2024 Charli XCX album with a lime green cover / THU 9-12-2024 / Petrichor is the aroma produced by this / "Fathoms ___" (opening song of "The Little Mermaid")

Constructor: Parker Higgins

Relative difficulty: no idea how difficult the theme is, I solved this without looking at the theme entries because the puzzle itself is very easy; hooray for themes where the entries are valid words + phrases in the grid, so you can fill them in from crosses

THEME: it's actually not a hard theme; phrases of the form "X and Y" are repurposed with Y as the clue and the entry being "X + (word that means "companion")"; see below

Word of the Day: RAIN [Petrichor is the aroma produced by this] — look, I'm not gonna post a definition per se here, but "petrichor" is my favorite word, and tbh I'd go so far as to say it's the prettiest word in the English language; anyway, it comes from the Greek words "petra" (rock) and "ichor" (this is a crossword staple, you already know it's the blood of the gods), which tells you just how beautiful that scent really is, and why I love both the scent and the word...

• • •

Hey hi howdy hello, Christopher Adams once again filling in for Rex on a Thursday where the theme is...well, it's not what I would've thought for a Thursday. Could pass for a Wednesday, maybe a Tuesday even. I wonder if OTAKU is the reason why this is a Thursday; to me it's not a difficult word, but YMMV wildly there, and Will Shortz is definitely not the target demographic for it, so I can see why this was a Thursday puzzle on the logic that "it's harder than Wednesday", even if (a) I don't agree and (b) it's not the usual sort of trickiness one would expect from a Thursday.

Theme answers:

• [LIMB] for LIFE PARTNER ("life and limb")
• [FOREMOST] for FIRST MATE ("first and foremost")
• [READY] for GOOD BUDDY ("good and ready")
• [DINE] for WINE PAIRING ("wine and dine")

Gonna be honest, I don't remember most of the solve; words filled themselves in, clues didn't offer much resistance, and I was at the right level of tired that I skipped over clues I couldn't fill in immediately. Hence the figuring out of the theme post-solve; if this were a trickier puzzle, I would've had to stop and figure things out, but very little in this puzzle put up a resistance, and even the parts that did got much easier once I had a letter or two in place from clues that really were that easy.

And still, a fun puzzle, a nice aha moment deciphering the theme post-solve, some fun phrases (AM I TOO LATE, ALASKA ROLL, some theme entries) scattered throughout, as well as fun clues (BRAT, NFL, OGRE, etc.). Even the clues that were straightforward often felt fun and (more importantly) felt like they were written by an actual constructor: BERET, RAIN, PETS, etc. Overall an enjoyable puzzle; it's not at all what I wanted or expected from a Thursday, but when it's a fun, clean solve, you can't complain too much about it not being tricksy or difficult.

 

40A: [Insert, as a video in a post]

52D: [2024 Charli XCX album with a lime green cover] BRAT (but brat summer is over, so now we're pumpkin that; also, per charli, "kamala is brat", please register to vote, and vote for kamala)

Olio:

• RISES [Gets ready for the national anthem, maybe] — The "maybe" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. I do not care to have the national anthem played at sporting events. To put it bluntly: it's jingoistic. It has no place at domestic sporting events, full stop, and I hate how it's been co-opted and turned into a big deal in a post-9/11 world. It's the same sort of "patriotism" (there needs to be more quote marks there) that gave us a certain strain of country music that I also abhor and also wish would go away. I fully support those who refuse to stand for the national anthem (especially in a country that often does not stand for or support you), and even more fully support movements to stop playing the damn thing, period.
• BELOW ["Fathoms ___" (opening song of "The Little Mermaid")] — Did not know the title of this song, but I love the clue because it's fun, you learn something, and you can get the answer immediately even without knowing it; it's the sort of thing I enjoy including when I write trivia, for those reasons.
• OCTET [Large wedding band, say] — Gonna be honest, filled in the -ET at the end immediately and let the downs disambiguate between OCTET and NONET and anything else it might've been.
• SPAYS [Neuters] — How many of you read this clue/answer pair in Bob Barker's (or Drew Carey's) voice?

Yours truly, Christopher Adams, Court Jester of CrossWorld

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