First name of the "Princess of Pop" / SAT 6-21-25 / Old-fashioned club / Kitchen alternative to tallow / Donned quickly / Performs a perfect dismount, e.g. / Like "Animal Farm" and "Don Quixote" / Average booster / Literature Nobelist who wrote "Dodsworth" and "Kingsblood Royal"

Constructor: Christina Iverson and Doug Peterson

Relative difficulty: Hard

THEME: None

Word of the Day: BOBSLED (1A: Olympics event in which Germany is the traditional powerhouse) —

Bobsleigh or bobsled is a winter sport in which teams of 2 to 4 athletes make timed speed runs down narrow, twisting, banked, iced tracks in a gravity-powered sleigh. International bobsleigh competitions are governed by the International Bobsleigh and Skeleton Federation (formerly the FIBT).

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Hello crossword people! It's Rafa here subbing for Rex. Happy to be back on your screens, and I hope you've all been doing great since I was last here. I've been doing OK, and can't wait for summer to finally start. (Summer in San Francisco starts in late August, and goes through early October. June and July and mostly cold and sad and windy. Boo!)

More excitingly, tomorrow is Westwords -- the West Coast crossword tournament! I cannot wait to hang out with crossword friends new and old, and solve some great puzzles. If you're there, say hi! I'll probably have a sticker that says "Rafa" on my shirt. If you won't be there, pencil it in your schedules for next year! (Remember when I said June is cold and sad and windy? That only applies to San Francisco. Westwords is in Berkeley, which is only 10 miles away but it is beautiful and warm and sunny in June. This is very important to know!)

Anyways, let's talk about this puzzle now. I don't know if it's because it's kind of late at night and my brain is somewhat mush, but this played quite hard for me! One of the slowest Saturday solves in recent memory. There was just resistance everywhere I tried to go, and very few answers came easy. As a seasoned solver, it's somewhat rare that a puzzle feels this hard, and it was fun to crack it slowly. I'm curious to know if this also played hard for others -- let me know!

Trains and buses in San Francisco are called MUNI

The first thing I noticed about this grid was that it had an unusual shape. Non-Sunday crosswords are typically 15x15, but this one is 14x16. This makes it easier to include entries of length 16 (impossible in a 15x15 grid) and 14 (annoying to build around in a 15x15 grid), which are more likely to be new to solvers. BARBIE DREAM HOUSE and SIBLING RIVALRY were my favorites here. RAILROAD STATIONS feels a bit more neutral but has a lovely clue in [Training facilities?] (facilities where you get on trains, aka train-ing). STOPPED ON A DIME is a totally legit idiom but didn't feel super zingy to me.

Netflix is headquartered in LOS Gatos, in the Bay Area

Overall, the clue-answer pair in PRIVATE JET and [Flight of fancy?] felt like the pièce de résistance. I said "ooh, that's good" out loud when I figured it out. There lots else to love in the non-spanner fill -- things like LET IT GO, HEART SMART, AIR KISS, THREW ON, etc. I had never heard of PISTOL PETE, but I also have never heard of most sports things, so alas I am unable to comment on whether it is good crossword fill!

There's an iconic hike at Stanford to walk up to this dish, which I guess is an ANTENNA

Hmm, what else? [It has its peaks and valleys] didn't totally land for me for GRAPH. Maybe I'm missing something but I don't think of high and low points on a graph as "peaks" and "valleys" ... it felt like a misdirect that was trying too hard. ORAN was the only piece of fill that felt off. I tend to be a very geography-forward crossword constructor, but ORAN and ADEN have always felt a bit a bit too ... obscure? ... to me. "Obscure" isn't really the right word here, actually. ORAN is a city of >1M people. But there are >100 cities with >1M people in China, and >65 in India. I'm not sure what makes a city "worthy" of inclusion in a crossword by an American publication, genuinely. I personally have never heard of ORAN in the news or in any other context outside of a crossword puzzle. Though of course (see: "I also have never heard of most sports things"), this is not a good metric for worthiness of crossword inclusion. Maybe I need to read more about Algeria? Anyways, this became a whole tangent. I'm just trying to convey that everything has Nuance™. But we can move on now!

Actually, this is pretty much all I wanted to say. A fun Saturday offering today that put up a good challenge for me!

Bullets:

• 51D NANA [Gram alternative] -- This is "gram" as in a nickname for a grandma.
• 34A JODIE [Foster kid in "Taxi Driver"?] -- This is a ? clue because "Foster" is the actress JODIE'S last name, and she was a kid in the movie Taxi Driver. (Yes I had to look this up. Real fans of Rafa's blog subs will recall that I famously know nothing about movies or actors.)
• 10D AIDA ["Ritorna vincitor" singer] / 12D SNERD [Mortimer who once made a guest appearance on "The Muppet Show"] -- big "old time" crossword vibes in this little corner with these answers
• 14A I HAVE TO [Words before ask, admit, or go] -- I can't decide if I like that this was essentially clued as a three-word partial instead of as a standalone phrase

Signed, Rafa

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