Relative difficulty: Hard (got stuck in the bottom left, 9:59)
THEME: HAUNTED MANSION — Spooky property that might include the theme answers
Theme answers:
BLOOD BATH-- Blowout victory, metaphorically
DEADPOOL-- Marvel superhero portrayed by Ryan Reynolds
ZOMBIE OFFICE-- Commercial property left mostly vacant by hybrid work arrangements
GHOST KITCHEN-- Restaurant offering delivery and pickup only
Word of the Day: GABE ("Welcome Back, Kotter" role of 1970s TV) —
Welcome Back, Kotter is an American sitcom starring Gabe Kaplan as a high-school teacher in charge of a racially and ethnically diverse remedial education class nicknamed the Sweathogs. Recorded in front of a live studio audience, the series aired on ABC from September 9, 1975, through May 17, 1979.
• • •
Hello friends, and happy Malaika MWednesday! I recognize Rebecca's name as someone who is excellent at coming up with themes, so I was excited to dive in. This was awesome! I'll take one paragraph to discuss the theme, and another paragraph to discuss the construction.
The way the New York Times structured this puzzle, when you were entering a theme answer, it highlighted the revealer. Usually my instinct is to immediately jump down and read that clue, but this time I held out a little and hopped around avoiding that section, and I'm glad. I think it was more fun that way. In particular, I got DEADPOOL and BLOOD BATH first, and tried to think of their connection. I wondered if their shared letters (OOL / LOO) would have anything to do with the theme. It wasn't until I filled in GHOST KITCHEN that I saw the spooky vibes, but I still didn't clock the relationship between the features of a house until I did hit the revealer.
I don't often discuss the complexity of construction in order to praise it. A lot of my reviews actually criticize when a constructor is jamming theme answers into a tight grid because I rarely think it's worth it, but Rebecca did an excellent job here. If you haven't constructed puzzles before, a grid with mirror symmetry like this one is really hard to wrangle because it's easy to end up with columns of long entries along the center axis, which can be hard to fill cleanly. That's what happened here, with INBOUNDS / DEADPOOL / KOMBUCHA and (to a lesser extent) DOG RUNS / RAINS / WE GET IT, but all the entries are clean. It's also hard to have theme answers intersecting (like DEADPOOL with BLOODBATH) or to have them stacked (like HAUNTED and MANSION). And she could have broken up those long non-thematic down answers with an extra block at square 49, but she kept them intact.
All in all, a really cute theme with really good execution. A puzzle that reminds me why I love puzzles.
Bullets:
[Sweet braided bread] for BABKA — I wanted "challah" here at first; I think of babka as twisted, not braided
[Message meaning "I can't be reached right now"] for OOO — This means "out of office." At my job, this is a very common initialism that I probably see at least weekly, more around the holidays
[Woman's name that becomes another woman's name when an "M" is added to the front] for ELISSA — It's always interesting to me when a name that's not particularly uncommon comes up in a grid and there's no famous person associated with it. Even more interesting when I personally have friends with this name! Can't put them in a clue though...
[Speed Wagon and Flying Cloud of old autodom] for REOS — This and GTO are the crossword cars that I will simply never ever remember or get
Guns N' Roses heavily toured the West Coast club circuit during their early years. Their debut album Appetite for Destruction (1987), supported by the eponymous tour, failed to gain traction, debuting at number 182 on the Billboard 200, until a year after its release when a grassroots campaign for the "Welcome to the Jungle" music video brought the band mainstream popularity. "Welcome to the Jungle" and "Paradise City" both became top 10 singles, with "Sweet Child o' Mine" becoming the band's only single to reach number one on the Billboard Hot 100. The album has sold approximately 30 million copies worldwide, including 18 million units in the United States, making it the country's best-selling debut album and eleventh-best-selling album. With their stylistic mix of punk rock, blues rock and heavy metal, the band helped move mainstream rock away from the glam metal era of the mid-late 1980s. In addition, they are credited with revitalizing power ballads in rock.
