Wednesday, July 9, 2025

Famous misquote of a James Cagney line from the 1932 film "Taxi!" / WED 7-9-25 / Squids' kin / Popular digital wallet service / California college where the writer David Foster Wallace taught English / Repeated sounds in "Hey Jude" / Redheaded boy of 1960s TV / 1970s space station

Constructor: Desirée Penner and Jeff Sinnock

Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium


THEME: Positional wordplay — answers around the edges of the grid have clues that playfully ("?"-style) indicate that position:

Theme answers:
  • MUTT (1A: Top dog?) (a kind of "dog" located on the "top" of the grid)
  • LID (5A: Top hat?) (a word for "hat" located on the "top" of the grid)
  • PISTOL (8A: Top gun?) (a kind of "gun" located on the "top" of the grid)
  • MEMO (1D: Side note?) (a kind of "note" located on the "side" of the grid)
  • BOARD (27D: Side plank?) (a kind of "plank" located on the "side" of the grid)
  • PUNT (58D: Side kick?) (a kind of "kick" located on the "side" of the grid)
  • LIMB (13D: Side arm?) (a category that includes "arm" located on the "side" of the grid)
  • PLATE (34D: Side dish?) (a kind of "dish" located on the "side" of the grid)
  • TASK (65D: Side job?) (a word "job" located on the "side" of the grid)
  • TROUGH (73A: Bottom feeder?) (a kind of "feeder" located on the "bottom" of the grid)
  • RAY (74A: Bottom line?) (a type of "line" located on the "bottom" of the grid)
  • BUCK (75A: Bottom dollar?) (a slang word for "dollar" located on the "bottom" of the grid)
Word of the Day: Taxi! (61A: Famous misquote of a James Cagney line from the 1932 film "Taxi!" = "YOU DIRTY RAT!") —

Taxi! is a 1932 American pre-Code film directed by Roy Del Ruth and starring James Cagney and Loretta Young.

The film includes a famous, and often misquoted, line with Cagney speaking to his brother's killer through a locked closet door: "Come out and take it, you dirty yellow-bellied rat, or I'll give it to you through the door!" This line has often been misquoted as "You dirty rat, you killed my brother".

To play his competitor in a ballroom dance contest, Cagney recommended his pal, fellow tough-guy-dancer George Raft, who was uncredited in the film. In a lengthy and memorable sequence, the scene culminates with Raft and his partner winning the dance contest against Cagney and Young, after which Cagney slugs Raft and knocks him down. As in The Public Enemy (1931), several scenes in Taxi! involved the use of live machine gun bullets. After a few of the bullets narrowly missed Cagney's head, he outlawed the practice in his future films.

• • •

Hard for a puzzle with short themers to be very interesting. Once you grasp the gimmick, then you're just going around the grid picking up fairly obvious synonyms or rough equivalents, all of them 3-4-5s. Then, because of the theme (that is, because of a preponderance of 3-4-5s), you end up with a very choppy grid without a hell of a lot of interesting things happening inside it. The NYTXW is supposed to max out at 78 words, but this one goes to 80. What that means, for practical purposes, is there's a whole lot of short stuff going on. The marquee answer here is "YOU DIRTY RAT!," which I enjoyed seeing, and learning about—I've seen imitations of Cagney that quote the line, but I didn't know where the line was from, or that it was a misquote. But for lots (and lots) of younger (than me) solvers, that answer is going to mean absolutely nothing. You're asking people to know an iconic misquoted line that hasn't really been iconic since Cagney himself was iconic (when I was a kid, yes, still, but now ... only to TCM fans like me) (note: I don't actually have TCM anymore since I cut cable and (eventually) its streaming replacements, but I still feel loyalty—it was my old-movie University for a long while). If I had to name five Cagney movies, Taxi! would not be among them. In fact, I have never seen the movie and if I've heard of it, I forgot it. This is all to say—"YOU DIRTY RAT!" a very deep cut for a Wednesday, and a highly anomalous answer in this puzzle for that reason. Generationally divisive for sure. I think it's the most interesting thing in the grid. Others ... are (maybe) not apt to feel that way.


