Midwesterner's embarrassed interjection / WED 11-6-24 / Gobi desert grazer / Inspiration for Toblerone's shape / Hip-hop's Madvillain or Mobb Deep / Baxter, "Poor Things" protagonist / Composer with a namesake horn / Green roll / Patterned fabric named for a Mideast capital

Constructor: Adam Aaronson

Relative difficulty: Medium

THEME: LONG AND SHORT OF IT (63A: General idea ... or a hint to the clue/answer pairings at 14-, 29-, 39-, 41- and 53-Across) — long theme answers contain a second short answer inside of them (in the shaded squares):

Theme answers:

• PLATINUM (14A: Silvery element)
• BLACK SABBATH (29A: Band in the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame)
• SOMALIA (39A: African country)
• LIMEADE (41A: Sweetened beverage)
• MEADOWLARK (53A: Bird with a distinctive call)

Word of the Day: MEAD (see 41A) —

a fermented beverage made of water and honey, malt, and yeast (merriam-webster.com)  

Mead has a reputation for being extremely sweet. Many people are hesitant to even try it after having tasted one of those syrupy-sweet honey wines that so many commercial meaderies make. People assume that it’s sweet just because it was made from honey. What they don’t realize is that the sugar in the honey gets fermented and turned into alcohol, just like the sugar in grapes. Whether the final product is sweet or not is up to the mead maker. People have even asked us if mead is thick like honey. That of course is not the case, since the honey is broken down by the yeast and turned into alcohol and CO2, meaning there’s not much left of the original honey except flavor. [...] There are two main methods of making a sweet product. The first is to simply add honey to the mead after it is done fermenting (with steps taken to prevent it from fermenting again). The second is to add more honey than the yeast is capable of converting into alcohol, which leaves some sugar behind. Each strain of yeast can only tolerate so much alcohol before the alcohol they make actually kills them. This method is fairly unpredictable, in part because there are usually several strains of yeast in any given fermentation, not just the one added by the wine or mead maker. The nutrient regimen and other factors can also impact how much alcohol the yeast can produce. ("Is Mead Sweet?," Contrivance Wine & Mead Co.)

• • •

[DRAX]

This puzzle felt somewhat harder than a typical Wednesday—the clues all seemed to be Really trying (to be tricky, or ambiguous, or pop culturally current). But I just set the difficulty back to "Medium" because my brain was addled by disrupted sleep (I fell asleep at 9 and woke up at 1 (?)—it's 2:15 now; the cats are very confused). From the very first clue, I just couldn't wrap my brain around a lot of little things. A [Gobi Desert grazer] is a what now? After GNU and ELK, I'm out of three-letters grazers. Oh, do ASSes graze now? Of course they do. Lots of animals graze, but I didn't know grazing was classical ASS behavior (I have no idea what lives or doesn't live in the Gobi, to be honest). I don't think of SOD as green, though of course it is (for some reason when I see SOD, I just see dirt). I figured the [Domain suffix that most people can't register] would be GOV. So that's strike 1 2 and 3 on the first second and third Across answers. "UH UH" instead of "UM, NO." And so forth. Things evened out and got slightly less disorienting through the middle of the grid, only to get sludgy again at the bottom. "OK, GOOD" (like its cousin, "UM, NO") was not quickly forthcoming. Totally forgot DRAX was a name in the MCU (I have tried to forget every Marvel movie I ever wasted time watching—though to be fair, the "Guardians" movies were my favorite of the lot). I tried to make 73A: Dave Bautista's role in "Guardians of the Galaxy" be GRÜT ... but the character I was thinking of is GROOT. Alas. And then there was the SW corner, which slowed me down some more, as I assumed 48D: "My plans aren't set in stone" was "I'M something" ("I'M OPEN?") rather than "I [space] [verb]" (in this case, "I MIGHT"). BLOW was somewhat tough to get to from its clue (56D: Major setback). No idea what making a KNOT with one hand even means, rockclimbing-wise (58D: Something a rock climber might make with one hand). ... [looks it up] ... Oh, a KNOT in your rope. LOL I thought you were "making" your hand into a KNOT somehow. Like KNOT was a special grip or something. So you can see ... much of this just wasn't clicking. Probably more apt to say my brain wasn't clicking. But I never got really stuck, and much of the rest of the grid was simple enough, so as I say, I'm just calling it "Medium" today. Seems like the safest bet.