• • •
This one was definitely saved by the revealer. Before that, all I really noticed was distracting little details, like two long "-ING" words on top of each other (I’M COMING, CARESSING) and, more jarringly, two crossing "OH" phrases (literally crossing at the "OH") ("OH, YOU!" / "OH, HI!"). The grid seemed built weird (why the longer answers in the NW?), such that I thought there were just three themers (the paint, the picture, the TAMBOURINE). This is all to say that there was nothing very pleasant going on until I hit the SE corner. The puzzle seemed fine, but definitely BLAH, with some awkwardnesses. But then I got "I'M SHOOK," which managed to be both the freshest answer in the grid and the thing that made all the seemingly unrelated longer answers seem, well, related. The revealer revealed. It did its job. Nicely. And just like that, my feelings went from Neutral-Negative to Neutral-Positive. Where the positive vibes were concerned, the puzzle had an assist in that SE corner from TRANSLATE—well, not from TRANSLATE itself, which is just OK as an answer, but from the clue on TRANSLATE, which was lovely (and which got me ... in the since that I had to think about it for a bit) (60A: Make two dos, say?). I could see it was going to be TRANSLATE but couldn't figure out why. If you make two "dos" then ... you just have one "do" ,.. and then another "do" ... how is that translation!? Imagine a several-second pause at this point where you can hear the hamster wheel in my brain turning and rattling. And then it drops: "two" is English, but if you TRANSLATE "two" to Spanish, it's "dos." So when you "make two dos," you TRANSLATE. Nice. You've also got EGOMANIA PHENOM and UNAGI down in that corner, so like I say, it's not just the revealer that's doing god's work in that corner. Lots of lively fill there. Above average Tuesday!
The grid *is* weirdly built, though. When the theme answers run Across (i.e. most of the time), you don't usually see long Across answers that *aren't* themers. It creates a kind of visual confusion. And here we've got not two but four Across answers of 8+-letter length (that is, standard themer length) that have nothing to do with the theme—that are, in fact, longer than two of the themers themselves (POMPOMS and the revealer). Usually, with Across-answer themes (i.e. most themes), you get your longer non-theme answers in the Downs. Today, no long Downs at all. Nothing over six letters. All this architectural weirdness must've snowballed from the placement of POMPOMS. If you put it at 1-Across (to match "I'M SHOOK!" at the bottom right), then it has to sit on two answers of at least seven letters in length. For every answer you put on the edge of the grid, there have to be at least two more adjacent answers of equal length moving inward, because any black squares in there would create one- or two-letter answers in the crosses, and those are not allowed. So I’M COMING CARESSING TRANSLATE EGOMANIA end up running with the flow of themers rather than perpendicular to that flow (as would be typical for longer answers in a conventional themed puzzle). If the puzzle seemed a little odd, structurally, well, now you know why (if you didn't already).
Three slightly stumpery parts for me today. One, I already covered (TRANSLATE!). The first such answer was the first Down I looked at: 1D: Draft selections (PICKS). I had the "P" from POMPOMS and could not think of a beer that fit. You see where I went wrong there. "PILS...S"? I now realize I dodged a bullet there, as PINTS would've fit, and then who knows what mess I'd've gotten into. The other answer I struggled with was I HEART (39D: Start of many souvenir slogans). Just a godawful standalone answer. A partial t-shirt phrase? And you're representing a visual (💗) with a word? Even the phrase "souvenir slogans" made no sense to me. That answer was in the thick of the "OH" v. "OH" collision. Needless to say, not my favorite part of the puzzle.
Bullets:
31A: Feature of a cockatoo (CREST) — they're notoriously proud of their aristocratic heritage, so they always wear little jackets featuring their family CREST. Weird little birds.
50A: Syllables of hesitation (UHS) — who doesn't love a "syllable of hesitation!" [raises hand]. Always an opportunity to make a mistake. Mine, today: UMS.
3D: Fast-food pork sandwich with its own locator website (MCRIB) — no one loves a MCRIB more than the crossword. This is its 10th appearance. Though it appears with reasonable frequency now, it actually took 30 years (!) for the MCRIB to find its way into the grid. It debuted in 1981 (!?), but back then, the editor (Maleska) was not (at all) inclined to put brand names in the puzzle. It's not that there were none, probably, but there were few, and probably very few from the fast-food category. But even after Shortz comes to power, it takes the better part of two decades for MCRIB to show up (2011). Once it got into constructors' wordlists, though, it ... I wouldn't say "took off," but persisted, for sure. Bet you didn't expect a MCRIB lesson today, did you? You are welcome.