All the plays-on-words in the theme clues are actual things, which is nice. Sometimes when you have to use repeated phrasing like this (top top top, side side side, etc.), you end up with at least a few clues that feel forced, but to me, only "side job" feels a little off, but it's not; not really. I think it's largely been replaced by "side hustle," and that's why it doesn't feel as solid (to my ears) as the others. But it's perfectly legitimate. It's possible "side plank" won't be well known to some people, but it's a pretty common core strengthening exercise (and, as vasisthasana, a staple of many yoga classes), so there's no reason to object to it. I didn't like how the relationship between clue word and answer word was not consistent. That is, the answer is an example of the word in the clue (e.g. PISTOL is a kind of "gun") ... but then, with LIMB / "arm," the category / example relationship gets reversed (e.g. "arm" is a kind of LIMB) ... and then a few other times, the answer is just a synonym of the clue (e.g. BUCK and "dollar," PLANK and "board"). The concept still works, but it keeps changing how it works, slightly, from answer to answer.


Because the fill is so frequently short, it ends up on the weak side. LOL at LALA *and* NANANA being in the same grid. NANANA has me saying "nah ... nah, nah" (70A: Repeated sounds in "Hey Jude").That's not an answer, that's a typo of "BANANA." If you replaced that first "NA" with SHA, you'd have a band. But otherwise, just say no no no to NANANA. There's scads of other short repeaters (ANODE ATO ETA EPEE ÉTÉ etc.) and a few words I only ever see in xwords (looking at you, GNAR ... also MISAIM). But there's nothing here to get particularly mad at. Oh, except ... I expect the OCTOPI-haters to be out in force once again (16A: Squids' kin). "That's not how you pluralize ... [sputter] ... Greek! ... [wheeze] ... not Latin! ... No!" Blah blah blah, I know, I know, I don't like it either, but it's in the dictionary, so please read this fantastic discussion of the Octopus Plural Dilemma at Merriam-Webster (dot com), and then get over it. Thank you. Actually, here—a little consolation for the OCTOPI-weary: if you're persnickety about these things, you'll love this 19th-century swipe at "modern" spellings:
But as the Octopus grew and multiplied, it became necessary to speak of him in the plural; and here a whole host of difficulties arose. Some daring spirits with little Latin and less Greek, rushed upon octopi; as for octopuses, a man would as soon think of swallowing one of the animals thus described as pronounce such a word at a respectable tea-table. In this condition of affairs, we are glad to know that a few resolute people have begun to talk about Octopods, which is, of course, the nearest English approach to the proper plural. (The Bradford Observer, 1873) (via merriam-webster.com)

Round-up:
  • 20A: Number with 12 zeros in the U.S. but 18 zeros in other parts of the world (ONE TRILLION) — I need to know what these "other parts of the world" are and what (in the world) they call the number with 12 zeros, then. I know that ONE BILLION, until fairly recently, had a different meaning in Britain (the "long scale" million million, or 10 to the 12th power, as opposed to the "short scale" 1,000 million, or 10 to the 9th, which is now the standard in all varieties of English). So a "long scale" billion is actually more than our standard trillion. It's absurd to me that these values weren't standardized across Englishes from the jump.  
  • 31A: Popular digital wallet service (CASH APP) — according to Pew Research in 2022, 26% of U.S. adults have used this app at least once. I am not one of those adults. But I somehow "knew" this answer. It sounds like a category of app and not an actual app ("hey, what CASH APP do you use?"), but nope, that's the name; CASH APP (formerly "Square Cash").
  • 8D: California college where the writer David Foster Wallace taught English (POMONA) — hey, it's the alma mater of ... me! And NYT Mini Crossword editor Joel Fagliano! I was too old (c/o '91) to have had Wallace (d. 2008) as my professor, and Joel (c/o '14) was too young.

