Sound from a dental click / SAT 4-19-25 / Portmanteau pants / Move quickly with the wind, as clouds / Film franchise that boosted sales of Ray-Ban sunglasses, for short / 20th-century activist ___ Milholland, dubbed a "Joan of Arc-like symbol of the suffrage movement" / Celestial object producing a so-called "lighthouse effect" as it rotates

Constructor: Alex Tomlinson

Relative difficulty: Easy

THEME: none 

Word of the Day: INEZ Milholland (19A: 20th-century activist ___ Milholland, dubbed a "Joan of Arc-like symbol of the suffrage movement") —

Inez Milholland Boissevain (August 6, 1886 – November 25, 1916) was a leading American suffragist, lawyer, and peace activist.

From her college days at Vassar College, she campaigned aggressively for women’s rights as the principal issue of a wide-ranging socialist agenda. In 1913, she led the dramatic Woman Suffrage Procession on horseback in advance of President Woodrow Wilson's inauguration as a symbolic herald. She was also a labor lawyer and a war correspondent, as well as a high-profile New Woman of the age, with her avant-garde lifestyle and belief in free love. She died of pernicious anemia on a speaking tour, traveling against medical advice. (wikipedia)

• • •

This was fine, but for the third day in a row, way, way too easy. There was a time when Saturday puzzles would absolutely f*** you up. A time when I, a fairly experienced solver, would have to Work, hard, to bring one of those babies down. A few of them absolutely broke me. But now if a Saturday takes me as much as 8 minutes, that's actually on the harder side. Today's puzzle ... well, without speeding at all, taking multiple screenshots along the way ... I don't know how long it took me, but I know that my computer's clock said 10:07 as I was printing the finished puzzle out (it's currently Friday night) and the puzzle doesn't even come out until 10:00, and I don't think I started right at 10:00, so ... conservatively, this took me a leisurely 5 minutes. 6 tops. And again, that's without any urgency on my part. That's about the amount of resistance I'd expect from a Wednesday puzzle. In fact, the Wednesday puzzle might've given me more resistance this week than this puzzle did. Having very few proper nouns and a relatively clean grid really helps move things along, but still, cluing could've been significantly amped up. I have exactly three parts of the puzzle marked as problem areas: INEZ (one of the few proper nouns, just didn't know her); SCUD (really thought the verb was SCUT, for some reason ... possibly because SCUD is the missile) (8A: Move quickly with the wind, as clouds) (SCUT is menial work); and BASE JUMP (51A: Go off a cliff, maybe) (I know the phenomenon, but for some reason my first stab at this answer was BASE DIVE, which gave rise to the amazing pants portmanteau, DORTS ... which I thought were maybe "denim shorts" ... which is what JORTS, in fact, are (jean shorts)). Nothing else in the grid caused more than a few moments' hesitation, tops. 

["... to improve your [Know-how in negotiations, say]"]

Yesterday's grid had so many snappy answers that I was too happy to complain very much about easiness. But today, the snappiness has abated somewhat. Hard to get excited about some guy who thinks he has BUSINESS ACUMEN dreaming up ACTION ITEMs while on his REVERSE COMMUTE. Also hard to get excited about semi-redundant answers like EXAM PAPER and (esp.) EMAIL SPAM. The high notes just weren't that high, and without difficult, or even particularly clever, clues to at least provide a solving challenge, there wasn't nearly so much pleasure to be had today. Again, I think this is solid enough, and clean enough. But it's neither as flashy as yesterday's nor as hard as a Saturday oughta be.

The puzzle starts with a gimme (1A: Support in construction) that also provides the opening letters of two very long Down. I went IBAR REFER ASOF IRA RULE before I could stop moving my fingers, which gave me most of those long Downs: some of BUSINESS [blank] (I wanted SENSE or something like that) and all of ALONG THOSE LINES:

From there, I started in on the bottom with SUDS (64A: They're in a lather) and whooshed back up the grid again, filling in everything adjacent to those two long Downs without too much problem. Before long (a couple minutes, at most), I was half done:

TABARD is kind of a hard word (45D: Sleeveless medieval garment), but I feel like we had it really recently. . . nope, apparently not. I swear, I encountered it really recently, and talked about it ... with someone, somewhere? Maybe it was at the tournament? Anyway, if that stumped you, that seems reasonable. Aside from the few proper nouns, I'm not seeing any likely sticking points. The highlights of this puzzle for me were ALONG THOSE LINES ... and, to a lesser extent, DETECTIVE BUREAU (would've liked DETECTIVE AGENCY better, as it's more in-the-language, ergo snappier ... and it fit! Thankfully, I worked that answer from the bottom up, so AGENCY was never an option). BASE JUMP is also a winner—it's a debut with a lot of bold energy. On the other end of the spectrum, energy-wise, is MADE A STOP, which is a real EAT-A-SANDWICH moment. The man who believed he had BUSINESS ACUMEN MADE A STOP during his REVERSE COMMUTE so he could EAT A SANDWICH. Easier to formulate ACTION ITEMs on a full stomach, I assume, probably.

Assorted notes:

• 33A: Sound from a dental click (TUT) — "dental click" must be a technical linguistic term, like a "fricative" or "plosive" or something like that. Yes, here we go. At first I thought I was going to have to imagine the sounds of various machines in the dentist's office. Grim.
• 35A: Need for an international student (VISA) — speaking of grim. The USA is currently kidnapping international students off the street and putting them in detention centers solely because they expressed opinions at odds with those of the current administration. Rümeysa Öztürk *had* a valid F-1 student VISA. Lot of good it did her.
• 14D: Film franchise that boosted sales of Ray-Ban sunglasses, for short (MiB) — Men in Black. Not sure if I would've got this with no help, but thankfully I had the "B" in place, and that was enough. I just watched Tommy Lee Jones in the 1978 American giallo Eyes of Laura Mars last week. I can't say I loved it, but Faye Dunaway is always a treat (here, as a famous fashion photographer who has visions of a serial killer's POV right before he kills), and late-'70s NYC always looks amazing, even in its awfulness. Laura Mars falls in the category of "not good movie that I would definitely watch again."

• 56A: Duke residence (DORM) — as attempted fakeouts go, this is a pretty old one: the old "hide the college name" trick (e.g. [Temple building], [Rice pad], etc.). Seems like maybe you should be looking for the residence of a duke or duchess. But no.
• 6D: Those whose time has come and gone? (EXCONS) — I like the answer and I really like the clue. The "time" here is the time they served in prison.

See you next time.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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