Trio of average guys / MON 11-11-24 / Visual accompaniment to a musical release / Disney's follow-up to "Dumbo" / Raps off the cuff / Huffer and puffer in a classic fairy tale / App also called "the Gram," informally / Store with a mazelike layout / "Momager" of the Kardashians

Constructor: Patrick Gramza and John Kugelman

Relative difficulty: Easy (solved Downs-only)

THEME: TOM, DICK AND HARRY (62A: Trio of average guys, as seen at the ends of 16-, 25- and 48-Across) — last words of three theme answers are the last names of three famous guys named, Tom, Dick, and Harry, respectively:

Theme answers:

• CARIBBEAN CRUISE (Tom Cruise) (16A: Island-hopping vacation that might start and end in Miami)
• BIG BAD WOLF (Dick Wolf) (25A: Huffer and puffer in a classic fairy tale)
• FREESTYLES (Harry Styles) (48A: Raps off the cuff)

Word of the Day: Dick Wolf (see 25A) —

Richard Anthony Wolf (born December 20, 1946) is an American film and television producer, best known for his Law & Order franchise. Since 1990, the franchise has included six police/courtroom dramas and four international spinoffs. He is also creator and executive producer of the Chicago franchise, which since 2012, has included four Chicago-based dramas, and the creator and executive producer of the FBI franchise, which since 2018, has also become a franchise after spinning off two additional series.

Wolf has also written four books. The first, the non-fiction volume Law & Order: Crime Scenes, is a companion to the Law & Order television series. The Intercept, The Execution, and The Ultimatum are works of fiction in a thriller series featuring an NYPD detective named Jeremy Fisk.

Wolf has won numerous awards, including an Emmy Award, being inducted into the Television Academy Hall of Fame, and receiving a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. (wikipedia)

• • •

About the easiest Downs-only solve I've ever experienced. It's not just that the Down clues were easy, it's that so many of them were short. There's a reason that, with any puzzle, I start in on the short stuff first. In general, the shorter the answer, the easier it is to get. That doesn't mean that short answers can't be hard, just that your odds of scoring a hit are better, especially right out of the box, with a short answer rather than a long one. Get enough short stuff in there, and now you've got traction, and the longer stuff becomes much easier to see. In a Downs-only situation, the short stuff is particularly important, since you have no recourse to the Acrosses. Short Downs are your friends, they're gonna get you access, and today, holy moses are there a lot of short Downs. Of the fifteen Down answers crossing the first (Across) theme answer, twelve (12!) of them are 3s or 4s. Not even 5s, which I also consider "short." 3s and 4s ... for 80% of the crosses. I got every one of those 3s and 4s no problem, but you don't even have to be that successful at first pass. Even if you got only half to 2/3 of those short Downs up top, there's a good chance that long theme answer is going to come into view—that is, it'll be inferrable from the six to eight short Downs that you did get. Once you infer an Across, you can then use its letters to help you get the Downs you couldn't see at first pass. And so on. Anyway, with soooooo much short stuff in the Downs, there was no resistance today. Ran right through this thing.

As for the theme, I like it, or I like the idea of it, anyway. I basically came down the west side of the grid to start, and it was fun to watch the front end of the revealer come into view, and then to have that "aha" when I got enough initial letters (five?) to throw the whole thing across the grid. Not many things start "TOMDI-," it turns out. Do young(er-than-me) people know the phrase "any Tom, Dick, or Harry?" Feels like something I learned from old songs or Warner Bros. cartoons as a kid. I don't know how widely used the term is these days as a way of talking about "any rando guy(s)." Looks like it's a song in the Broadway musical Kiss Me, Kate? Huh. I did not know that. Looks like the phrase has its origin in the 17th century, though different names were used then. Also, apparently "TOM, DICK AND HARRY" is also a mnemonic for med students:

English-speaking medical students use the phrase in memorizing the order of an artery, and a nerve, and the three tendons of the flexor retinaculum in the lower leg: the T, D, A, N and H of Tom, Dick, and Harry correspond to tibialis posterior, flexor digitorum longus, posterior tibial artery, tibial nerve, and flexor hallucis longus. This mnemonic is used to remember the order of the tendons from anterior to posterior at the level of the medial malleolus just posterior to the malleolus. (wikipedia)

Seems way fussier than Every Good Boy Does Fine or Roy G. Biv, but what do I know. I'm not, nor ever have claimed to be, a [squints] flexor retinaculum expert.

I only have two minor notes on the theme execution. Not complaints, just ... notes. Neutral comments. One is that CRUISE and WOLF are free-standing words in their respective answers, whereas STYLES is a word part (the latter half of a single word). The other is that I could not remember who Dick Wolf was. He's one of the most successful TV producers in history (the Law & Order, Chicago, and FBI franchises, among other things), and though I've heard his name before, today... that was not who I thought "Dick Wolf" was. Instead I was imagining some other Dick. Who was that guy who worked for Clinton and then wrote a thinl- ... PRIMARY COLORS! Oh my god I've been sitting here for fifteen minutes trying to remember the name of that damned book and it finally came to me, mid-sentence. OK, so who wrote Primary Colors? [googles]. Joe Klein!?!? That's not a Dick. Who am I th- DICK MORRIS! Is that somebody? [googles] Oh, right, the political consultant. Joe Klein wrote the roman à clef about about Clinton's first presidential campaign (1992), while Dick Morris was the campaign manager for Clinton's second presidential campaign (1996). My brain has fused these guys into one unholy '90s political operative: Joedick Morklein. My brain has also, mercifully, made me forget the specificities of most of '90s politics. Thank you, brain.

I don't have much to say about the fill in this one. The longer Downs tend to be the hard things to get in a Downs-only solve, but SPRINGTIME was a flat-out gimme (no crosses needed), and NUT ALLERGY was pretty easy to build from the ground up—I was able to infer the Acrosses at its back end, so -RGY led easily to NUT ALLERGY, and from there it was just a matter of figuring out TRACE (weirdly, one of the toughest Downs for me to get today), and I was done. Besides TRACE, I think ALBUM ART and DETACHES were the only Downs that forced me to stop and think a little. Not sure what I wanted for ALBUM ART. Wanted something like DITCHES (?) for DETACHES. I guess I was thinking of [Breaks off] in terms of ending a relationship (abruptly). All the other Downs seemed obvious to me. Surprised ADA got such an old-fashioned clue (64D: Nabokov novel) (superfamiliar if you've been doing xwords forever, but probably less so if you're younger). "Momager" is perhaps the worst portmanteau of all time (10D: "Momager" of the Kardashians = KRIS). Is it "mom-ager," like "teenager," or "momager," like mom + manager? Or mom + dowager?? I assume it's mom-ager, but in that case it really (really) needs the hyphen. It's an unrecognizable word blob without it. I do not like TIDE POD very much in the singular (this is how I feel about DORITO every time I see it), but it's hard to deny it's a thing. The product itself is plural, but what else are you going to call one unit of said product? 

[38A: Laundry product that was once the subject of a viral internet challenge]

Happy Monday. 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 recently, 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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