Glass artist Chihuly / SUN 11-17-24 / Breanna of the W.N.B.A., to fans / One of Mario's catchphrases / Participant in the annual "S.N.L." Christmas joke swap / Seminal protest song written at a Greenwich Village cafe / Coupon clipper's acronym / HOMES component / James for whom a NASA telescope is named / Pasted pasta

Constructor: Rebecca Goldstein and Ariela Perlman

Relative difficulty: Easy

THEME: "Nothing But Blue Skies" — a puzzle that visually depicts a HOT AIR BALLOON (with its black square configurations) and then contains a series of diminutive things (clued as if they were diminutive because seen from said HOT AIR BALLOON), and then a few more vaguely related answers:

Theme answers:

• UP UP AND AWAY (23A: Line before takeoff)
• "BLOWIN' IN THE WIND" (4D: Seminal protest song written at a Greenwich Village cafe)
• TAKE THE HIGH ROAD (14D: Refuse to sully oneself)

The small things:

• SMALL TOWN (39A: Neighborhood seen from a 93-Across?)
• TINY HOUSE (65A: Dwelling seen from a 93-Across?)
• WEE LASS (104A: Girl seen from a 93-Across?)
• MINIVAN (108A: Vehicle seen from a 93-Across?)

Word of the Day: DALE Chihuly (91A: Glass artist Chihuly) —

Dale Chihuly (/tʃɪˈhuːli/ chih-HOO-lee; born September 20, 1941) is an American glass artist and entrepreneur. He is well known in the field of blown glass, "moving it into the realm of large-scale sculpture". [...] In 1971, with the support of John Hauberg and Anne Gould Hauberg, Chihuly co-founded the Pilchuck Glass School near Stanwood, Washington. Chihuly also founded the HillTop Artists program in Tacoma, Washington at Hilltop Heritage Middle School and Wilson High School. // In 1976, while Chihuly was in England, he was involved in a head-on car accident that propelled him through the windshield. His face was severely cut by glass and he was blinded in his left eye. After recovering, he continued to blow glass until he dislocated his right shoulder in 1979 while bodysurfing. // In 1983, Chihuly returned to his native Pacific Northwest where he continued to develop his own work at the Pilchuck Glass School, which he had helped to found in 1971. No longer able to hold the glassblowing pipe, he hired others to do the work. Chihuly explained the change in a 2006 interview, saying "Once I stepped back, I liked the view", and said that it allowed him to see the work from more perspectives, enabling him to anticipate problems earlier. Chihuly's role has been described as "more choreographer than dancer, more supervisor than participant, more director than actor". San Diego Union-Tribune reporter Erin Glass wrote that she "wonders at the vision of not just the artist Chihuly, but the very successful entrepreneur Chihuly, whose estimated sales by 2004 was reported by The Seattle Times as $29 million." (wikipedia)

• • •

Look, up in the sky! It's a bird, it's a plane, it's ... a HOT AIR BALLOON. Is a HOT AIR BALLOON a "whimsical" method of transportation? Why? I think of it as just ...  a method of transportation? Whimsy not required. Where is the inherent whimsy? I don't get it. The HOT AIR BALLOON the first successful method of human flight. I guess you can make it whimsical by turning the balloon into various novelty shapes, or by using it to race around the world in 80 days, but "Whimsical method of transportation" seems odd, or oddly narrow, as a description here. But cluing aside, this puzzle seemed ... I dunno. Whimsical, probably. It's doing three different things (black-square visuals, small things, vaguely balloonish things). That's a lot of things. Why it's doing any of these things, I don't know? Is it balloon month? Are HOT AIR BALLOONs in the news? Making a comeback? The theme is harmless enough, but whatever whimsy or romance or fun was supposed to accompany a HOT AIR BALLOON-based puzzle was simply lost on me. Kind of the way the appeal of the annual balloon rally at Spiedie Fest here in Binghamton is lost on me. It's obviously a big deal to lots of people—there are even balloons in the city's iconography, including some that are carved into the supports of freeway overpasses. But balloon fever, I somehow never caught. I don't feel any kind of way about this topic. 

