Phrase on ID tags / SAT 11-16-24 / Grinchy shout / Valentino competitor, for short / Ballerina who popularized "The Nutcracker" / Veet rival / 2002 movie with the tagline "Higher education just hit a new low" / Headquarters of Talofa Airways / All-Star point guard Young

Constructor: Peter Gordon

Relative difficulty: Medium

THEME: none 

Word of the Day: TAOISEACH (31D: Prime minister of Ireland) —

The Taoiseach [...] is the head of government or prime minister of Ireland. The office is appointed by the President of Ireland upon the nomination of Dáil Éireann (the lower house of the Oireachtas, Ireland's national legislature) and the office-holder must retain the support of a majority in the Dáil to remain in office.

The Irish word taoiseach means "chief" or "leader", and was adopted in the 1937 Constitution of Ireland as the title of the "head of the Government or Prime Minister". It is the official title of the head of government in both English and Irish, and is not used for the prime ministers of other countries, who are instead referred to in Irish by the generic term príomh-aire. The phrase an Taoiseach is sometimes used in an otherwise English-language context, and means the same as "the Taoiseach". (wikipedia) [pronounced something like "TEA-sheck"]

• • •

This felt hard, but hard in a way that Saturdays are supposed to be hard. As with yesterday's puzzle, this one was a bit too much of a trivia test for my liking, leaning heavily into proper nouns, many of which I'd simply never heard of in my life. Peter's puzzles often vex me on precisely this level. He created a "Celebrity" game app (focused on celebrity names) and writes a regular Newsflash crossword puzzle that is (by design) chock full o' names from very recent news headlines (lots of "who died this week?" and "who won a sporting event this week?," stuff like that). With "Celebrity," you expect celebrities. That's ... literally the name of the game. And with the Newsflash puzzles, again, you expect to get hit with proper nouns of recent noteworthiness. In my regular-ass NYTXW crossword, I have somewhat less patience for extensive name tests. There's also, if I'm being honest, some element of my simply not enjoying being reminded of how ignorant I am of soooooo many names. Today, there were two names, long names, that I'd never seen before in my life. And the second name ended up not being a name at all. Well, not a specific person's name, but the name of a political office. I assumed that TAOISEACH was the name of the current Irish prime minister, and I was like "OK, first of all, wow, and second of all ... is that a last name or a full name, first and last? And if it's first and last, dear lord, where does the first end and the last begin?" Literally every letter of that had to come from crosses. Totally in the dark, I was. The other name (an actual name) that was a ??? to me was TALLCHIEF (17A: Ballerina who popularized "The Nutcracker"). Turns out she's hugely famous, "America's first prima ballerina." So now you know that Irish politics and ballet are really not my thing. I can only have so many things. There are so many things. Today, the place names / activist names / sports names / movie names / brand names knocked me around quite a bit. Provided all the difficulty. Luckily, the non-name part of the puzzle was pretty easy, so it all averaged out to a very Saturday-like Saturday.

Even with stuff I did know, or had heard of, parsing problems pummeled me today. I wish I could show you all a real-time version of me trying to put together APIA, SAMOA (14A: Headquarters of Talofa Airways), LOL. I had A-IAS-MO- and still no idea. "That ... is no city or country that I know." Turns out it's both city *and* country. Oy. Nearly as funny was me trying to put JOAN OF ARC together. I had the JOAN part but thought I was simply looking for the last name of someone named "Joan." You know, a Didion or a Baez or a Rivers or a Cusack or something. But none of those people were alive in 1915, so they were out, and I couldn't think of other famous Joans ... again, oy. I forgot that JAZZ came in orchestra form, so while the JAZZ part was easy, the ORCHESTRAS part took work. Wanted TAKES ILL before FEELS ILL, which I should've known was wrong since TAKES CARE was already in the grid. I wanted COOKSETS but didn't trust the SETS part. I also didn't fully trust the COOK part because the "K" was coming from 33A: Holy book, in one spelling, which I wanted to be KORAN but which I thought couldn't possibly be KORAN because that's a standard English spelling, and the clue seemed to want some variant. Why else add "in one spelling?" That is not a typical cluing move for answers that have multiple acceptable spellings (as KORAN does). Unnecessarily confusing, that one. 

