The forest, in a metaphor / SAT 1-25-25 / ___ Mountains, Kyrgyz/Tajik border range / nage (cooked in a broth) / Sublimation products / Foe in a 1932 Australian "war"/ Funding source for the Great Wall of China / Coward of the theater world / Old atlas inits. / Aeschylus trilogy of tragedies

Constructor: Michael Lieberman

Relative difficulty: Medium 

THEME: none 

Word of the Day: GESTALT (10D: The forest, in a metaphor) —

: something that is made of many parts and yet is somehow more than or different from the combination of its parts

When he gets rolling, you're not responding to single jokes—it's the whole gestalt of the movie that's funny.—Pauline Kael

broadly  : the general quality or character of something 

When new employees are recruited fresh out of college and can look forward to working for the same company for 40 years, it changes the gestalt of management. —Brenton R. Schlender

… the Old Hollywood gestalt, where daughters adored and romanticized their charismatic, powerful, often unavailable fathers. —Nora Johnson

"not see the forest for the trees" (idiom): to not understand or appreciate a larger situation, problem, etc., because one is considering only a few parts of it (merriam-webster.com)

• • •

[MYRNA Loy (3D: Loy of filmdom), seen here with Crosswordese Hall-of-Famer ASTA]

GESTALT? LOL, what? What a bizarre way to clue that. The idea of not being able to see the forest for the trees, that's very familiar. I know that expression from many places, most notably the song "Different Drum" by the Stone Poneys (featuring Linda Ronstadt on vocals):

But GESTALT. I think I last heard that term in a Woody Allen movie circa the late-'70s. Diane Keaton probably says it in Manhattan. I'm aware that the word exists, but I would never use it, nor would anyone I know (apparently). And I know what it means ... or I thought I did. Anyway, I would never have put one of these things (the "forest" idiom) anywhere near the other (GESTALT). The clue was very confusing, since it says "in a metaphor," so I thought the answer would be the thing from the metaphor, but it was the forest that was the metaphor. "Clunky" and "awkward" don't even begin to get at what I think about that clue. I left the GESTALT / ASST cross blank until the very end because I just couldn't commit to GESTALT. Unpleasant. The rest of the grid was varied. Highly varied, both in terms of quality and in terms of difficulty, though the only part I found legitimately difficult was the SW—namely, that bank of answers (SHARIA, TAMED, RIPTIDES) that could have provided (but in my case, failed to provide) a toehold on all those long Downs. I don't know how many things I tried before SHARIA. A lot. The worst mistake I made, though, was a pure crossword brain glitch: I wrote in EBB TIDES and not RIP TIDES. The idea of the "ebb" tide lives very close to the front of my brain thanks to my having seen it seemingly thousands of times over the years in crosswords. Rip is a tide I see rarely. And so ... pffft. Worse, the "E" from EBB TIDES made me start (as opposed to finish) 30D: Consumed with grief? with ATE (actual answer: STRESS-ATE). ATE ... something? No. No no no. But if crossword brain got me into that fix, crossword brain got me out. I somehow knew ALAI cold (52A: ___ Mountains, Kyrgyz/Tajik border range). Just ... knew it. In that way where you're like "I know this ... how do I know this? Is this right?" and then it is. The amount I could tell you about the ALAI Mountains ... well, it's not TONS, let's put it that way. Rest of the puzzle ran on the easy side of Medium, but SW def knocked me around.