21D: Green-and-white sidekick of video games (YOSHI) —
Relative difficulty: Medium (normal Monday, solved Downs-only)
THEME: PRNDL — i.e. automatic transmission automobile gears: theme answers begin with PARK, REVERSE, NEUTRAL, DRIVE, and LOW, respectively:
Theme answers:
PARK RANGER (17A: Authority figure in Yellowstone or Grand Teton)
REVERSE DUNK (25A: Iconic basketball move of Kobe Bryant)
NEUTRAL COLORS (37A: Hues unlikely to cause clashes)
DRIVE INSANE (52A: Annoy to a maddening extent)
LOW SPIRITS (61A: Downer feeling)
Word of the Day: DENISE Richards (32A: Actress Richards of "The World Is Not Enough") —
Denise Lee Richards (born February 17, 1971) is an American actress, television personality, and model.[2] She rose to prominence with roles in the science fiction film Starship Troopers (1997), the erotic thriller film Wild Things (1998), and the James Bond film The World Is Not Enough (1999). Her performance as Bond girlChristmas Jones, though criticized, granted Richards her mainstream breakthrough.
[3D: 1980 disaster comedy film with an exclamation point in its title]
Hello and welcome to the Oscars™ Edition of Rex Parker Does the NYT Crossword Puzzle. Sadly, that does not mean that this post will feature movie stars and musical numbers, only that, for the first time in a long long time, I stayed up late (well past 10!) watching the Academy Awards broadcast to the very end, and so now am sitting here paying for it at 4:15 in the morning. Thus, the write-up will be abbreviated. I think. Or else I'll go into a delirious underslept rambling and I'll fill up the usual amount of space, but god knows with what? Anyway, congrats to ANORA, which deserved everything it won, and which will now definitely be in crosswords for, well, eons. Prepare yourself.
As for this puzzle, it's PRNDL. That's it. I think that's it. I've definitely seen PRNDL-themed puzzles before, probably not exactly like this. Slightly weird to see a Monday puzzle with no revealer (I assume there will be at least some small number of people wondering what the theme is), but why crowd the grid with a revealer that's fairly obvious and not that exciting (PRNDL shows up as fill sometimes, to no one's great joy)? It's hard to talk pluses / negatives with this theme. It just is. There they are, five phrases that start with those five words. I think they're reasonably colorful phrases on their own. Solving Downs-only, it took me slightly longer than it usually takes to parse them. All of them. The RANGERS, DUNK, COLORS, and LOW parts all took some hacking away at (I didn't really "see" the theme until I was all done). My worst hold-up / slow-down involved imagining that the middle themer was NEUTRAL CORNER (you know, like in boxing?). Also, it took me a few beats to convince myself that LURER was a thing (still not convinced, frankly) (5D: Enticing one), and a few more beats to get 45D: Dexterous (ADROIT) when I couldn't get ADEPT to fit.
The worst struggle, however, was probably the same for anyone solving Downs-only (certainly true for both my wife and me), and that was: IN MIND (12D: Thought of and considered). So many issues, not least of which is that the clue looks like a verb phrase (whereas "Thought of" and "considered" are being used semi-adjectivally here, i.e something IN MINDhasbeen (or is being) "thought of" and "considered"). Parsing that baby was rough. All kinds of awkwardness there, esp. for a Monday. But this will only be jarring only if you're solving Downs-only. Otherwise, probably just a weirdness blip. No biggie.
A few more things:
25A: Iconic basketball move of Kobe Bryant (REVERSE DUNK) — weird. I watched him play a few times over the years, I don't remember the REVERSE DUNK being "iconic" for him. I'm sure it's got some truth to it, it's just ... if it were truly "iconic" (like Kareem's skyhook, or Jordan's dunk where he takes off from about the freethrow line), then I would expect it to leap out at me.
28A: "The ___" (Tyler Perry series set in the White House) ("OVAL") — sometimes it's good to solve Downs-only, as you don't get tripped up by pop culture stuff you don't know. I would've been stumped here (though I'm always happy for the opportunity to remind people that TYLER PERRY made his first appearance in the NYTXW in one of my puzzles) (the same puzzle in which I debuted AMYPOEHLER and PORTLANDIA) (Jun. 21, 2013)
69A: "___ of the D'Urbervilles" (Thomas Hardy novel) ("TESS") — the parenthetical feels redundant. I mean, if you don't know TESS from the title alone, then saying it's a "Thomas Hardy novel" is not going to help you. Why not [Hardy heroine]? It's so neat and compact. And alliterative, for those of you who like that.