See you next time.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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Tuesday, July 8, 2025

Rock out on stage? / TUE 7-8-25 / Place for a coin collection? / One of many on a self-driving car / What a pleasure-seeker seeks / British celebrity restaurateur Gordon ___ / Beach, in Spanish / Pop singer Ora

Constructor: Jesse Guzman

Relative difficulty: Medium (normal Tuesday)


THEME: A-PLUS WORK (54A: Outstanding effort ... or a feature of 16-, 21-, 34- and 46-Across) — circled squares in four answers contain "A" + some occupation (or "work"):

Theme answers:
  • LAGUARDIA (16A: Airport that Captain Sully departed from) ("a + guard")
  • HANNA-BARBERA (21A: Animation studio behind "Scooby-Doo") ("a + barber")
  • ACHE FOR (34A: Crave) ("a + chef")
  • DOPAMINE RUSH (46A: What a pleasure-seeker seeks) ("a + miner")
Word of the Day: CHRIS Rock (35D: Rock out on stage?) —

Christopher Julius Rock (born February 7, 1965) is an American comedian, actor, and filmmaker. He first gained prominence for his stand-up routines in the 1980s in which he tackled subjects including race relations, human sexuality, and observational comedy. His success branched off into productions in film, television, and on-stage, having received multiple accolades including three Grammy Awards for Best Comedy Album, four Primetime Emmy Awards, and a Golden Globe Award nomination. Rock was ranked No. 5 on Comedy Central's list of the 100 Greatest Stand-ups of All Time. He also ranked No. 5 on Rolling Stone's list of the 50 Best Stand-Up Comics of All Time.

After years working as a stand-up comedian and appearing in minor film roles including Beverly Hills Cop II (1987), Rock gained prominence as a cast member on the NBC sketch comedy series Saturday Night Live from 1990 to 1993. While at SNL, he appeared in the films New Jack City (1991) and Boomerang (1992). In 1993, he appeared in CB4, which he also wrote and produced. He reached mainstream stardom with Bring the Pain in 1996. Rock continued making specials which include Bigger & Blacker (1999), Never Scared (2004), Kill the Messenger (2008), Tamborine (2018), and Selective Outrage (2023). He developed, wrote, produced and narrated the sitcom Everybody Hates Chris (2005–2009), which was based on his early life. From 1997 to 2000 HBO aired his talk show The Chris Rock Show.

Rock was cast in starring film roles in Lethal Weapon 4 (1998), Dogma (1999), The Longest Yard (2005), the Madagascar franchise (2005–2012), I Think I Love My Wife (2007), Grown Ups (2010), Death at a Funeral (2010), Top Five (2014), The Week Of (2018), Spiral (2021), Amsterdam (2022), and Rustin (2023).

• • •

[42D: Spiky hairdos]
[image by the great Lynda Barry]
This one didn't really work for me because the revealer just didn't land, or landed awkwardly. I guess I can hear someone saying "hey, that's A+ WORK you're doing there, Bob," or something like that, but the phrase just doesn't roll off my tongue or feel as coherent as I'd like a revealer phrase to me. "A+ EFFORT" seems as much of a phrase as "A+ WORK." The execution of the concept is sort of cute, but the concept itself, the phrase on which the concept is based, feels weak to me. I had A PLUS- and had to think for a bit about what might come next—not a great sign. The same thing happened to me with DOPAMINE RUSH; I could see the first part would be DOPAMINE but the first word that came to mind that might follow it was HIGH. This "what's supposed to come next?" problem happened yet again with MAKES- at 26D: Lets bygones be bygones (MAKES PEACE), although I can't really impeach the correct answer there. Seems fine. But MAKES NICE and MAKES AMENDS both tried to get in there before MAKES PEACE. And so over and over I kept having to think about what these latter parts of answers were going to be, and every time, after getting the right answer, my feeling was varying degrees of "huh, OK, sure, I guess." And I don't particularly love the clue on DOPAMINE RUSH. Pleasure-seekers seek pleasure from whatever activity they're doing. They might experience a DOPAMINE RUSH, but that's a side-effect of whatever they're doing. It's like saying thrill-seekers are seeking an increased heart rate. Not exactly. Not directly. Anyway, it all works fine, but just felt kind of lackluster. But I can't dispute the fact that there are "A"s and jobs (i.e. WORK) in those circled squares. The puzzle executes what it sets out to execute, and, if nothing else, DOPAMINE RUSH is an exciting, original answer.