["It's a word, it's a plan..."]

I do think it's somewhat clever to take familiar diminutive things (SMALL TOWN etc.) and clue them as if they were regular-sized things seen from a great distance (specifically from the distance of a HOT AIR BALLOON in flight)—this is the one truly innovative and clever thing about the theme. Making a vague balloon shape out of black squares, shrug, OK, but pictures in the grid don't tend to interest me much on their own. And as for the three "bonus" answers ... I guess you had to do something. There are only four "small" things, so you gotta cram some more theme material in there somehow. Otherwise the theme would feel too slight. As is, the whole thing seemed a little scattershot. But it's probably loaded with whimsy, and my whimsy meter is just down. I'm no whimsy aficionado, and even on my most whimsical day, I think the general population tends to appreciate whimsy more than I do. There's definitely a cuteness to all of this. It just didn't make for a very interesting solve. The balloon element is obvious, and the theme answers are both sparse and fairly easy to get. More trickiness, more cleverness, more bite, that's what I tend to want in a Sunday (or any) puzzle. For all its pictorial splashiness, at the actual puzzle level, it's a bit too plain for me.

And the proper nouns just keep coming. The puzzle has, of late (specifically, this weekend) been inundated with names, making trivia rather than wordplay the basis for so much of its clues. Playing around with our common language, with vocabulary, with the funny way words work in English ... we still get that, but the puzzle really seems to be leaning hard in the pure trivia direction of late. I had to stop and take a deep breath after getting not one but two proper nouns, right out of the gate. 1-Across and 1-Down—name and name. And again, one of them didn't even have to be a name. WARD is just a regular-old English word. I think it's fine to clue WARD via Jesmyn (1D: Jesmyn ___, first woman to win two National Book Awards for Fiction) (I actually know her name, and she's certainly puzzleworthy)—I'm just pointing out that the puzzle often makes the choice to lean into names, in a way that often seems excessive. When your puzzle is already rife with names, steer ... away. ILENE is tough (I've seen her name a few times over the decades, but always forget how it's spelled) (32D: "The L Word" creator Chaiken). ERIVO (despite being 3/4 of the way to an EGOT) was tough for me, despite the fact that I've seen trailers for that Wicked movie about a dozen times now (71D: Cynthia of 2024's "Wicked"). You know, it's weird: those trailers do not even make it clear that the movie is a musical (which, I'm told, it is) and they never mention the names of the actors. ERIVO, Grande, Goldblum ... no mention. If only they had just put ERIVO's name on the damned screen in those trailers, maybe I'd've had a shot here (side note: the Wicked movie hasn't yet been released—always weird to clue an actor via a movie no one's seen yet). 

Crossing JOST and J-LO felt slightly cruel. I barely heard about that J-LO documentary (90D: Singer in the '24 documentary "The Greatest Love Story Never Told"), and I haven't watched a single episode of SNL (or any late-night comedy anything) since 2016, so I don't even know what an "annual 'S.N.L.' Christmas joke swap" is (90A: Participant in the annual "S.N.L." Christmas joke swap). I do know who Colin JOST is, but ... I just think that clue could use a "Colin." Would've helped me, for sure. And then there's BOMER (51D: Matt of "Magic Mike").. OK, BOMER. As with yesterday's puzzle, there are So Many Recent Movie clues—three of them today that mention the year "2024" by name (the JLO, ERIVO, and IDEA clues). Relying overly heavily on one cluing niche is, I will continue to contend, bad editorial practice. DALE the glass guy was maybe the hardest name in the puzzle for me, but at least there I feel like I learned something. Would be hard to argue that there are too many glassblowers in the damned puzzle, that's for sure.

