Epithet for a G.O.P. moderate, maybe / SUN 11-24-24 / Small card for a short message / Filipino meat dish / Citrusy breakfast treat / Wirelessly driven toy, for short / One writing wrongs? / ___ Dingbats (icon-filled font) / Chemistry Nobelist Rutherford / Powell of the Federal Reserve / Midair collision of sorts / Component of an old PC tower / Queequeg's figurine in "Moby-Dick," e.g. / What Kwanzaa's first principle, Umoja, means / Sumatran swinger

Constructor: Alex Eaton-Salners

Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium

THEME: "Shape Up or Ship Out" — circled squares contain shapes that go up (literally) or ships that go out (i.e. must be removed in order for the answer to make sense):

Shape up:

• LEMON SCONE (25A: Citrusy breakfast treat)
• BASKETBALL STAR (26A: Sue Bird or Larry Bird)
• SEAL OF APPROVAL (105A: Imprimatur)
• COMES ACROSS (110A: Finds)

Ship out:

• BARKEEPER (50A: Paging device)
• DUBLINER (64A: Nickname)
• BARGES IN (67A: Sloth, for one)
• SUBTRACTS (84A: Swaths of land)

Word of the Day: ZAPF Dingbats (46A: ___ Dingbats (icon-filled font)) —

ITC Zapf Dingbats is one of the more common dingbat typefaces. It was designed by the typographer Hermann Zapf in 1978 and licensed by International Typeface Corporation. [...] In the computer industry, a dingbat font or pi font is a computer font that has symbols and shapes located at the code points normally designated for alphabetical or numeric characters. This practice was necessitated by the limited number of code points available in 20th century operating systems. Modern computer fonts containing dingbats are based on Unicode encoding, which has unique code points for dingbat glyphs. [...] David Carson, radical editor of experimental music magazine Ray Gun, lent the font a degree of notoriety in 1994 when he printed an interview with Bryan Ferry in the magazine entirely in the symbols-only font – the double-page spread was therefore incomprehensible and would have to be interpreted like a cryptogram for those unfamiliar with the font. He said he did it because the interview was "incredibly boring" and that upon searching his typeface collection for a suitable font and ending at Zapf Dingbats, decided to use it with hopes of making the article interesting again. (wikipedia)

• • •

It's got whimsy, I'll give it that. And it does what it says it does, i.e. the shapes do go up and the ships do go out. But the "fun" (such as there is) is entirely architectural, i.e. there's nothing humorous about this, no wordplay at all (except in the title). It's just things going up or things being cut out. It wasn't hard to figure out, and it just didn't do much for me (purely architectural feats rarely do). There's not even really anything to say about it. You get four unclued answers (the ones that actually contain ships, e.g. DUBLINER, SUBTRACTS, BARGES IN, BARKEEPER); I guess that's ... something. Whether that's a good something or a bad something, you can decide for yourself. I'd say it's a necessary something. You need to have a ship in place before you can make the ship disappear, after all. The only issue I have with the execution today concerns STAR; specifically, its standalone / non-hiddenness. All the other shapes are embedded in their respective answers, and so, to a certain extent, hidden (OVAL in APPROVAL, CONE in SCONE, CROSS in ACROSS), whereas STAR is just ... STAR. Not embedded. Not hiding. Feels like the weakest link today. But other than that, I don't have any real complaints about the way the theme was executed. I just found it kind of boring. 

Also boring: the names in the puzzle. ERNEST Rutherford (88D: Chemistry Nobelist Rutherford), JEROME Powell (97D: Powell of the Federal Reserve), the JOBS ACT (19D: Bipartisan 2012 stimulus bill), zzzz. These left me FEELING NUMB. SCHEMATIC and OLD AS TIME weren't exactly raising my pulse either. I don't know what SCISSOR CUTS are, exactly. Is that ... as opposed to a buzz cut or razor cuts. Aren't most haircuts done with scissors? IDIOLECTS is a fancy term, and probably my favorite thing in the grid, but I'm a weirdo—I can't see IDIOLECTS being a winner with most solvers. I also liked CHEST BUMP, especially as clued (116A: Midair collision of sorts), but other than that, not a lot of longer fill to get excited about today. 