["I DO x 5"]

As for the theme, I really liked it. It does what it tells you it does. You get a "long" and a "short" answer for each clue, with the latter embedded inside the former. "Long" and "short" in one answer. Nifty trick, consistently executed. The only answer I balked at was MEAD, which, while being made from fermented honey, is not what I'd call "sweetened" (41A: Sweetened beverage). But a little research shows that mead makers (who work at "meaderies," a word I just learned—see "Word of the Day," above) do "sweeten" some of their meads (by adding honey after fermentation or starting with more honey than the yeast can convert to alcohol; again, see above). So calling MEAD "sweetened" seems fine. All other theme pairs seem right on the money. No issues, perfect fits for their clues. Not sure I'd've called TIN (or any metal, besides silver) "silvery," but it seems like a reasonable description. Overall fill quality feels about average. STINK BOMBS good (3D: Foul-smelling prank items), HEALTH BARS meh (10D: Indicators of remaining energy for video game characters), everything else fine. Very little wincing today. 

The one answer I was truly happy to see today was AGNES Varda (54D: ___ Varda, director with an honorary Palme d'Or and Oscar). I've been (intermittently) shouting for years that, like fellow legendary film director Yasujiro OZU, she should be in more puzzles. Then last year, Erik Agard and Malaika Handa finally used a [French film director Varda] clue for AGNES, and I was elated. And now I'm re-elated. Varda's Cleo from 5 to 7 is one of my three favorite movies (along with Wilder's The Apartment and Hitchcock's Rear Window). Varda had a long and varied career. Her documentaries are particularly exceptional. I have a beautiful, massive Criterion Collection box set of her films (haven't come close to watching all of them yet). Still haven't seen VARDA in the grid yet, but, baby steps, baby steps. And this puzzle's cinephilic streak keeps going, extending from DRAX and AGNES to BELLA (22D: ___ Baxter, "Poor Things" protagonist). That seemed like a somewhat tough BELLA clue. Yes, it's a recent role, and an Academy Award-winning role, but I don't know how widely known Emma Stone's character's name is. I saw the movie in the theater and the name still didn't come to me quickly. But crosses seem fair. Anyway, Marvel movie reference notwithstanding, I love this puzzle's movie-mindedness. It's the one part of the puzzle that did, in fact, click with me.

Notes and explainers:

• 19A: Northernmost city in North America with over one million people (EDMONTON) — brain, not clicking, assumed that "North America" meant "United States of America," and so tried to invent a city called EDISON, AK.
• 20A: Inspiration for Toblerone's shape (ALP) — weird clue. Yes, the inspiration is an ALP, but more specifically, a very famous ALP: The Matterhorn. This is a little like cluing PRESIDENT as [Person on the five-dollar bill]. I mean ... yes ... but
• 2D: Composer with a namesake horn (SOUSA) — yes, the SOUSAphone, which is a horn, and (sadly) not a telephone you use when you need someone to compose a march, stat!
• 8D: Hip-hop's Madvillain or Mobb Deep (DUO) — a tough clue if you know nothing about hip-hop, which experience tells me is a lot of you. I've heard of both these acts and DUO still didn't leap to mind.
• 11D: Actress Tracee ___ Ross of "American Fiction" (ELLIS) — Diana Ross's daughter. 
• 67D: Midwesterner's embarrassed interjection ("OPE!") — I forget which Midwesterner says this. Minnesotan? Hmm, looks like it's common across Minnesota, Wisconsin and Michigan. According to this 2020 article from "Oshkosh Northwestern": "['OPE' is] said after bumping into someone, dropping something, or as an alert of someone needing to get around or “sneak right past ya.”"

See you next time.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

***

Important Note:

As of Monday, 11/4/24, the NYT Tech Guild is on strike. 

From The Guardian:

The Guild is asking that readers honor their picket line by boycotting the Times’ selection of games, including Wordle and the daily digital crossword, and to avoid other digital extensions such as the Cooking app.

Annie Shields, a campaign lead for the News Guild of New York, encouraged people to sacrifice their streaks in the wildly popular Wordle and Connections games in order to support the strike.

You can read more about the strike here (nyguild.org).

There were some anti-union talking points being credulously repeated in the comments yesterday, so just to be clear (per Vanity Fair): "The union said Tech Guild workers' main concerns that remain unresolved are: remote/hybrid work protections; “just cause” job protections, which “the newsroom union has had for decades”; limits on subcontracting; and pay equity/fair pay." 

Since the picket line is "digital," it would appear to apply only to Games solved in the NYT digital environment—basically anything you solve on your phone or on the NYT website per se. If you get the puzzle in an actual dead-tree newspaper, or if you solve it outside the NYT's proprietary environment (via a third-party app, as I do), then technically you're not crossing the picket line by solving. You can honor the digital picket line by not using the Games app (or the Cooking app) at all until the strike is resolved. No Spelling Bee, no Connections ... none of it. My morning Wordle ritual is was very important to me, but ... I'll survive, I assume. 

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