The one good, or at least interesting, thing about having a picture puzzle today is that the white-square configurations are unconventional, leading to interesting stack formations through the middle of the (mirror symmetry) grid. You get these little isolated pockets of answers, all in strange shapes. Those were kind of an adventure, especially the ones inside the balloon itself. There are only very narrow passageways in and out of those sections, so they are slightly hard to get at, and they feel like areas where it would be easy to get stuck. Having RAMA (as clued) (31D: Hindu god of rights and responsibilities) alongside ILENE in one of those pockets seems like a feature that might create difficulty for some solvers. But all the crosses seem fair, in the end. So I'm weirdly enjoying negative whimsy today. The balloon picture itself, I don't care that much about, but the resulting white-square configurations, those are at least making the shape of my solving journey ... different. And as Bill Murray says in the non-2024 movie Groundhog Day, "different is good."

Notes:

• 27A: Detector of lies, informally (B.S. METER) — debuted in 2022 and has now been used four times. I'm tired of seeing it. Its originality has worn off. I know, I know, "it's whimsical!," right? It's too showy and long a term to be repeating so often. Feels like stale whimsy, now. 
• 29A: Apt rhyme for "fling" (SLING) — there has to be someone besides me who thought the "fling" was sexual and put SWING here. Swingers are more associated with group sex and swapping than "flings" (or, uh, so I hear), but still, it feels like the words arguably live in the same linguistic universe.

[from my own personal collection of trashy paperbacks]

• 43A: Movie in which the Wet Bandits get "scammed by a kindygartner" (HOME ALONE) — still have never seen this movie. Maybe I'll see it someday and think "wow, why did it take me so long, this movie is wonderful." But then again maybe (probably) not. I know the premise of the movie, and I know the stars of the movie, but "Wet Bandits"? Ew. (So named because they leave the water running at every house they rob, like a calling card—but if you wanted notoriety, you'd think you'd adopt a cool name and not one that made you sound like you'd peed your pants)
• 63A: Feline hybrid (LIGER) — wouldn't know this beast existed were it not for crosswords. See also the TIGON (which has made just one NYTXW appearance, to the LIGER's thirteen).
• 70A: Breanna of the W.N.B.A., to fans (STEWIE) — last name Stewart. One of the most famous WNBA players. I knew her name. I did not know she shared a nickname with the baby from Family Guy. Slightly weird to get Breanna Stewart in nickname form before we've ever seen her in BREANNA form (that's a name that's dying to be in crosswords, but so far ... nothin').

• 77A: Coupon clipper's acronym (BOGO) — Do people still clip coupons? The demise of the local newspaper seems like it would put a damper on the popularity of literal coupon "clipping." "BOGO" = acronym, from "Buy One Get One (free)."
• 112A: Concerning "speck" in a sugar bowl (ANT) — is this whimsical? If you just have one (dead?) ant in your sugar bowl, consider yourself lucky. They don't tend to travel solo. Things could be much worse.
• 54A: HOMES component (ERIE) — I'm in the middle of a Great Lakes summer vacation extravaganza with my best friends—we've stayed on (directly on) Lake Michigan, Lake Superior, and Lake Erie so far. Next year it's Ontario, and then the following year we'll end up on Huron, probably somewhere near the top of Michigan (roughly the dead center of Great Lakesdom). When we're done hitting all the Great Lakes, we're all getting Great Lakes tattoos. This Is My Midlife Crisis! As midlife crises go, it's pretty fun.

• 79D: One of Mario's catchphrases ("HERE WE GO") — "catchphrase." This banal thing. It's just a phrase. A regular old phrase. Did you need to drag (and I mean draaagggg) Mario into this? Why "Mario" a clue when you don't have to? The things you think are whimsy, I can't understand.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

P.S. you can now pre-order a physical copy of the NYT's big Puzzle Mania special edition (which comes out two weeks from today: Dec. 1, 2024)—more than 50 puzzles including (if it's like past years) a super giant jumbo crossword. All for $7. Go get it.

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