Outliers in the data / MON 6-9-25 / Colorful puppy of children's TV / Easter or Passover, but not Christmas / Dangerous thing to be inside / Georg ___, longtime Chicago Symphony conductor / Relative of a rapier / Record-holder's suffix / Kimono-clad entertainer / Captain Hook's right-hand man / Hitchcock film given an R rating 24 years after its release

Constructor: Aimee Lucido

Relative difficulty: Easy (solved Downs-only)

THEME: LAST BUT NOT LEAST (61A: "And bringing up the rear ..." or an apt description of the ends of 17-, 26- and 46-Across) — themers all end with words that are almost, but not quite, LEAST:

Theme answers:

• BELLY OF THE BEAST (17A: Dangerous thing to be inside)
• MOVABLE FEAST (26A: Easter or Passover, but not Christmas)
• BREWER'S YEAST (46A: Beermaker's supply)

Word of the Day: EDGE CASES (34D: Outliers in the data) —

An edge case is a problem or situation that occurs only at an extreme (maximum or minimum) operating parameter. For example, a stereo speaker might noticeably distort audio when played at maximum volume, even in the absence of any other extreme setting or condition.

An edge case can be expected or unexpected. In engineering, the process of planning for and gracefully addressing edge cases can be a significant task, and yet this task may be overlooked or underestimated.

Some common causes of edge cases are:

• Unpredictable user behavior
• Evolution of use cases (e.g. user behavior may change over time)
• Limited test coverage
• Product complexity (for instance, in distributed systems or microservice architectures)
• Resource limitations (e.g. limited processing power, computer memory, or computer storage)
• Other external causes

Some basic examples of edge cases include:

• A long username in an app overflows and displays incorrectly
• A booking system does not handle reservations correctly on a leap day (February 29th)

Non-trivial edge cases can result in the failure of an object that is being engineered. They may not have been foreseen during the design phase, and they may not have been thought possible during normal use of the object. For this reason, attempts to formalize good engineering standards often include information about edge cases. (wikipedia)

• • •

This theme is silly so I kinda like it. You cannot argue with the fact that BEAST, FEAST, and YEAST are all "last" (in their respective answers), and are also not the word "LEAST," despite having 80% similarity. Those are all the five-letter -EAST words in existence, in case you're wondering (I ran the alphabet!). The fill is pretty clean, there are some nice longer Down answers, and the themers are nice standalone answers in their own right. Yes, this will do nicely for a Monday. Yes, there are a lot of repeaters, overly common short answers, but the only ones that really feel crosswordesey are ALTA and EPEE and SMEE and OLAV. Maybe RASTA. In the olden days, I would've thrown Georg SOLTI in there too, but I feel like he's fallen so far out of favor that he now feels less over-common, more retro or vintage (3D: Georg ___, longtime Chicago Symphony conductor). SOLTI died in 1997, but didn't hit his peak crossword fame until some time in the mid-aughts. He was definitely there in my early solving days (the early-mid '90s), as was, to a lesser extent, his first name, GEORG. At some point in the '90s, I started paying more attention to classical music, so his name became familiar to me outside of crosswords. Anyway, his name no longer feels like Monday material (if it ever did). But no doubt he was a major conductor. More than 250 recordings, including 45 complete opera sets (per wikipedia). I must own at least one of those recordings. Hang on, gonna go check... ah yeah, here we go. A nice Bartók piano concerto to get your week started right:

Or Beethoven's 8th, if that's more your vibe:

I had surprisingly little trouble with the Downs-only solve today. The one harrowing part was trying to put together EDGE CASES. The cue said "Outliers" but the only synonym I could think of was ... "outliers"? I couldn't think of a synonym, is what I'm saying. I had the whole puzzle done but that one answer. I managed to infer some letters from crosses, but not enough ... until I realized -RAB must be CRAB (rather than GRAB or DRAB), so that the last part of 34D could be CASES. From there, I just had to put together a four-letter word (ending in "E") that could plausibly precede CASES. And the first letter could only really be "U" or "E" (GL-E). The "U" was very unpromising, but as soon as I tested the "E," EDGE suddenly seemed self-evident. And sure enough, I filled it in and pop went the "Congratulations" message. 

The only other part that gave me trouble was BLUEY (28D: Colorful puppy of children's TV), because I thought the dog from Blue's Clues was named BLUE. I mean, why wouldn't I, the damned show is called Blue's Clues? But when BLUE wouldn't fit, I thought, "oh man, is the dog named actually BLUES? Did I have the apostrophe in the wrong place this whole time!?" Eventually BREWER'S YEAST gave me the "Y" for BLUEY. Sigh, turns out I had the wrong TV show in mind the whole time. Apparently, since last I paid any attention to children's television, a different show with a Different Blue Dog (?!) became popular, and that show is called (... wait for it ...) BLUEY. You probably knew this.

Bluey is an Australian animated television series aimed at preschool children, created by Joe Brumm and produced by Ludo Studio from Queensland. It was commissioned by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and the British Broadcasting Corporation, with BBC Studios holding global distribution and merchandising rights. Bluey premiered on ABC Kids on 1 October 2018. It subsequently made its international debut on Disney Junior in the United States and is available for streaming on Disney+. (wikipedia)

So it premiered on ABC Kids when my own kid was ... 18. And in college. This all makes sense now. OK, that's enough for today. See you next time.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

P.S. today's constructor, Aimee Lucido, is a successful author of middle-grade novels ... in verse! (I recommend Emmy in the Key of Code, which I enjoyed reading several years ago). She has a new one coming out this fall called WORDS APART , which really leans into words, vocabulary, and even crossword puzzles (it opens with a young girl solving a crossword with her mom and sister). I'll promote it again closer to publication time, once I've had a chance to read it completely (I just got my advance copy last week!), but you can find out more about it, and preorder it here (Amazon) or here (Bookshop).

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