Things started off fast with this one. This was my opening gambit:

I wrote it in thinking, "If this is wrong, I don't want to be right." And then SIA confirmed it (6D: "Cheap Thrills" pop star) and I felt amazing! Good answer at 1A, and I got it right off the bat. Here we go! But then came GESTALT (oof) and then I got shut out of the SW (see above) and so all that whoosh feeling I had at the outset quickly settled back to a kind of plodding feeling (fairly normal for Saturdays). The fill in this one is not particularly good, so it gets all its interest / pleasure from the cluing, which seemed to be striving for trickiness at every turn. Lots of wrong initial answers today. Aside from the ones I've already covered, I had "I GET IT NOW" before "I SEE IT NOW" (13D: "Oh-h-h-h, that makes sense"); I wanted (ID EST did not want, but thought it might be) SPERMS before SPORES (41D: Reproductive cells); I threw down DIEHARD with confidence, but 38D: Ardent supporter ended up being DEVOTEE; oh, and THROES before THRALL (7D: Clutches); oh, oh, and CLOG before SPOT (41A: Jam); oh oh oh, and CANAL before CANOE (I didn't actually write that one in, just thought it) (36A: Sight in Monet's "Boating on the River Epte") (how has EPTE never been in the grid?) (LOL spoke to soon—it has, once, on Aug. 19, 1975: [Seine tributary]).

Explainers (deep breath, here we go...):

• 16A: Strike one! (POSE) — "!" clues oddly function as commands. Like [Hit it!] could be a clue for DRUM (or PAYDIRT, I suppose). Any "Strike one!" has nothing to do with baseball here. The answer is a thing you (might) strike, i.e. a POSE.
• 21A: Coward of the theater world (NOEL) — one of those clues where they try to hide a name that is also a regular word by putting it at the front of the clue (where *all* words are capitalized, not just names). But NOEL Coward is so famous (to me) that the trick didn't work at all. 

• 23A: Funding source for the Great Wall of China (SALT TAX) — if you say so! I just inferred this one from crosses. All I know about the Great Wall is that they went there on Love Boat once (not on the actual boat, mind you—it's a magical boat, but not that magical)
• 28A: Felt in the Christmas spirit? (ELF HATS) — which are made of "felt," I guess. I had the ELF early, so this was easy enough.
• 32D: S&P part (AMPERSAND) — ha ha, brutal. Self-referential clue. There's the "S" and the "P" and in between ... the AMPERSAND ("&").
• 35A: One working on a column? (CPA) — a column in a ledger book, or a column of numbers, or whatever. A CPA is a Certified Public Accountant, of course.
• 41A: Jam (SPOT) — in the sense of "in a jam" (i.e. "a sticky situation"), i.e. a SPOT.
• 48A: It's fit for a king (SASH) — so, a king ... sized bed. I don't really know what these are. Dictionaries are weirdly unhelpful. A SASH seems to be a decorative blanket or "bed scarf" that you drape across the bed (????). Here:
• 

[I’m being told this SASH is the thing a ruler or a prom “king” might wear across his body. I’m so used to puns in xword clues that I just assumed a bed was involved]

• 51A: Some photomontage art (DADA) — yeesh. I guess this is in fact true. Still, very hard. That little GIG / DADA / ZADIE / GASES area, strangely hard for me (I know ZADIE Smith, but not that title) (45D: ___ Smith, "The Autograph Man" novelist)
• 5D: Foe in a 1932 Australian "war" (EMU) — I learned about the EMU War (awful) from crosswords. Do crosswords long enough, you'll learn all sorts of things about EMU.
• 14D: They support many student movements (P.E. CLASSES) — true enough on a literal level, I guess. Tortured misdirection, but yes, literally, students do move in P.E. 
• 47D: Sublimation products (GASES) — "Sublimation is the transition of a substance directly from the solid to the gas state, without passing through the liquid state." (wikipedia). I was really thinking Freud here.
• 24D: ___ nage (cooked in a broth) (À LA) — educated guess. "À LA nage" means "in the swim" (not, as my rusty French originally translated it, "in the snow") (that's "neige").
• 31D: Where locks are picked? (HAIR SALON) — obviously the "locks" here are locks of hair. This would've been easier if it hadn't run straight through that SHARIA / TAMED / RIPTIDES section I spoke of earlier. There's a lot of really great HAIR SALON scenes in the new Mike Leigh movie, Hard Truths, which I saw just yesterday. Recommended, if you have a very high endurance for watching a miserable human being just be miserable, hyperbolically and virtually non-stop, for 90 minutes (it helps that Marianne Jean-Baptiste is very good and occasionally hilarious)

• 39D: Place whose name has an appropriate final vowel sound (SPA) — because you (conventionally) say "Ahhhh" there (or "Aaaaaaah"—I forget which one is the sigh and which the scream). 