As for difficulty, it was pretty much the kind of easy Tuesday experience you'd expect, but the SW corner was disproportionately tough for me, for a number of reasons. First, that's where the PEACE of MAKES PEACE is, so my failure to come up with that second word meant that I didn't have the stake in that corner that I would have otherwise. Then there's the touch clue on STARDOM (39D: Fame and fortune), which seems like it's going to be plural, but isn't. I would associate STARDOM much more with "fame" than "fortune," btw, so ... not in love with that clue. Then there's the supremely MACOS, which I did not know despite using Macs my whole life. I just never think of the OS written out like that. Ever. All the MAC OS incarnations have names like Lion, Ventura, and Sequoia. As I've said before, every time I see MACOS ... which isn't often, it looks like a cereal name to me (MAC O's!). No one even thought to put it in a puzzle at all until 2023, which tells me it's a pretty poor answer. If MACOS was used in common parlance, we would've seen it all over the grid, for years and years. Don't believe me? Ask MS/DOS (fifty-four (54!) NYTXW appearances). Although I will admit, I can find MACOS written just like that if I click on "About this Mac"—it's just not a term I ever hear:


But back to the rest of the SW corner. The elaborate (and admittedly kind of colorful) clue on AHEM held me up in that corner as well—not immediately clear (60A: [Um, I can hear everything you're saying, you know]). I thought [Set of tenets] was a CREED for a bit. And then there was the hardest (or at least most misleading) clue in the puzzle (for me), which was kind of blocking one entryway to the SW corner: that answer was CHRIS (35D: Rock out on stage?). The big problem there was that I had the "HR" part before anything else, and so I promptly wrote in SHRED, as in "to play an electric guitar with great skill and speed" (merriam-webster dot com). "Out on stage" is accurate enough for what Rock does, as a stand-up, but without a specific comedy angle in the clue, I missed the wordplay completely. And so the SW was trouble. I don't remember much of anything else about the puzzle. 


Bullets:
  • 16A: Airport that Captain Sully departed from (LAGUARDIA) — wow, haven't thought about Captain Sully in a long time. I got this answer solely from [Airport...], and didn't even notice the latter part of the clue until just now. That famous emergency landing feels like recentish history, but it's been over 16 years now.
  • 58A: Place for a coin collection? (SOFA) — see, kids, in the olden days we used to have this thing called "hard currency," and it came in metal disc form, and these discs would sometimes fall out of your pants pockets and into the cushions of your SOFA, and over time you could AMASS quite a fortune down there. (seriously, when does the "coins in the SOFA" bit become obsolete?)
  • 12D: Beach, in Spanish (PLAYA) — this was a gimme for me, despite my not speaking Spanish. PLAYA is in many place names, so I just know it, as do most of you, I'm guessing. But I can see not knowing it, and I can also see not knowing Gordon RAMSAY, which means that I can imagine someone having trouble in the NE corner. But that someone wasn't me.
See you next time.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on BlueSky and Facebook]
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Monday, July 7, 2025

Flamenco guitarist ___ de Lucía / MON 7-7-25 / Mantra for many foodies / Long-running student quiz show / One might read "FASTCAR" / Singer Clark with the 1965 #1 hit "Downtown"

Constructor: Daniel Raymon

Relative difficulty: Medium (i.e. normal Monday) (solved Downs-only)


THEME: STILL ON THE TABLE (58A: Not yet decided ... or an "artful" description for the last words of 17-, 27- and 45-Across) — the last words of the themers are all things one might find on a table ... and in a still life painting??? (I honestly don't know what "STILL" and "artful" have to do with anything at this point)