For all that TAOISEACH and TALLCHIEF flummoxed me, their sections were not the hard sections of the puzzle. TAOISEACH in particular just seemed to come together, somewhat quickly, rather magically, and I just had to trust that all those letters were correct. The area that put up the most resistance was, rather, the SW corner, where I finished up. This is partly Joan's fault, but also ... TAKES ILL before FEELS ILL (44A: Goes green, maybe), blanking on BELLA (42D: Model Hadid who wore a spray-on dress at a 2022 Paris fashion show), MCATS for ORALS (53A: Hurdles for would-be doctors), LEI for LOA (50D: Mahalo nui ___" (words from a grateful Hawaiian)), and ... well, no idea about ACT AS (55A: Represent). All this chaos had me doubting even the two answers down there that I had correct: LADLE and HAMMERED AT. Actually tested HAMMERED ON at one point. Another lesser but still significant slow spot was everything around SLACKERS, a movie I did not know existed until today (20A: 2002 movie with the tagline "Higher education just hit a new low"). I had this moment of "... SLACKERS? ... but that's ... that's from 1991, not 2002." Nope, I was thinking of the singular, SLACKER, Richard Linklater's first major film. SLACKERS, on the other hand ... as of this very second, I still have no idea. Hang on ... [searching] ... Huh. Yeah, I'm looking at the wikipedia page for this movie, and it is not registering at all. I know a lot of the actors (Jason Segel, Jason Schwartzman ... Mamie van Doren!!!?), but it looks like some ill-conceived American Pie rip-off:

It bombed at the box office, and the reviews—well, "unkind" would be a kind way of putting it. From wikipedia: 

On the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, Slackers has overall "Rotten" rating of 10%, with an average score of 3.1 out of 10, based on 105 reviews. The site's critical consensus reads, "Another teen comedy with little on its mind but moving to the next gross-out gag, Slackers strains for laughs and features grating characters." On Metacritic, the film holds a 12/100 based on 28 critics, meaning “overwhelming dislike”. A few critics noted the dialogue as a positive, but not sufficiently good to warrant attention. // 

Philip French commented that "Slackers makes American Pie look like The Importance of Being Earnest." // 

Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times awarded the film a zero out of four stars and described the film as "a dirty movie. Not a sexy, erotic steamy or even smutty movie.

So ... a 20+-year-old movie that fell in the woods and made no sound but pfft. Is that fun? Again, I just don't understand turning the ordinary word SLACKERS into a proper noun here. It's Not Like Your Puzzle Is Hurting For Proper Nouns.

Additional notes:

• 32A: Italian province on the Swiss border (COMO) — I know there's a Lake COMO. That is the only way I got this answer. More trivia.
• 35A: Phrase on ID tags (FAMOUS POTATOES) — the highlight of the puzzle for me. This clue and the clue on SCHULZ (15D: Woodstock artist) I found absolutely delightful. "ID" is of course the state code for Idaho, which has "FAMOUS POTATOES" written on its license plates (or "tags"). And Charles SCHULZ is the creator of Peanuts, which featured Snoopy and his little yellow-bird sidekick, Woodstock.

• 38A: Wordle score that elicits the message "Genius" (ONE) — good clue but man that "Genius" thing is stupid. "Ridiculously lucky" should be the message.
• 39A: Pulse, e.g. (SEED) — argh, see I knew this was going to be the plant version of pulse, but I ... forgot what pulse was, exactly. In my head, it was something like a bean sprout. I had -EED and actually wanted WEED at one point. But pulses are just legumes. "When [legumes are] used as a dry grain for human consumption, the seeds are also called pulses" (wikipedia)
• 40A: Veet rival (NAIR) — It was that or NEET, which is awfully close to Veet, spellingwise. Veet seems like a terrible name (like a product that removes hair solely (!) from your feet), but then so do NAIR and NEET so what do I know.
• 34A: Does a job for a summer? (ADDS) — kind of awkward phrasing here, but that “summer” gag is old as the hills: “summer” = one who does sums, or ADDS things up.
• 5D: Grinchy shout (BAH) — famously, iconically a Scroogey shout, so BAH to this clue.
• 13D: Valentino competitor, for short (YSL) — me staring down Y-L here: "YUL Brenner?! But YUL Brynner and Rudolph Valentino weren't even working at the same time, how... oh." Valentino here is a luxury fashion house, as is YSL (Yves Saint Laurent).

See you next time.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]