See you next time.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on BlueSky and Facebook]

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Seafarer's device / FRI 1-24-25 / Some stripes on drapeaux français / Green-skinned god of the afterlife / English translation of a paradoxical line in a Magritte painting / Fall forecasting aids / Greek goddess sleeping near the river Oceanus / Media outlet with a Francophone counterpart / Best-selling American car of the 1990s

Constructor: Ernest Lim

Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium

THEME: none (though for a bit there I thought it was something about "newspapers"...) 

Word of the Day: The Treachery of Images (9D: English translation of a paradoxical line in a Magritte painting) —

The Treachery of Images (French: La Trahison des images) is a 1929 painting by Belgian surrealist painter René Magritte. It is also known as This Is Not a Pipe, Ceci n'est pas une pipe and The Wind and the Song. It is on display at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

The painting shows an image of a pipe. Below it, Magritte painted, "Ceci n'est pas une pipe" (pronounced [sə.si ne paz‿yn pip], French for "This is not a pipe".)

The famous pipe. How people reproached me for it! And yet, could you stuff my pipe? No, it's just a representation, is it not? So if I had written on my picture "This is a pipe", I'd have been lying!

— René Magritte

The theme of pipes with the text "Ceci n'est pas une pipe" is extended in Les Mots et Les Images, La Clé des Songes, Ceci n'est pas une pipe (L'air et la chanson), The Tune and Also the Words, Ceci n’est pas une pomme, and Les Deux Mystères. [...]

On December 15, 1929, Paul Éluard and André Breton published an essay about poetry in La Révolution surréaliste (The Surrealist Revolution) as a reaction to the publication by poet Paul Valéry "Notes sur la poésie" in Les Nouvelles littéraires of September 28, 1929. When Valéry wrote "Poetry is a survival", Breton and Éluard made fun of it and wrote "Poetry is a pipe", as a reference to Magritte's painting.

In the same edition of La Révolution surréaliste, Magritte published "Les mots et les images" (his founding text which illustrated where words play with images), his answer to the survey on love, and Je ne vois pas la [femme] cachée dans la forêt, a painting tableau surrounded by photos of sixteen surrealists with their eyes closed, including Magritte himself.

• • •

Most of the marquee answers don't really seem up to the job today. There's an adequate blandness that spreads over this thing, a blandness highlighted by the one answer that is truly unbland—easily the best thing in the grid—and that is "THIS IS NOT A PIPE." I'd've really flipped for CECI N'EST PAS UNE PIPE, but that wouldn't fit in a regular 15x15 grid, so that will have to wait for some ambitious Sunday constructor, I guess. But "THIS IS NOT A PIPE" was the one time during this solve where I really sat up and went "hey, nice." Everywhere else just felt like ... how to say it ... quotidian and workaday and kind of blah. Full of the worldly ho-hum workaday-world concerns of someone who is PRESSED FOR TIME, or who has to BEAR THE EXPENSE of something. Time & money. Yesh, they are problems for all of us, but yawn. There's no doubt that MAKES HEADLINES and LATE EDITION are real things, but as successive answers, following EXIT POLLS, the puzzle really felt like it was going to be themed ... some kind of boring "news" theme? ... but then no, those are just three longish newsy answers. There is no theme. This made me happy (I don't want themes on F / Sat), but also sad, in that those answers now seemed kind of purposeless. Like an abandoned or aborted theme. Not really up to the task of being marquee answers in a puzzle that desperately needs them. But here nonetheless. Just not enough zing today. But that Magritte painting line, that I dug. 

