Purple-flecked root vegetable / MON 1-27-25 / Study abroad program on a ship / Bird named for its beak's shape / Stance for a yoga beginner / Musical based on a comic strip / Cotton variety

Constructor: Alexander Liebeskind

Relative difficulty: Medium

THEME: LOOK THE OTHER WAY (40A: Ignore suspicious behavior ... or a hint to the circled letters in 17-, 24-, 51- and 62-Across) — words that are rough synonyms of "LOOK" appear backwards (i.e. "the other way") inside circled squares in their respective theme answers:

Theme answers:

• HOMEPAGE (17A: Commonly visited part of a website)
• SEMESTER AT SEA (24A: Study abroad program on a ship)
• FEDERAL GRANTS (51A: Funding sources for many labs)
• TREE POSE (62A: Stance for a yoga beginner)

Word of the Day: SHOEBILL (26D: Bird named for its beak's shape) —

The shoebill (Balaeniceps rex), also known as the whale-headed stork, and shoe-billed stork, is a large long-legged wading bird. It derives its name from its enormous shoe-shaped bill. It has a somewhat stork-like overall form and has previously been classified with the storks in the order Ciconiiformes based on this morphology. However, genetic evidence places it with pelicans and herons in the Pelecaniformes. The adult is mainly grey while the juveniles are more brown. It lives in tropical East Africa in large swamps from South Sudan to Zambia.

• • •

I'm not sure how good this puzzle is in absolute terms—it seems fine; let me think about it—but my Downs-only experience of it was pretty close to ideal. First pass at the grid was rough. All the longer Downs and several of the short ones just weren't clear. Either they could've been one of two things (HARM or HURT, say, at 38D: Damage), or else I simply had no idea (ADMISSION and COURTYARD were both ??? at first). Luckily, HOME PAGE was pretty easy to parse from the letters I had in place, and I could see GAPE spelled backward in those circled squares—very, very useful when it came time to parse the next, much harder-to-parse theme answer: SEMESTER AT SEA. I absolutely used the theme (such as I understood it) to get those circled squares, which (finally) gave me enough letters to see the whole of SEMESTER AT SEA. In fact, I think I used the "backward word meaning 'look'" knowledge with every single themer, and had them all in place before I actually got the revealer itself. So even though the revealer appears in the middle of the grid, I didn't see it til the very end, which is the ideal place for a revealer. But every single 8+-letter Down except SKI RESORT was a mystery to me for a while. Not just ADMISSION and COURTYARD (which I had as COURTROOM at one point) (?!), but FEISTIER, SWISS ROLL, and SHOEBILL. I wanted SPOONBILL so bad and was so mad when it wouldn't fit. Anyway, I loved how this felt impossible at first (from a Downs-only perspective), but then boop boop boop, little by little, pieces fell into place and I got it done, with SWISS ROLL being the last answer to fall. Now that I look the theme over, I think it's pretty solid. Maybe more Tuesday than Monday (if that's a meaningful distinction). Definitely sassier than most Monday fare. The revealer is rock solid, and admirably literal. The short fill is lackluster, but it always is, and the longer Downs more than make up for that. Overall, good stuff.

I was lucky enough to know all the names I needed to know today. I learned both Phillipa SOO and TESSA Thompson from crosswords, though the latter's name only began to stick recently, so I was happy to be able to throw her name down no problem. I also knew that HERA was the [Greek marriage goddess], so that helped. I stupidly wrote in PICA for the [Cotton variety] (PICA is a typographic unit of measure, or a disorder where you eat inedible material like clay, or ... wow, virtually anything, apparently. The subtype list is lengthy—burnt matches?? (Cautopyreiophagia!?!?!)). Eventually, I remembered the real meaning of PICA and changed that answer to PIMA—big help with the visibility of SEMESTER AT SEA. Had ARETE at first for 12D: Mountain crest (RIDGE). Because Crossword Brain. Who's going to go to ARETE before RIDGE? Someone who solved a ton of NYTXW puzzles in the '90s, that's who. The only part of the puzzle that made me mad was LAH (15A: "Well, ___-di-dah!"). If you need LAH, then OK, use it, but ... you absolutely do not need LAH here. That little section is very, very easy to fill without garbage non-things like LAH. Here's just one example (try your own!):

[this version gets rid of LAH *and* ALA (2 birds / 1 stone)]

Notes:

• 51A: Funding sources for many labs (FEDERAL GRANTS) — are you sure? I mean, maybe that was true last month, but the malevolent dipshit in the White House has made this clue at least somewhat less true.
• 62A: Stance for a yoga beginner (TREE POSE) — this clue is bad in at least two ways. First of all, TREE POSE is a stance for *anyone* practicing yoga. Just like corpse pose, down dog, etc. It's just a pose. The fact that a beginner *might* do it does not mean it's *for* a beginner specifically. Which brings me to my next objection, which is that LOL TREE POSE is not that easy for many people. People fall out of that pose in class all the time. You gotta balance on one leg with the sole of your other foot pressed up against the inner thigh of your standing leg. Basically I think the word "beginner" is screwing up this clue.

• 1D: "Tsk, tsk," in textspeak (SMH) — Shaking My Head (in frustration and/or disbelief)

That's all. See you next time.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on BlueSky and Facebook]