Fermented Russian drink / SUN 9-1-24 / Jazz Trombonist Dickenson / Surfer's hand sign / Source of a sleep-inducing narcotic in the "Odyssey" / Magazine with "Maison" and "Enfants" spinoffs / Lentil-based stew from India / Long-lasting lip makeup / Ecosystem formed by polyps / de rire dying of laughter in French / Starchy side, familiarly

Constructor: Chandi Deitmer and Matthew Stock

Relative difficulty: Easy

THEME: "Product Integration" — shaded squares (three sets of 2x2 squares) contain numbers. Adjacent numbers must be multiplied in order for their answers to make sense. Each set of shaded boxes makes a kind of TIMES (get it!?) SQUARE (131A: Midtown Manhattan hot spot ... or each of this puzzle's three shaded regions):

Theme answers:

• 
  PAC 3x4 (i.e. PAC-12) (37A: West Coast N.C.A.A. conference that lost 10 teams in 2024)
• SWEET 4x4 (i.e. Sweet 16) (3D: Coming-of-age celebration)
• 7x4 DAYS (i.e. 28 days) (44A: Typical length of February)
• 3x7 GUN SALUTE (i.e. 21-gun salute) (38D: Military honor with fired artillery)

• CLOUD 3x3 (i.e. Cloud 9) (76A: Location of elation, in an idiom)
• FRESHMAN 5x3 (i.e. Freshman 15) (22D: Weight gained at the start of college, informally)
• 5x8 WINKS (i.e. 40 winks) (71A: Short nap)
• 8x3-HOUR GYMS (i.e. 24-hour gyms) (72D: Always-open workout spots)

• HANG 5x2 (i.e. hang 10) (99A: Surfing move with all of one's toes off the board)
• FANTASTIC 2x2 (i.e. Fantastic 4) (50D: Squad with the Invisible Woman and the Thing)
• 4x2-BIT (i.e. 8-bit) (106A: Like old Nintendo consoles)
• 5x4 PENCE (i.e. 20 pence) (100D: One-fifth of a British pound)

Word of the Day: KVASS (69A: Fermented Russian drink) —

Kvass is a fermented cereal-based low-alcoholic beverage of cloudy appearance and sweet-sour taste.

Kvass originates from northeastern Europe, where grain production was considered insufficient for beer to become a daily drink. The first written mention of kvass is found in Primary Chronicle, describing the celebration of Vladimir the Great's baptism in 988. In the traditional method, kvass is made from a mash obtained from rye bread or rye flour and malt soaked in hot water, fermented for about 12 hours with the help of sugar and bread yeast or baker's yeast at room temperature. In industrial methods, kvass is produced from wort concentrate combined with various grain mixtures. It is a popular drink in Poland, Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Moldova, as well as some parts of Finland, Sweden, and China. (wikipedia)

• • •

This probably seemed like an interesting concept on paper, but in practice, it's over before it begins. It's a one-note theme stretched over a Sunday-sized grid. Once you grasp the theme (not hard), the themers are all instantly gettable. You gotta spend a few seconds figuring out what numbers are going to be used to arrive at the product, but basically you can do all the themers with no help from crosses. I know because that's what I did:

And that's it. Once you know numbers are involved, it's over. Except for the revealer, which is clever, but if I hadn't had to finish this puzzle (because it's my job), I don't think I would have. Once the theme stuff is all done, there's not much left. An ordinary Sunday-sized grid. Ho-hum. If the theme had put up any kind of fight, then I might have noticed the quality and texture and flavor of those theme answers, many of which would've made fine answers in a regular crossword. FRESHMAN FIFTEEN (15!), for instance, would be perfect as a grid-spanning answer in a regular Friday or Saturday puzzle. But today, it was just one of the number answers, interesting only because it's involved in a "TIMES SQUARE." There's no trick, no gimmick, no wordplay. Just children's math. What's more, some of the theme answers seem pretty weak or contrived. 28 DAYS? 20 PENCE!?!?! An arbitrary amount of money? That seems flimsy. I'm sure it was tough getting all these number-containing answers to work out (symmetrically!). The grid is architecturally impressive. Congrats on that. But from a solver standpoint, this felt underwhelming. You don't have to be a solving genius to have this all figured out almost immediately. And then you're just sweeping up—not a lot of fun in that.

What remains, after the theme stuff, is a halfway decent themeless puzzle. In a way, the whole puzzle is themeless, in that there's nothing but the multiplication gimmick giving any unity to the themers. I didn't see much of note in the non-thematic parts of the grid—nothing that seemed particularly original or interesting or challenging or infuriating. I enjoyed seeing MARIE CLAIRE (19A: Magazine with "Maison" and "Enfants" spinoffs) and "IS IT TRUE?" and FAKE NAILS, but then you've got wobbly things like STAR PITCHERS (really wanted to add "-ting" to STAR) (125A: Aces), and boring things like FINANCIAL AID and awkward things like DELEGATEE, plus your usual host of ASDOIs and APSOs and RSSs and UGGs (again!) and SOOTY (again!?) (actually SOOTY > yesterday's SOOTS, for sure). YENNED is kind of awful, since of course you want YEARNED (a word people actually use) there (68D: Longed (for)). But I can't say any other answer in this puzzle made much of an impression, good or bad. I did not know SAMBAR (12A: Lentil-based stew from 42-Down [INDIA]) and am only vaguely familiar with lip STAIN as a beauty product (60A: Long-lasting lip makeup), but that's about it in the "new-to-me" category. Oh, and VIC (5D: Jazz Trombonist Dickenson). I'd never heard of VIC Dickenson, but I'm really glad to make his acquaintance—his music sounds great.