[Coincidentally, I taught Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics just yesterday]

I also dug STATE PEN, though I don't understand why there was no abbrev indicator in the clue (4D: Sing Sing, e.g.) [my bad: Sing Sing *is* an abbr., slang for Ossining State Penitentiary]. COLMAN Domingo was nominated for a Best Actor Academy Award yesterday for his performance in Sing Sing (2024). If he wins, then expect to see COLMAN in the grid more often (he has so far appeared once, as [___ Domingo, Best Actor nominee for 2023's "Rustin"]. At that point, I hadn't heard of Domingo or Rustin. I'm up to speed now).

My disappointment today wasn't just rooted in bland marquees. There were several moments where the fill made me wince, or in the case of CEDAR WOOD, laugh outright. Oh, CEDAR WOOD, you say? As opposed to what, CEDAR METAL? CEDAR PLASTIC? CEDAR MARBLE? CEDAR PASTE? What are we doing here? Then there's RETINT and COTENANT, who are fighting the Battle of Who Can Be The Worst Prefixed Answer. Or so says my SEXTANT (40D: Seafarer's device). That's quite a trio, RETINT COTENANT and SEXTANT. The -NT Boys! Why would you put a cutesy "?" clue on possibly the worst answer in your grid (10D: Change one's tone again?). I have never understood constructors/editors wanting to call attention to bad fill this way. Then we've got some absurd plurals—a cadre of KATES and a bunch of ... BLEUS? Do I have that right? (31D: Some stripes on drapeaux français). Yee + ikes. That bit of French hasn't seen the light of day (crosswordwise) since Nineteen Hundred and Sixty-Three, where it was clued [Cordons ___]. No editor after Farrar would touch BLEUS. Until today. So it's a historic moment ... in the history of desperate fill. Not the way I'd choose to make history, but different strokes etc. BLEUS was about the only answer I had any trouble with, due solely to the fact that I forgot "drapeaux" meant "flags"—I (perhaps unsurprisingly) translated it as "drapes." I was like "How the hell should I know what French interior decorators get up to??"

Had the usual bout of single-square confusion. Always unsure of EMEND v. AMEND. "THESE Men" before "THOSE" (56A: "___ Magnificent Men and Their Flying Machines" (1965 film)). ELOTA before ELOTE (truly dumb mistake, I've eaten ELOTE and seen it in puzzles and everything). Had "Give it a READ!" before "Give it a REST!" LOL, I like my wrong answer. Someone pushing a book recommendation on you is nicer than someone telling you to shut up, I think. Briefly thought the 1845 immigrants were IRANI (true crossword brain there) (28D: Like many immigrants to the U.S. beginning in 1845). All those mistakes were my fault. My bad. On me. But there was one "mistake" which I want to go back and put in the grid as an act of protest and defiance. That is, I want to reinstate OPEN-ENDED, which is the only acceptable answer to 55A: Type of question not asked in 20 Questions. I plunked in OPEN-ENDED so fast, and that had to wonder who was attending commencement with a letter pattern like -DS (53D: Commencement attendees). For a brief, harrowing moment, I thought they were going to try to make me believe that GDS was an acceptable abbr. for "grads." But no. Worse (or almost worse), they are trying to make me believe that an OPEN-ENDER is a thing. Look, I get not wanting to use SDS, it's crosswordese of a decidedly bygone variety, but this "solution" to the SDS problem only makes matters worse. People ask OPEN-ENDED questions, they do not as OPEN-ENDERs. SRS is better than SDS, yes, somewhat, but OPEN-ENDED is better than OPEN-ENDER by an amount that is near-infinite. So suck up SDS or else rewrite that corner entirely. 

[Students for a Democratic Society]

Bullets:

• 20A: Green-skinned god of the afterlife (OSIRIS) — got this off the "O." I forgot he was green-skinned. I just remember he looks like ... a dog, right? No, damn, that's ANUBIS (who is, in my defense, the "god of funerary rites, protector of graves, and guide to the underworld" (wikipedia). Man, those Egyptians were death-obsessed.

[OSIRIS]

[Anubis]

• 35A: Florida city with the U.S.'s largest equestrian center (OCALA) — this was "Florida city..." and then the voice of the teacher in the "Peanuts" cartoons. I wrote in OCALA real easy. More of that old-school crosswordese.