26D: Part of a microscope or telescope (EYE LENS) — as with LURER, I balked at this one. Are there lenses for *other* parts of your body. A TOE LENS, maybe? EYE LENS feels ridiculously redundant.
59D: Author and lawyer ___ Stanley Gardner (ERLE) — I like that they stuck "lawyer" in there. It's true! And it was very relevant to the creation of all his detective novels, particularly the Perry Mason ones. If you're going to bring back old-school crosswordese, sure, give us a little added trivia. I like that.
THEME: "Rainbow Connection" — seven colored vertical lines appear in the grid (one for each color of the rainbow: REDORANGEYELLOWGREENBLUEINDIGOVIOLET); in order to solve the Acrosses that cross those lines, you have to add the letters from the colors, as if the names of those colors appeared INSIDE THE LINES (113A: Tidy way to color ... and where seven words are hiding in this puzzle?):
Theme answers:
BURG (1A: Town)
ASEA (19A: Mid-voyage)
NODS (23A: Go-ahead responses)
SOHO (16A: N.Y.C. neighborhood where the Cronut was invented)
IRAN (22A: Neighbor of Pakistan)
EASE (26A: Move gingerly)
GNAT (30A: Winged pest)
PREGGO (35A: Expecting, informally)
GALLEON (42A: Armada vessel)
GYRATE (49A: Go in circles)
REEF (55A: Maritime hazard)
ALPE (61A: Mont Blanc, par exemple)
PLOT (68A: Narrative arc)
POSY (73A: Modest bouquet)
ROYALWE (77A: Pompous "I")
MAGNET (56A: It's simultaneously attractive and repulsive)
GRAY (62A: Like much limestone)
MEETS (69A: Athletic competitions)
ALEE (74A: On the safe side, nautically)
GRINDS (79A: Makes mincemeat of)
ABBA (70A: Band whose name is a rhyme scheme)
COLT (75A: Derby entry)
TRUE (81A: Verifiable)
TWINES (85A: Packaging cords)
TAIPING (92A: ___ Rebellion (19th-century Chinese conflict))
ORNATE (101A: Showy)
TEDX (106A: Spinoff of a popular lecture series)
ATIT (112A: Fighting)
LOGO (116A: Nike's swoosh or McDonald's golden arches)
SOON (120A: Not quite yet)
CANTEVEN (97A: Is too overwhelmed with emotion to speak)
SIRI (105A: iPhone speaker?)
COON (111A: Actress Carrie of HBO's "The Leftovers")
OLDE (115A: Word on a shoppe sign)
PEER (119A: Equal)
ETDS (123A: Some flight tracker data, for short)
Word of the Day: TAIPING Rebellion (92A: ___ Rebellion (19th-century Chinese conflict)) —
The Taiping Rebellion, also known as the Taiping Civil War or the Taiping Revolution, was a civil war in China between the Manchu-led Qing dynasty and the Hakka-led Taiping Heavenly Kingdom. The conflict lasted 14 years, from its outbreak in 1850 until the fall of Taiping-controlled Nanjing—which they had renamed Tianjing "heavenly capital"—in 1864. The last rebel forces were defeated in August 1871. Estimates of the conflict's death toll range between 20 and 30 million people, representing 5–10% of China's population at that time. While the Qing ultimately defeated the rebellion, the victory came at a great cost to the state's economic and political viability.
