African creature whose name is one letter away from what its horns might do / THU 5-15-25 / Dizzy feeling, with "the" / Certain grain source / Mark Twain tale narrated in the first person by a noted first woman

Constructor: Simeon Seigel

Relative difficulty: Hard (17:03)

THEME: [Statements that can be seen as positive ... or a hint to interpreting the theme entries] for DOUBLE NEGATIVE — In four long across entries, the letter string NO NO becomes YES, with each of the "NO"s squished into one box

Theme answers:

• [Some colorful apparel] for TIE DYE SHIRTS which was written as TIE D NO NO HIRTS
• The down answers crossing were NOD TO and DINO
• [Certain grain source] for RYE SEED which was written as R NO NO EED
• The down answers crossing were NOT IT and SNOOTILY
• [Old-fashioned homemade cleaner] for LYE SOAP which was written as L NO NO OAP
• The down answers crossing were NODULE and NOODLE
• [Des Moines's domain] for HAWKEYE STATE which was written as HAWKE NO NO TATE
• The down answers crossing were NOSE and RHINO

Word of the Day: HART (Eponym of the N.H.L.'s M.V.P. award) —

The Hart Memorial Trophy is named in honour of Canadian Dr. David Hart. Dr. Hart, who donated the original trophy to the NHL, was the father of Cecil Hart, a former coach and general manager of the Montreal Canadiens.

• • •

Hi friends! Welcome to an off-schedule Malaika MWednesday aka Malaika MThursday. I just watched a movie with a friend and then tried to catch a bus home. I missed the bus by literally 30 seconds (I ran after it and waved at the bus driver, the whole deal), and so I hopped on a bike, and while I was biking home I saw the exact bus I had missed in a huge accident!!!!! No one was hurt (because the busses here drive like 4mph lol) but the car was fully totaled and I am still reeling from this experience and feel like I am a character in Final Destination. 

Okay, sorry for rambling, onto the puzzle! I love love loved this theme, but I did not really like the level of difficulty. I am a huge fan of rebus puzzles! I think there should be more of them on other days of the week, with circles and in-app tips about how to enter the answer. I'm also pretty good at clocking a rebus puzzle early. Usually what happens is I run into an entry I've seen a zillion times, but it doesn't fit. In this case, it was with the clue [Acknowledge nonverbally]. I knew this had to be either "nod at" or "nod to," but there weren't enough empty boxes. 🚨Rebus alert!!!🚨 At that point I searched around the grid for the revealer and confirmed NO felt relevant.

I think new solvers struggle with rebuses because they don't trust their gut-- like, let's take a look at the clue [Beast with a horn]. Pretty much anyone would say that this is a RHINO. But a new solver would look at the four available boxes and think "Oh man there must be some esoteric animal I've never heard of...." (in the vein of okapi or oryx or, um, IMPALA) and leave it blank, where a more experienced solver would think "Aha! 🚨Rebus time!!🚨"

Speaking of rhinos, the Solio Rhino Sanctuary has a new baby named..... MALAIKA!!!

It took me about seven minutes to solve the thematic element of the puzzle (aka all the long across answers + the down answers that crossed through the rebus) and then ten minutes to solve the rest. For me, that's a long time to spend on a third of a themed puzzle, and I didn't love it. Once I was done with the theme, I kept thinking "Well what's the point of all this?" In a hard themeless puzzle, your reward is the long, colorful entries. But here, I was struggling with super opaque clues on short fill (LOOT for [Spoils] was one example here), and the cleverness did not feel fun, it felt like a chore. I finished with an error-- I had RUSH (for [Call for delivery?]) and ROKES (for [Slow sorts, in slang], thought it was some old-timey slang I didn't know). That central bottom section was sooo hard for me.

But I'd like to know what your solving progress was like! I'll admit that I absolutely bodied the theme-- as I said, I got the rebus almost immediately, and was able to immediately plunk in the revealer across the center; the rest of the theme content was easy-peasy from there. But if the rebus was more of a slow burn for you, and you didn't get the theme until your grid was already 3/4 full, I can see your experience with the difficulty being different from mine. 

This is not really related to the puzzle but "slow burn" made me think about the announcement that Season 4 of Bridgerton is coming out soon

I almost wish I'd got to experience the theme as a Slow Burn because it was so deliciously good. I feel like it could be in a Crossword Textbook for how to absolutely nail a theme. There's a couple pretty tricky things going on (a rebus, letters getting swapped in, and letters reading differently across vs down), but the revealer so perfectly describes the behavior that it almost feels simple once you get it. Like "Oh, duh! The double negative becomes a positive! Of course!!" So elegant. On top of that, the two longer theme answers were fun and interesting. (And, outside of the thematic entries, we got HAIR SALON and MEAT EATER.)

Bullets:

• [Small, clingy bristles on a gecko's foot] for SETAE crossing [Longtime deodorant brand] for ARRID — I had to totally guess on the A here. The gecko vocab was last used in the Times puzzle in 2013.
• [Letter before cue] for PEE — The clue is referencing the letter Q, which is preceded by the letter P. I think it's so dumb when they do this, btw. We all pee! Let the clue reference pee!!
• [Cool cat's "Roger that"] for IM HIP — I'm sorry but this felt like it was written twenty years ago...
• [Close one, for short] for BFF — Fantastic clue, and I would have loved to see this in a hard themeless puzzle with no abbreviation indicator. I think when abbreviations are used aloud just as commonly as the full term (like MIT or ATM) then hard puzzles don't need the indicator.

xoxo Malaika

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