• 45D: Give a run for your honey? (ELOPE) — oof, even the "?" clues are tired today. This is a really awkward variation on [Take the honey and run?], which is a classic (i.e. already-been-done, don't-do-it-again) ELOPE clue. The clue on UTERI (49A: Development sites?) falls into the same category—tired wordplay. Seen it before. 14 different uses of "development" in UTERI clues in the Shortz Era. This very clue has been used four times now (two have "?" and two don't ... so there's literally no logic to the "?"). Gotta be more creative with your cutesy cluing of crosswordese (did you know: UTERI appeared just once in pre-Shortz puzzles, but has appeared 37 times under his leadership?; also, did you know: UTERUS did not appear in the grid at all until 2007?; also, did you know: UTERUS is an anagram of SUTURE ... I'm learning so much today). 
• 38A: TV family you "meet" in the show's theme song (FLINTSTONES) — You know: "Meet Fred Flintstone .... His pet, Dino ... Daughter Pebbles ... Wilma, his wife!" No, wait ...

• 41A: Temperature gauges, sometimes (TOES) — I liked this one. Had no idea, needed all the crosses, then thought "ah, good one." That's how a tricky clue is supposed to go.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on BlueSky and Facebook]

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Perfume ecclesiastically / THU 1-23-25 / Classic line from the Dick and Jane series / Advocacy org. that gained prominence in 1980s New York City / Steamed dumpling in Tibetan cuisine / E, in a musical mnemonic / Land whose name meant "between two rivers" / Bee-dazzler? / Literary husband of Zeena Frome

Constructor: Natan Last and the J.A.S.A. Crossword Class

Relative difficulty: Easy

THEME: POTHOLES (56A: Obstacles for a driver ... or what this puzzle's circled squares represent) — four circled squares function as POTHOLES, i.e. they contain the word "POT," and they interrupt Down answers that mean "road"  (in the Across answers, the letters "POT" function normally):

  
Theme answers:

• RO[POT]AD / SEE SPOT RUN ((3D: Either of two diverging in a Robert Frost poem / 15A: Classic line from the Dick and Jane series)
• BO[POT]ULEVARD / NEPOTISM (9D: Sunset in the West? / 16A: Hiring practice at a family business, say)
• AVE[POT]NUE / MESOPOTAMIA (22D: Way / 32A: Land whose name meant "between two rivers")
• STRE[POT]ET / MAPO TOFU (38D: Word with clothes or cleaner / 55A: Sichuan bean curd dish)

Word of the Day: ACT UP (44A: Advocacy org. that gained prominence in 1980s New York City) —

AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) is an international, grassroots political group working to end the AIDS pandemic. The group works to improve the lives of people with AIDS through direct action, medical research, treatment and advocacy, and working to change legislation and public policies.

ACT UP was formed on March 12, 1987, at the Lesbian and Gay Community Services Center in New York City. Co-founder Larry Kramer was asked to speak as part of a rotating speaker series, and his well-attended speech focused on action to fight AIDS. Kramer spoke out against the state of the Gay Men's Health Crisis (GMHC), which he perceived as politically impotent. Kramer had co-founded the GMHC but had resigned from its board of directors in 1983. According to Douglas Crimp, Kramer posed a question to the audience: "Do we want to start a new organization devoted to political action?" The answer was "a resounding yes." Approximately 300 people met two days later to form ACT UP.