The uprising was led by Hong Xiuquan, an ethnic Hakka who had proclaimed himself to be the brother of Jesus Christ. Hong sought the religious conversion of the Han people to his syncretic version of Christianity, as well as the political overthrow of the Qing dynasty, and a general transformation of the mechanisms of state. Rather than supplanting China's ruling class, the Taiping rebels sought to entirely upend the country's social order. The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom located at Nanjing managed to seize control of significant portions of southern China. At its peak, the Heavenly Kingdom ruled over a population of nearly 30 million people. (wikipedia)
• • •
This puzzle was basically over ... here:
The first few Acrosses in the NW wouldn't work, so I got the Downs and a couple more Acrosses and I could immediately see what was up. After that, the whole theme was transparent, and the whole puzzle a little bit easier, as I had ... what is that? 33 letters, just handed to me by the grid? Nothing left to discover. Just the revealer—which is fine, but not exactly thrilling. The puzzle was diverting, I guess. But on the whole it was too easy and way way Way too full of 3- and 4-letter answers. It's such a weirdly-built grid, with these loooong narrow sections, and then complete non-connectivity between the SW and NE corners and the adjacent S and N sections, respectively. If you solve by working off crosses you already have (as I do—it's efficient), then you have to climb So Far to get back out of the SW and into the rest of the grid. If you're down at SO(O)N (the very bottom of the grid in the SW), you have to go all the way back up to GRATE (above the equator!) before you can find a way back down into the southern part of the grid. Here, I've drawn red lines to show what I mean:
That makes the SW and NE the most bizarrely cut-off / sequestered / isolated corners I've ever seen in a grid. Might as well be wholly separate puzzles. Those red lines highlight the corridor-like structure of the grid, which in turn highlights just how many short answers there were—a brutal amount of short stuff, truly. The idea here is cute, I think, and the revealer is right on the money, in terms of representing what's actually going on with the theme. I appreciate that all the color-crossing Acrosses make totally plausible (unclued) answers without the letters from the colors in place, and I also appreciate that the colors of the rainbow are basically in order, reading L to R, top to bottom (RO up top, YGB in the center section, and IV down below). But this puzzle had no sustain. The theme reveals itself all at once, early, and you're left with the rather workmanlike task of filling in a bunch of mostly 3- and 4-letter answers, one letter of which has already been provided with you. Not exactly peak thrills.
[95A: Something to chew on]
I got in precisely two jams while solving this one, neither of which lasted long, the first of which was much worse than the second. The first ... was the "WHY IS IT?" (!?!?!?!) / DILI / TAIPING smash-up in the SW. I could not bring myself to accept "WHY IS IT?" as a question. What is the context for that question? It does not read like a plausible standalone question, and it especially doesn't seem a strong enough question to be worthy of a wacky "?" clue (67D: Line of questioning?). Is "Line of questioning?" just ... a line ... you say ... when you question something? Isn't any question a "line of questioning?" So bad / weak / strange. As for DILI, shrug, just forgot it. It's been in the puzzle before, but it's pretty obscure, as world capitals go (83A: Capital of East Timor). And as for TAIPING, that's on me, I really should know what the hell that is, but tbh I did not. I looked it up and I can't believe I was wholly unaware of what seems to be a major even in world history. Sometimes the holes in our knowledge are gaping. Most of us don't confess them to the world, but ... that's what I've signed on for, so now you know: my knowledge of Chinese history is (apparently) very poor. The other sticky spot for me in the grid was HASH (!?) / ADD FUEL, the first part of which was just whatever, coding blah blah I'll just trust you on that (96D: Encryption code, in computer science lingo), but the last part of which, ugh, horrible (103A: What "E" on a gauge means). "E" means "Empty." It absolutely does not mean "ADD FUEL." You ADD FUELbefore you get to "E." Just a cheap, stupid trick to say that "E" means "ADD FUEL." Your car might have an "ADD FUEL" warning message, but, still, that's not what "E" means. Hey, did you know ADD FUEL is also (per wikipedia) the moniker of "Portuguese visual artist and illustrator Diogo Machado (born 1980)"? He's a graffiti / street artist. His work looks very cool, actually. Lots of blue & white patterns, and the occasional freaky creature.
But yeah, beyond the "WHY IS IT?" and ADD FUEL sections, not a struggle point anywhere. All the ink on my print-out is concentrated on those two areas. I think I had some hesitation around HE OR SHE (32A: Binary pronoun options) because it's not a formulation I've heard in a while, and also I thought it might be HE OR HIM ... like, some extended way of saying your pronouns are "he/him." Wish there had been some (any) context on the clue for SIT ONE OUT (11D: Take a breather). One what? Dance? Give me some color, clue! Make me see it.
