINS feels like a strong outlier here, familiarity-wise. I had to read way way down the wikipedia "I Ching" page to find anything about "coins," and even then, it was just in passing (turns out "I Ching divination" has its own separate page). I think of the I Ching as a text. I know it's used in various rituals of foretelling, but how those rituals are performed, pfft, no idea. Apparently, there's no one way. There are lots of ways. One of those ways involves coins. It seems. I did not have to wonder about how the other three theme answers worked. At all. But I CHING COINS is not a phrase I've ever heard. As a result, this puzzle was briefly Not Easy, which I should be grateful for, but it's a mild bummer to have the only difficulty in a puzzle concentrated on just one answer. I feel like what we've got here is a first draft of a theme idea, but there's nothing to elevate it to real Theme status. No snap, no pop. Just a list of things. Disappointing.

All difficulty for me came in and around ICHINGCOINS. I briefly forgot MOCHI but then crosses helped me remember (5A: Japanese rice cake often filled with ice cream). Didn't know ALYSSA at all but easy crosses made that irrelevant (23A: ___ Thompson, U.S. soccer star who made her World Cup debut at 18). It wasn't until CRISCO for CANOLA (33D: Kind of cooking oil) that I started to struggle a bit. Didn't take *too* long to see that the I CHING was involved in that third theme answer, but what was supposed to follow I CHING ... I had no idea. And so ... let's see, I had DEAD before DAMN (31D: Word with "straight" or "right") (a bad guess, I admit), ADO before IRK (44D: Bother), didn't have enough info to get CONSUME straight away (42D: Eat), and could think only of the expression I actually use (GO SOUTH), not the one that ended up being in the grid (GO SOUR) (46A: Take a turn for the worse). Concentrated struggle. But brief struggle, as struggles go. After that, back to Monday-easy.

MISC. (28D: This and that: Abbr.):

• 56A: Pass up, using a less common spelling (FOREGO) — to be quite honest, if you'd left out the "using a less common spelling," I'm not sure I'd've blinked. It's like the clue is calling attention to a weakness I didn't know it had, and making the clue ungainly in the process. Better just to find another word entirely. It wouldn't be hard to do a mild tear-down in this corner and start over.
• 2D: Three-player trick-taking game (SKAT) — I wrote in SPIT. My family (or some members of it) used to play a card game called "SPIT in the Ocean," which must be why my brain went that way. Don't know SKAT, but it was what I guessed off the SK- so I must've heard of it before. SKAT is the "national game of Germany" (wikipedia); you know, in case anyone ever asks you "hey, what's the national game of Germany?" Now you know.
• 25D: Shady, in modern slang (SUS) — short for "suspicious." And yes it's common. I'm stunned to find that this is its Modern Era NYTXW debut, as I've seen it a whole lot in other, apparently more contemporary crosswords. The last time SUS appeared in the NYTXW (1986) it was as a [Swine genus], wow, yeesh, and yipes. Twenty-one "swine genus" appearances between 1949 and 1986. 
• 39D: Totally tubular pasta (RIGATONI) — speaking of 1986, glad to see this clue lean into '80s slang. Made me smile. "Tubular" was slang for "awesome" (like "radical"). I think it's originally surfer slang. I want to say I first heard it from Jeff Spicoli in Fast Times at Ridgemont High, but I can't confirm that. I *can* confirm that the word appears in "Valley Girl" by Moon Unit Zappa. Please enjoy one of the most unlikely and strange Solid Gold performances of all time.

• 34D: Activities that might require 20-sided dice, for short (RPGS) — role-playing games. I almost wrote in DNDS here (!?). 

See you next time.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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