At the Second National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights, in October 1987, ACT UP New York made their debut on the national stage, as an active and visible presence in both the march, the main rally, and at the civil disobedience at the United States Supreme Court Building the following day. Inspired by this new approach to radical, direct action, other participants in these events returned home to multiple cities and formed local ACT UP chapters in Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, Rhode Island, San Francisco, Washington, D.C., and other locations. ACT UP spread internationally. In many countries separate movements arose based on the American model. For example, the famous gay rights activist Rosa von Praunheim co-founded ACT UP in Germany. (wikipedia)

• • •

I thought this was a nifty little puzzle, with the one downside being that the revealer came as a huge anticlimax. You can see that those squares are "POTHOLES" as soon as figure out the rebus, which for me came at "SEE SPOT RUN." Once I saw that the cross was ROAD, and that the "POT" square disrupted ROAD (rather than being an actual part of the answer), I got it—the rebus squares are actual "POTHOLES." I don't know if it's possible to do the revealer any differently; that is, what else is it going to be but POTHOLES? But anyway, by the time I got to the bottom of the grid, POTHOLES was telling me something I already knew. Since the puzzle doesn't need a revealer in order to make sense of the theme, maybe there's some (as yet unconceived) answer out there that could have come at the concept obliquely. Something like BUMP IN THE ROAD (except not that, because "road" is already one of the answers). Anyway, POTHOLES felt superfluous. Like a sign saying "tree" next to a "tree." Like, yes, I see that that is a tree. That is obviously a tree. But leaving the problem of the revealer aside, the core concept here was lovely. Four different road types, all disrupted by "POT" holes. I love that "POT" doesn't work in the Downs. It's jarring, the way POTHOLES are jarring. And the "POT"s are all handled very nicely in the Acrosses. Those "POT" answers are all really interesting in their own right, and in none of them is "POT" actually a standlone word, i.e. the "POT" is well and truly "buried" in each answer (what I mean is that if one of the crosses was TEA POT, that would be less interesting/elegant than what we have here, which his "POT" hidden inside other words / phrases every time). The puzzle was too easy for a Thursday, but when the concept really works (as this one does), I don't mind the lack of challenge so much. I should add that the grid was very smooth overall, and had some nice non-theme answers, including "DREAM ON!" and "COME UNDONE." The J.A.S.A. Crossword Class puzzles are always really polished. You'd think puzzle-by-committee might get clunky, but nope. Reliably good stuff, every time.

There was only one answer I didn't know today, and that was MOMO (54D: Steamed dumpling in Tibetan cuisine). No Tibetan restaurants where I live. I know there's (at least) one in Minneapolis, where I visit frequently. I've driven past it a bunch. Maybe I'll make my best friends take me there next time I visit. This is a debut for MOMO ... at least as a food product. It last appeared in 1973, as an [Owl of Guam] (!?!?!?!?!). Wow ... I mean, wow. I'm kind of in awe of how obscure that is. Like, even the Gods of Crosswordese were like, "pass." First trotted out in 1942 ([Short-eared owl.]), then ... thirty-one years passed ... then [Owl of guam] ... then fifty-two years passed, and here we are, eating Tibetan food. I feel like this is a real story of perseverance and triumph. Instead of caterpillar-to-butterfly, we get owl-to-dumpling. All things are possible through crosswords.

Normally I would tell you where I struggled, but I struggled nowhere today. There will be many who (understandably) don't know who E.C. SEGAR, but I teach a course on Comics, so that's a name I know well (you see both ECSEGAR and SEGAR from time to time in puzzles) (the "E" stands for ELZIE, in case that's ever relevant ... which it has been, three times in NYTXW history). Bob ROSS, ETHAN Frome, Hall & Oates' "MANEATER," the Latin phrase DE NOVO—all these things are right over the plate for me. I'm guessing that for a lot of people, this will be among the fastest rebus puzzles they've ever completed—maybe not a record Thursday, as it's always a little time-consuming and fussy to enter the damned rebus squares, but still, I'm scanning the grid for real trouble areas and not seeing them. 