What else?:
9A: "Don't take offense," nowadays ("NO SHADE") — "No offense" turned into this phrase a while back, among people younger than ... well, me, that's for sure. Still, very familiar to me, for many years, unlike "NO CAP" ("no lie," "for real"), which I learned only just last year, from a crossword (I think) and then my students, who confirmed, yes, old man, it's a thing. (They didn't say the "old man" part, and if they thought it, I'm sure it was affectionate)
16A: N.Y.C. neighborhood where the Cronut was invented (SOHO) — are cronuts still things? For like six months there, everyone was all cronut this, cronut that, but now ... the very term feels like a relic. A 2010s relic. "Time magazine named the Cronut one of the best inventions of 2013," LOL "invention."
24A: The humanities, traditionally (ARTS AND LETTERS) — been in the humanities (specifically, English departments) my entire adult life and yet this phrase did not come naturally at all. ARTS AND SCIENCES wouldn't fit ... and so I was stuck until I got some crosses. I realize that "sciences" are not "humanities," but if you Match Game me with "ARTS AND ___," there's only one word I'm going to want. Well, two. There's ARTS AND CRAFTS, but that doesn't seem to fit the context, somehow.
44A: One tapped by leadership? (SIR) — think "knight," as in "I dub thee, SIR Mix-A-Lot, Defender of Big Butts" or whatever, and then tap tap with a sword on either shoulder, and then rise and assume your title.
74A: On the safe side, nautically (ALEE) — one of the weirdest things about the extended NYT Games universe is that ALEE is ultra-common in the crossword, but Spelling Bee does not recognize its existence.
111A: Actress Carrie of HBO's "The Leftovers" (COON) — would've been a massive "???" to me except I listen occasionally to Marc Maron's "WTF" podcast and she was a very recent guest on that show (Feb. 24), so even though I haven't listened to that interview yet, her name was right in front of my face, and somehow it stuck.
16D: Longtime host Robert of NPR's "All Things Considered" (SIEGEL) — good memories of a time I was still able to listen to NPR (I gave up almost all news-related and even news-adjacent radio and TV, including any and all late night shows, the moment the Creep came to power in 2016—it's hard for me even to listen to my local classical station, as I have to remember to turn the channel at the top of every hour so I don't have to endure hearing about whatever inevitable horror the day has to offer) (I'll fill myself in, on my own time, in as brief a way as possible). (note: Sebastian STAN is stealth Creep content (82A: Actor Sebastian ___ of the "Avengers" movies)—he's up for Best Actor (tonight!) for playing a young Creep in last year's The Apprentice).
42D: Sydneysider's salutation ("G'DAY, MATES") — a little weird in the plural, maybe, but I'll allow it, if only for the experience of the word "Sydneysider," which would be a *good* debut, if you could manage to squeeze it into a grid.
48D: Super Mario character also known as King Koopa (BOWSER) — ... and the Nintendification of the puzzle continued unabated ...
79D: Single-player and multiplayer, for two (GAME MODES) — a little weird in the plural, once again, but this video game term, I didn't mind, as it did not require me to be proficient in any single video game's lore.
114D: Popular wood for American whiskey barrels until a 20th-century blight (ELM) — huh. I did not know this. Oak is the most common wood for such barrels today. Always up for some whiskey history in my puzzle. I assume the "blight" in question is "Dutch Elm Disease"
Have a Roy G. Beautiful day. I'm gonna go try to do my 5-mile walk in 9-degree weather :( See you next time.
Pretty LIMP, overall. The middle has something going for it—that central stagger-stack of POT BROWNIES, RULE OF THUMB, and BACON STRIPS is decent—but most of the rest of it just sort of lies there, not really distinguished or PUNCHY in any way, and even that center stack is somewhat tainted by the proximity of SAMUS, which is ... what is that? (30A: ___ Aran, protagonist in Nintendo's Metroid). Just the stupidest name I've ever seen in the grid (tapping the "Not All Debuts Are Good" sign, once again). I barely know what Metroid even is, and certainly never seen this "protagonist's" "name" before. The Nintendification of puzzles has gone way too far. Feels lazy and sad. Is this what you want your generational contribution to crosswords to be? Apparently. It doesn't even look like a name. I would have to guess at how to pronounce it. Just desperate, ugly fill. Also ugly—the two (2?) verb-A-noun phrases emerging out of the northern part of this puzzle. It's EAT-A-SANDWICH Day! RATES A TEN! SPIN A WEB! Clunk City. Anemic. The difficulty level on this puzzle was also bizarrely uneven, with the NW corner being legitimately hard, and everything south of SAMUS (SAY-mus? SAM-us? SHAY-mus? ... SAW Moose?) being a relative piece of cake. Would've been nice to have *every* corner of the grid involved in the fun today, the way yesterday's puzzle did, but ... hard to get excited by PARRED over COMMON AREA. The SW corner is giving me a little, I guess (PUNCHY, a wailing BANSHEE, and a RARE COIN, OK, you got something there...). But overall it was one corner of not terribly pleasant struggle, one bright spot there in the middle (Saw Moose notwithstanding), and then a lot of blah.