Theme answers:
  • STARTING PITCHER (17A: Player facing the leadoff batter)
  • VANITY PLATE (27A: One might read "FASTCAR")
  • COLLEGE BOWL (45A: Long-running student quiz show)
Word of the Day: PACO de Lucía (34D: Flamenco guitarist ___ de Lucía) —

[this guy looks cool as hell, god bless the '70s] 

Francisco Sánchez Gómez (Spanish: [fɾanˈθisko ˈsantʃeθ ˈɣomeθ]; 21 December 1947 – 25 February 2014), known as Paco de Lucía (Spanish: [ˈpako ðe luˈθi.a]), was a Spanish virtuoso flamenco guitarist, composer, and record producer. A leading proponent of the new flamenco style, he was one of the first flamenco guitarists to branch into classical and jazz. Richard Chapman and Eric Clapton, authors of Guitar: Music, History, Players, describe de Lucía as a "titanic figure in the world of flamenco guitar", and Dennis Koster, author of Guitar Atlas, Flamenco, has referred to de Lucía as "one of history's greatest guitarists".

De Lucía was noted for his fast and fluent picados (fingerstyle runs). A master of contrast, he often juxtaposed picados and rasgueados (flamenco strumming) with more sensitive playing and was known for adding abstract chords and scale tones to his compositions with jazz influences. These innovations saw him play a key role in the development of traditional flamenco and the evolution of new flamenco and Latin jazz fusion from the 1970s. He received acclaim for his recordings with flamenco singer Camarón de la Isla in the 1970s, recording ten albums which are considered some of the most important and influential in flamenco history. (wikipedia)

• • •

Not a fan of this one, mainly because the revealer didn't really land for me. That is, I was left uncertain about what the puzzle was trying to do. I'm assuming, at this point, that the "artful" part of the revealer clue means that we are supposed to think about "STILL" in an art context, i.e. as a reference to still-life paintings, which frequently contain tables, on which might be found the items at the ends of the theme answers: pitchers, plates, bowls. It's just that still-life paintings contain so much more than dishware. There are usually lots and lots of things "on the table"—fruit, flowers ... dead animals of various kinds? Hang on, let me try to find a famous one. OK, here's Cézanne killing it with those peaches and pears


And Manet getting fishy with it


And ... lord knows what Braque is doing here ... I think maybe there's a violin in there somewhere (?)


The point is, some of these do indeed have pitchers or plates or bowls, but "bowl" and "plate" in particular don't feel definitely still-lifey. There's so much more to the still life. Also, you kind of have to connect the dots to get to the concept of still life at all from the available evidence. The revealer should land perfectly, like a pow, ta-da, clarifying all, in (ideally) a clever way. Today's revealer didn't really do that, so much as I love art in my puzzle themes, this one left me a little cold. 


The Downs-only solve was fairly easy and relatively uneventful, despite there being a couple of names that registered a "0" on the "Familiar To Me" scale. The first was Michelle AKERS, who is one of the greatest women soccer players of all time. FIFA's Female Player of the Century (the 20th century, that is). So why can't I remember her name? Very frustrating. Possibly because women's soccer's popularity in this country didn't really get going in earnest until the late '90s (or so my hazy memory tells me). This is her fifth time in the NYTXW, the third since '06 (when I started blogging), so I can't say I haven't seen her name. But I can say that I keep forgetting it. No question of her puzzleworthiness. It's just ... maybe if her name were more crossword-friendly (hello, MIA HAMM!), it would stick. The other name that I didn't know—and someone who is also a legend in his field—is PACO de Lucía. This is his third NYTXW appearance, but it's been 24 years since he's been in the puzzle (designer PACO Rabanne is still the PACO leader at four appearances—before Shortz, PACO used to be clued as a kind of ore (4 times) or as another word for "alpaca" (once)). I'm just glad the letters in PACO were eventually inferable—indisputable—because his name could easily have killed me. 