[35D: Hall & Oates hit with the opening lyric "She'll only come out at night"]

Bullets:

• 21D: ___ chips, snack from Hawaii (TARO) — so much tasty food in this one. 
• 28A: Bee-dazzler? (PETAL) — is it the PETALs that dazzle? I guess so. Bees are drawn to color. I just like that this clue references a ridiculous As Seen On TV product from the '90s:

• 31A: E, in a musical mnemonic (EVERY) — "Every Good Boy Does Fine" (or "Deserves Fudge")
• 47A: Laura of "Jurassic Park" (DERN) — there have been lots of tributes written in the past week for the late, great David Lynch, but Laura DERN's (which I just read today) is probably my favorite. Well worth your time.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on BlueSky and Facebook]

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Bankable vacation, for short / WED 1-22-25 / Italian anise-flavored liqueur / It follows ka in the Spanish alphabet / Mare/hare pair? / Horse-drawn party vehicle? / Former N.B.A. star Smits, the "Dunking Dutchman" / Eats that pair well with beer / Company that once sold the Magic 8 Ball / Humorous name for the largest player on your baseball team

Constructor: Landon Horton

Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium

THEME: MIXED DOUBLES (51A: Tennis format ... or a description of some of the letters in 20-, 31- and 38-Across) — three wacky answers created by taking three familiar answers and "mixing" up their "double" letters, i.e. moving each answer's double letters to a different answer: 

Theme answers:

• PLAYBOY BUDDY (20A: Jay Gatsby, to Nick Carraway?) (gets the "D"s from "drinking buddy")
• HORSE AND BUNNY (31A: Mare/hare pair?) (gets the "N"s from "Playboy Bunny")
• DRINKING BUGGY (38A: Horse-drawn party vehicle?) (gets the "G"s from "horse and buggy")

Word of the Day: SAMBUCA (7D: Italian anise-flavored liqueur) —

Sambuca (Italian: [samˈbuːka]) is an Italian anise-flavoured liqueur. Its most common variety is often referred to as "white sambuca" to differentiate it from other varieties that are deep blue ("black sambuca") or bright red ("red sambuca"). Like other anise-flavoured liqueurs, the ouzo effect is sometimes observed when combined with water. (wikipedia)  

The ouzo effect (/ˈuːzoʊ/ OO-zoh), also known as the louche effect (/luːʃ/ LOOSH) and spontaneous emulsification, is the phenomenon of formation of a milky oil-in-water emulsion when water is added to ouzo and other anise-flavored liqueurs and spirits, such as pastis, rakı, arak, sambuca and absinthe. Such emulsions occur with only minimal mixing and are highly stable. (wikipedia)

• • •

Took me way longer than it should have to figure out the theme because I got the first theme answer and then the revealer, so I had no theme answer *pattern* to look at. Just PLAYBOY BUDDY. And I was like "How are the 'doubles' ... mixed? There's one set of double letters ... there are also two 'B's ... there are three 'Y's, is that something?" Mystified. But I figured, it's Wednesday, it can't be that hard, just keep going. And sure enough, after I pieced the next themer together, the double-letter answers in both themers glowed neon (BUDDY / BUGGY), and so I realized what I should be focusing on, but I thought the "joke" was merely that a different set of double letters had been swapped in for the correct letters each time. Wasn't til I got all three themers that I could see that the "familiar" answers had all swapped double letters among themselves. A closed system. OK. The BU--Y pattern seems absurdly arbitrary—why not swap the doubles in BATTY BAGGY and BARRY? or PETTY PEGGY PENNY? or DIZZY DITTY and, uh ... DILLY? DIPPY? Whatever, you get the idea. It's always nice when there at least *some* logic to the choices a puzzle makes. I could also ask "why have a pattern at all?" That is, why not just swap double letters? Why do those double letters *all* have to appear within the same word framework (BU-__Y)? But having solved the puzzle, I kind of know at least one answer to that one—makes it a lot easier to see what's going on. When you're looking at BUDDY BUNNY BUGGY, you've got a clear pattern that stands out, which tells you where to look for the "joke." Also, probably much easier to construct a puzzle like this when you use the same word framework for the base—would be very hard to find three different word frameworks that could handle the letter swapping. Annnnnnyway, I kind of liked how my understanding of the theme grew in stages (though you can probably only get that experience if you solved the themers in the weird order that I did). Otherwise, the theme is kind of a shrug for me. The wackiness isn't wacky enough, not only because the answers themselves aren't inherently funny but also because the clues are just too tepid. [Mare/hair pair?]??? I see your little rhyme, but you're basically just saying "horse & bunny," literally. Not much fun in that.