And then there's the short fill, which gets rather rough in patches. The SESH / UTES / HEH patch, for one, the OPER / EVEL / AGLET patch, for two, and particularly the OHHI / AHAS / ESSO / RINO patch. Ugh to RINO (125A: Epithet for a G.O.P. moderate, maybe) (stands for "Republican In Name Only"). Extreme ugh. The clue is wrong, as the "epithet" has been used for people as "moderate" as Liz Cheney. RINO is a tired insult used by the worst people to describe any Republican who, however briefly, decides not to hold some stupid and monstrous opinion. What's next, are you gonna put "libtard" in the puzzle? "Cuck"? What other lovely pejoratives await us? Don't normalize these idiots' language. You can make that corner nice all around if you ditch the stupid "epithet." I've made three or four RINO-less versions just sitting here. Not hard. You can do some that not only ditch RINO, but ditch AHAS and OHHI and ESSO as well. Would love to ditch RCCAR too (RC = remote control), but you'd have to do a slightly bigger tear-down to accomplish that. Anyway, I made my way through this one without too much effort, but after the initial "aha," there weren't many more AHAS. I've done worse (and certainly cornier) Sundays, but the gimmick today felt like dazzle camouflage—a superficially showy concept covering up an essential lack of pure puzzling pleasure. 

[43A: Like the main character in "Memento" (AMNESIC)]

Bullets:

• 33A: The Tabard, in "The Canterbury Tales" (INN) — used to be that the opening lines of the General Prologue were commonly memorized by English literature students (highschoolers, even). These are the lines that begin, "Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote / The droghte of March hath perced to the roote" and end with "The hooly blissful martir for to seke / That hem hath holpen whan that they were seeke." They're as famous a set of 18 lines as there is in the entire Middle English corpus. Well, the Tabard isn't mentioned in those lines. It's in the very next set of lines:

Bifil that in that seson on a day,

In Southwerk at the Tabard as I lay,

Redy to wenden on my pilgrymage

To Caunterbury with ful devout corage,

At nyght were come into that hostelrye

Wel nyne and twenty in a compaignye

Of sondry folk, by áventure* y-falle*        *chance *fallen together

In felaweshipe, and pilgrimes were they alle,

That toward Caunterbury wolden ryde.

The chambres and the stables weren wyde,

And wel we weren esed atte beste.

And shortly, whan the sonne was to reste,

So hadde I spoken with hem everychon,

That I was of hir felaweshipe anon,

And made forward* erly for to ryse,        *agreement

To take oure wey, ther as I yow devyse. (text from poetryfoundation.org)

• 39A: Component of an old PC tower (CD DRIVE) — I miss these. In fact, I still have a standalone CD DRIVE (actually, a CD/DVD drive) right here next to my laptop set up, for when I want to play CDs through my computer speakers. "Towers" don't really tower, but they are kind of vertical, and their components are stacked, so the term makes a kind of sense. Here's what's currently in my non-entowered CD DRIVE:

[from the album On Giacometti by Hania Rani—a fabulous musician with a name built for crosswords]

• 92A: One writing wrongs? (LIBELER) — I like the clue a lot better than I like the answer. SLANDERER seems like a much more ordinary word than LIBELER, probably because anyone can slander, but you gotta publish in order to libel someone.
• 5D: Pet name derived from the Latin for "faithful" (FIDO) — this seems obvious, and yet never occurred to me before today.
• 28A: Part of a certain chain (DAISY) — I know the phrase "DAISY chain" but ... do you just make a chain out of actual daisies? Like a lei? Yes: "a string of daisies threaded together by their stems." Also a metaphor for any interlinked series, particularly computer peripherals. There's a sexual meaning too. I'm just gonna let you imagine that one.

• 71D: Small card for a short message (NOTELET) — LOL, what? Hey, I have a short message for you: no. Also, boooooo! This is ridiculous. A non-thing if there ever was one. The epitome of "nobody asked for this" NYTXW debuts (that's right: shockingly, no one has put NOTELET in a puzzle before today ... but now they're gonna, because precedent, ugh. Use good judgment, people! Just say 'no' to NOTELET!). 

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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