Yet another puzzle drowning in names. Crossing names, abutting names, names galore. FARRAH BANA! (fun to say). OHTANI IRWIN (unlikely team-up). ATAHUALPA LARRY'S ("come on down to ATAHUALPA LARRY'S for a great deal on wall-to-wall carpeting!"). Except for Saw Moose, the names were mostly gimmes for me today. Even IRWIN, who is very bygone and only wrote a couple things of note, was familiar to me as someone who collects old paperbacks and also grew up in the '70s, when the Rich Man, Poor Man miniseries was massssssive (only the second miniseries ... ever? Wow). Rich Man, Poor Man was 1976, Roots was 1977. Miniseries used to be Events. Anyway, knew that author guy, and FARRAH and the rest of the actors (BANA, ANYA), also straight-up gimmes, as was OHTANI, the greatest player in the entire history of baseball. The one active baseball player you absolutely should be required to know. LARRY'S, though, that's just bad fill. Any name you've tacked an "S" to, for any reason, is bad. And "California-based cookie brand"? Yeah, I don't know what that is. I grew up in California, but we didn't have these when I was a kid, and I haven't lived in California since 1991, so ... shrug. They're probably good. But LARRY'S, as fill, not good.
[Oh. These. I've seen these at gas station mini-marts, I guess.]
Lots of mistakes today. Like, lots. Wrong answers that I actually wrote in:
SAXON for SAMUS (30A: ___ Aran, protagonist in Nintendo's Metroid)
TORN ACL for TURF TOE (26D: Familiar injury in football and soccer)
EN PLEIN AIR (!!?!?!?!) for STREET FAIR (16A: In-tents dining experience?) (this is the fanciest mistake I've ever made in my entire crossword-solving life)
END for AIM (14D: Objective)
FEED for FUEL (5D: Provide power to)
EXTEND for EMBOSS (25D: Make stick out, in a way)
ELY for EEL (44A: Northern California's ___ River)
PURRED, and then PASSED, for PARRED (49A: Performed exactly as expected, in a way)
CHOO for CHOI (51A: "Parasite" co-star ___ Woo-shik) (I think I was thinking of Shin-Soo CHOO, who held the MLB record for most career home runs hit by an Asian-born player (218), until he was surpassed by ... Shohei OHTANI!)
More bullet points:
1A: Like some healthful spice blends (SALT-FREE) — could not fathom how you could make "spice" more "healthful." Did not occur to me that you would've had SALT in there as a default ingredient that would need removing.
7D and 43D: Supernatural descendant of Cain, in "Beowulf" (ELF / ORC) — I have read Beowulf. A bunch. Taught it a few times, even. And yet this factoid, I didn't really remember. I assume it comes during the discussion of "where the hell did Grendel come from?" (besides the obvious answer: his mom, who, like Grendel, and unlike ORCs and ELFs, is a major character in Beowulf)
4D: Variable representing an angle, in math (THETA) — me: "I dunno, some Greek letter, sigh, guess I'll just wait for crosses"
30D: One putting on a show (SOLO ACT) — this clue is cleverer than it seems, I think, since the "One" here has an intensified meaning: not just "a person" but "a single person." I had SOLOIST here at first, so I should probably add this answer to the "Mistakes" list, above.
40D: Feature of Mike Wazowski from "Monsters, Inc." (ONE EYE) — I'd've gone with [Polyphemus feature], but the infantilization of crosswords feels unstoppable, oh well.
[Odilon Redon, The Cyclops, ca. 1900]
50D: Word often found near Roman numerals (ANNO) — as in "ANNO domini," "the year of our lord" (what "A.D." stands for). Years are often expressed in Roman numerals. So that's what that clue's all about. Not sure about "often" here, as ANNO is usu. abbreviated. But since there's no standard for what counts as "often" ... I guess I can't really prosecute here.
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