The fill on this one ran toward the weak side, and this was especially obvious (and worrisome) at the very beginning of the solve;

An OLEO / ALKA opening bodes no good. I also don't love (i.e. actively dislike) when OKAY is spelled out in colloquial expressions. On its own, OKAY is a thing, but "OKAY" starts feeling oddly formal when you write it all the way out in slang expressions. "OK, BYE" is how it should look. I had "OK- and figured I needed a five-letter term to follow. Annoying. The fill got a little better, but not much—lots and lots and lots of 3s and 4 ensured a surfeit of overfamiliar stuff (EGOT EWE REN OBOE DES STYE TYCO) and some crosswordy but less familiar stuff (ELE), and then one bit of non-crosswordese that really feels like it should've been crosswordese all along—PTO (!?!?). That answer hasn't been in the puzzle in almost thirty years, and the last time it appeared, it was a [School grp.] (like PTA, I'm guessing, with "Association" swapped out for "Organization"). Before that, it was [Page instrn.]. No, no typos in that clue, "instrn."! LOL, that is the single worst "abbr." I've ever seen in a crossword clue, in that the editor (Maleska) appears to have completely made it up. All pre-Shortz appearances of PTO had a version of this "instruction" clue, but I could Not figure out what the "instruction" was supposed to be until I'd read *all* the various clues and finally inferred that it must stand for "Please Turn Over (the page)." Oof, you can see why PTO got sent to Crosswordese Hell (which is just Hell, only moreso). But now it's been loosed by a more modern initialism: Paid Time Off. Still don't love it! But it's better than [Page instrn.], that is for sure.

Not too much difficulty today. There was the usual slowness putting together the nonsense answers. And the usual slowness from unfamiliar names. TSAI Ing-wen still won't stick in my brain (this her fourth appearance in the past three and half years; first female president of Taiwan, you'd think she'd stick!). Actually, it looks like I knew the other names in this puzzle, including RIK Smits (32D: Former N.B.A. star Smits, the "Dunking Dutchman") (worth knowing for both his name parts). What I didn't know, or only kinda knew, was SAMBUCA. I wanted it, but then thought "no, isn't it SAMBUCO? or, no, wait, doesn't it have double 'C'? SAMBUCCO? no, I'm thinking of 'Prosecco.' SAMBUCA or SAMBUCO? ... pretty sure one of those is a Bon Jovi guitarist..." (nope, that's Richie SAMBORA). I didn't consider SAMOSA, but solely because I know exactly what those are. Just an absurd spelling journey (probably didn't take long, but it felt long in my head). Once I got out of the (roughly) upper left quadrant of the puzzle, it got a lot easier. Needed all the crosses for PTO, finished with PUB GRUB (30D: Eats that pair well with beer).

Bullets:

• 1A: Org. of the main characters in "The Americans" (KGB) — somehow read this as [One of the main characters in "The Americans"] and I *love* that show but could *not* for the life of me remember either of the main characters' names. "SAM? PAM? ... RIK?"
• 17A: It follows ka in the Spanish alphabet (ELE) — the letter "L"
• 3D: Get a party going (BREAK THE ICE) — was expecting something far more "party"-ish here. You can BREAK THE ICE in any situation where you're meeting new people. Unless you are literally breaking ice, for drinks. Yes, I like that better.

• 4A: What might rain down on opposing players (BOOS) — had BOO- and wanted BOOM (i.e. you lower the ... BOOM ... on opposing players???) (I know it's bad, I'm just saying my brain thought of it, and I thought you should know)
• 48A: "___ intended!" ("NO PUN") — was going to tap the "Not All Debuts Are Good" sign again, but turns out, "NO PUN" has been in the puzzle before. Once. Twenty-four years ago. I miss those twenty-four years.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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