So-called "Las Vegas of the East" / TUE 10-22-24 / Offering in Eilish's clothing brand? / Bottoms decorated with characters from the "Odyssey"? / Close-fitting pajamas? / Cylindrical alternative to a French fry / Flavor enhancer in Doritos, for short

Constructor: Barbara Lin

Relative difficulty: Medium (i.e. normal for a Tuesday)

THEME: Dial "S" for "PantS" — familiar phrases have an "S" tacked to the end—the "S" turns the final word into clothing you wear on the lower half of your body, and every theme answer gets some kind of "wacky pants" clue:

Theme answers:

• LONG STORY SHORTS (17A: Bottoms decorated with characters from the "Odyssey"?)
• SLEEP TIGHTS (27A: Close-fitting pajamas?)
• BILLIE JEANS (48A: Offering in Eilish's clothing brand?)
• CUT ME SOME SLACKS (62A: Request to a custom tailor?)

Word of the Day: Billie Eilish (see 48A) —

Billie Eilish Pirate Baird O'Connell (/ˈaɪlɪʃ/ EYE-lish; born December 18, 2001) is an American singer and songwriter. She first gained public attention in 2015 with her debut single "Ocean Eyes", written and produced by her brother Finneas O'Connell, with whom she collaborates on music and live shows. In 2017, she released her debut extended play (EP), Don't Smile at Me. Commercially successful, it reached the top 15 of record charts in numerous countries, including the US, UK, Canada, and Australia. [...] Eilish has received multiple accolades, including nine Grammy Awards, two American Music Awards, twenty Guinness World Records, seven MTV Video Music Awards, three Brit Awards, two Golden Globe Awards, and two Academy Awards. She is the second artist in Grammy history to win all four general field categories—Record of the Year, Album of the Year, Song of the Year, as well as Best New Artist—in the same year. Eilish is also the first person born in the 21st century to win an Academy Award and the youngest ever two-time winner. She was featured on Time magazine's inaugural Time 100 Next list in 2019 and the Time 100 in 2021. According to the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and Billboard, Eilish is the 26th-highest-certified digital singles artist and one of the most successful artists of the 2010s. She was honored as one of the BBC 100 Women in December 2022. (wikipedia)

• • •

I went from "wait, so we're just adding 'S'?" to "wow, this theme is good" pretty quick. That is, as quick as it took me to get the second themer. After LONG STORY SHORTS, I couldn't see where the theme could possibly go, and if it was just gonna involve adding an "S," I was pretty sure I was not interested. LONG STORY SHORTS is kinda funny on its own (I now desperately want some Middlemarch shorts), but it didn't seem like the basis for a tight or coherent theme. Well, I was wrong. Along came SLEEP TIGHTS and all of a sudden we had a simple, elegant "wacky legwear phrases" theme. Add "S," get some kind of bottomwear. Regular phrase becomes wacky phrase. It all works really nicely. The only glitch is not really a glitch but an anomaly—CUT ME SOME SLACKS is an outlier in that it's not some cool new *kind* of bottomwear, like the Odyssey shorts or the SLEEP TIGHTS or the Billie Eilish-brand jeans. Instead we get a verb phrase related to plain old slacks. But again, I don't really mind this blip in consistency because the overall concept is so fresh and fun. 

When the theme is solid, all the fill has to do is hold up, and the fill today did that just fine. We actually get six (6!) long Downs for our solving pleasure, and though there's lots of 3-4-5s, they never become particularly irksome. They lie low and stay largely inconspicuous. I kinda frowned at "UM, YEAH," because it's yet another one of these recently proliferating colloquialisms ("UH, SURE," "OH, OK," etc.) that are hard to get just right in the cluing. To my ear, the tones of "Well, duh!" and "UM, YEAH" are different, though I guess if I mentally added an "!" to "UM, YEAH!" then I might get closer to the naked contempt of "Well, duh!" I also frowned at OCHRE because I'm not Canadian and the puzzle isn't either so what the hell (52A: Earth tone). What the hell is up with this stupid color that can be spelled either -ER or -RE? Merriam-webster dot com has "-ER" as the main spelling and "-RE" as the variant. Being a good red-blooded American, I went with the "-ER" spelling and was not rewarded. Fixing this "mistake" created the only other slow spot in my solve. Almost all the "difficulty" today came in figuring out the wacky themers.


Bullets:

• 5A: Vegetarian's protein source (TOFU) — it's a "protein source" for whoever eats it. I eat a lot of TOFU. I am not a vegetarian. TOFU is a staple of plenty of non-vegetarian cuisines around the world. Also, there are plenty of vegetarians who don't eat TOFU. This clue would feel better if they just dropped the apostrophe-s.
• 17A: Bottoms decorated with characters from the "Odyssey"? (LONG STORY SHORTS) — gotta admit to a certain amount of disappointment when I discovered this clue was *not* about ass tattoos. Scylla on one cheek, Charybdis on the other. It could work.
• 9A: So-called "Las Vegas of the East" (MACAO) — since "Las Vegas" is American I assumed "East" meant "Eastern America," like Atlantic City or something. Then I got the answer to M-C-- and thought "MECCA? Pretty sure they don't gamble there." Then remembered MACAO, which is a fairly common 5-letter crossword place name.

["Like taking candy from a baby" (it's sung)]

• 16A: Hard core exercise? (PLANK) — a very good "?" clue, though not as good as 66A: Place for grape nuts? (NAPA), which wins the "?" clue sweepstakes today.
• 47A: "Ability" for Johnny Carson's Carnac the Magnificent (ESP) — congrats to the NYTXW on acknowledging, for once, that ESP is, in fact, a quote-unquote ability and not an ability.
• 26D: Flavor enhancer in Doritos, for short (MSG) — congrats also to the NYTXW for not making the tried and true (and tired) reference to Chinese food here.
• 5D: Cylindrical alternative to a French fry (TATER TOT) — I guess they are cylinders, aren't they? They're so squat, and ... rough-surfaced? ... that I wouldn't usually think of them that way.
• 50D: They can cause sour experiences for car owners (LEMONS) — this got me wondering about the use of "lemon" to describe a defective car. So I looked it up: "Its first attribution to mean a problematic car was in a Volkswagen advertisement created by Julian Koenig and Helmut Krone as part of an advertisement campaign managed by William Bernbach, all advertising executives with the firm Doyle Dane Bernbach in 1960, which was a follow-up to their Think Small advertising campaign for VW." 

[Ad copy]: "The Volkswagen missed the boat. The chrome strip on the glove compartment is blemished and must be replaced. Chances are you wouldn't have noticed it; Inspector Kurt Kroner did.

There are 3,389 men at our Wolfsburg factory with only one job; to inspect Volkswagens at each stage of production. (3,000 Volkswagens are produced daily; there are more inspectors than cars.)

Every shock absorber is tested (spot checking won't do), every windshield is scanned. VWs have been rejected for surface scratches barely visible to the eye.

Final inspection is really something! VW inspectors run each car off the line onto the Funktionsprüfstand (car test stand), tote up 189 check points, gun ahead to the automatic brake stand and say "no" to one VW out of fifty.

This preoccupation with detail means the VW lasts longer and requires less maintenance, by and large, than other cars. (It also means a used VW depreciates less than any other car.) 

We pluck the lemons; you get the plums."

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]