Went to see Blink Twice yesterday (fascinating, funny, and deeply disturbing—the only movie I've ever seen with a trigger warning (re: sexual violence)). Every time I go to the movies, I take a little notebook with me and write down all the basic data: date, showtime, theater, theater no., concessions I ate (usu popcorn/butter/salt and that's it), how many other people are there, what they look like, anything memorable they do/say, and finally, the trailers. What trailers did I see? I'm telling you all this because yesterday I saw a trailer for a new Christmas movie featuring some very beloved actors. The movie is called Red One, and it stars Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson and ubiquitous, Oscar-winning character actor J.K. SIMMONS in the title role: you see, Red One is code name for ... Santa Claus. And he's been kidnapped. By ... well, bad guys, I assume, and his security team (led by Johnson) has to rescue him. It's a tongue-in-cheek action film that has a lot of fancy computer animation and looks expensive as hell [just looked it up, and yep: the budget is a 1/4 billion]. Annnnyway, I solved this puzzle only a few hours after I saw the Red One trailer, so J.K. SIMMONS was fresh on my mind. I always forget the initials of two-initial people (see, notably, N.C. Wyeth), but I had the "JK" before I ever even looked at the clue today. Worried (briefly) that it was gonna be another, much worse "JK," but it wasn't. You wanna see the Red One trailer, don't you? OK, fine.

A few more things:

• 43A: Newark alternative, in brief (LGA) — LaGuardia Airport, of course. This would've been way more exciting—and tougher, for sure—if the clue had just been [EWR alternative]. Concise. No need for writing out "Newark" and adding "in brief." Airport code for airport code. Let's tighten things up a bit. Come on. My way's more elegant, and solvers can handle it. 
• 93A: Source of a sleep-inducing narcotic in the "Odyssey" (LOTUS TREE) — currently teaching Virgil's Aeneid, so the Odyssey (the most important antecedent and model for Virgil) is fresh on my mind. If you wanna know what I'm teaching next, and I know you do: it's DANTE (56A: Writer whose work is hell to get through?)
• 18D: Surfer's hand sign (SHAKA) — this puzzle is weirdly into surfing (see also HANG 5x2). I know SHAKA exclusively from crosswords. I'm more of a Chaka guy, myself:

[this needle drop in Blink Twice is, let's say, memorable]

• 41D: Hilton ___, Pulitzer-winning critic for The New Yorker (ALS) — a great writer who should be the preferred clue for ALS. So much better than [Gore and Pacino, for two] or the like. He wrote a book on Prince! The New Yorker recently did an Archive Issue where it printed exclusively articles and reviews and cartoons from previous years, and there's a 1999 piece in there by ALS about Richard Pryor (and Lily Tomlin) that is mesmerizing. Very much worth your time (as all of his writing is, I assume)
• 62D: Wake-up times, for short (AMS) — leaving aside that it's not a great plural, one tiny thing. Like, very tiny. Nitpicky, even, but it would've bugged me if this had been my puzzle: I wouldn't put "times" in the clue since it is (crucially) in the grid—not just in the grid, but in the revealer, i.e. the most important part of the grid. I know, I know, no one noticed, no one cared. But when I edited a puzzle recently, a certain test-solver (who is also an accomplished constructor) caught a similar dupe. Her (very nice) note: "truly doesn't bother me at all, especially bc contexts are so different, just noting in case!" But even though she said it didn't bother her, and I kept telling myself it didn't bother me, I definitely got up in the middle of the night one night and fixed it. Once I see the dupe, I can't unsee it, it's gotta go. The point is: test-solvers are vital to the health of puzzles. So thank you to ... whoever that test-solver was (wink!).
• 92D: Lynne Cheney portrayer in 2018's "Vice" (AMY ADAMS) — I like this energy. Go deep into that filmography! Make me work for these famous people. My reaction to uncovering AMY ADAMS here was "Wow, really?" Almost makes me want to watch a movie about the Cheneys.
• 109D: Starchy side, familiarly (TOTS) — as in "tater" (small children: not that starchy, it turns out)
• 127D: Suffix with doomer or consumer (-ISM) — kinda tough. Not sure I've heard "doomerism," though I can guess what it means. I wanted -IST here for a bit (completely unsurprising). 
• 108D: Exclamation after misunderstanding some Gen Z slang, say ("I'M OLD") — first, I think this would be more "Weary admission" than "Exclamation." Second, I really (really) thought that the answer was going to be a reaction to some specific bit of Gen Z slang. That is, I thought I had to figure out what the slang was, and then figure out what you'd exclaim if you misunderstood it. That is, I thought the exclamation was something you made before you realized you'd misunderstood. Like if someone said "no cap!" and you exclaimed "but my head is cold!" Something like that.

See you next time.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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