No other sticking points, though. Wasn't sure about the [Japanese computer brand] at first. Thought maybe ... ACER? ASUS? But those are Taiwanese. SONY is Japanese, but far more than a "computer brand." Eventually, VANITY PLATE gave me the "V" for VAIO. Had some trouble inferring the STILL part of STILL ON THE TABLE, and (relatedly) couldn't come up with EASEL for a bit (after TRIPOD, I couldn't not think of a [Three-legged support]). Still, I was never in danger of non-completion, so maybe I should've rated this something closer to Easy. Whatever. On Mondays, it's hard to differentiate Challenging from Medium from Easy. For me, it's a matter of 30 seconds one way or the other.


More stuff:
  • 27A: One might read "FASTCAR" (VANITY PLATE) — that's the best example you could think of for a VANITY PLATE??? That's pretty weak. At least be imaginative or funny. This one doesn't even play with missing letters or numbers-as-letters or anything. To get at the real spirit of the VANITY PLATE, you gotta go big (and, if possible, dumb, or at least ill-advised):






  • 43D: "OK, that's enough out of me, sorry" ("I'LL STOP") — this is probably the most inventive thing in the grid. A very real colloquial phrase that I can't remember seeing in the puzzle before ... yep, sure enough, it's a debut. It's amazing that after so many years and so many puzzles, there are still little phrases like this out there to be discovered and deployed.
  • 46D: Kaplan of "Welcome Back Kotter" (GABE) — lot of names in this one, and they tend to skew old. Solidly 20th-century, anyway. I grew up in what historians now call the Peak Kaplan Era, which extends from the start of Welcome Back Kotter (1975) to the release of legendary Kaplan-starring basketball comedy Fast Break (1979), which I'm quite sure I saw in the theater (age 10). There are lots of interesting things about that movie (like ... how? and ... why?) but perhaps the most interesting (to me, right now, at this very second) is that it featured the hit song "With You I'm Born Again" by Billy Preston and Syreeta. Talk about transcending your origins. If you are my age or older and paid attention to pop music, you probably know the song, but even I didn't remember it originated in a 1979 GABE Kaplan basketball comedy.


That's it. See you next time.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on BlueSky and Facebook]
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Sunday, July 6, 2025

Popular chocolate biscuit from Down Under / SUN 7-6-25 / Mario's dinosaur sidekick / Trickster of Greek myth / Closest world capital to Miami / Onetime wealthiest family in Europe / Typical patty melt specification / Breaking maneuver / Of extremely unreliable quality, in slang / "Midnight's Children" author, 1981 / Word with bullet or toilet / Philosopher who wrote "The bureaucracy is a circle from which no one can escape"

Constructor: Zhou Zhang and Kevin Curry

Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium


THEME: "Escape Room" — the puzzle is modeled on an escape room (I guess—I wouldn't know, never been in one); a four-letter answer sits at the middle of the grid, inside what looks like a keyhole, completely cut off from the rest of the grid (69D: [Insert key here]), and in order to figure out what word goes there, you have to follow hints found in other answers (there are four such hint-answers: one for each letter of the keyhole answer); the "key" to "unlocking" that center lock (and thus finishing ("escaping"?) the puzzle) is EXIT ... and if you figure it out, you are (according to the puzzle) a BREAKOUT STAR! (42D: Person everyone's talking about ... or what you'll be after unlocking the lock and completing this puzzle?)


Theme answers:
  • 39D: Final stop ... or a hint to finding the first key letter in this puzzle (END OF THE ROAD) [the "road" in the grid is RODEO DRIVE, the "end" of which is the letter "E"]
  • 109A: Kids' ball game played on a court ... or a hint to finding the second key letter in this puzzle (FOURSQUARE) [in the "4" square in this grid (see 4-Down, XES) is the letter "X"]
  • 93A: "The Little Mermaid" hit ... or a phonetic hint to finding the third key letter in this puzzle ("UNDER THE SEA") [there is only one "C" in the puzzle (in MEDICI), and directly "under" it is the letter "I"]
  • 31A: Is completely oblivious ... or a hint to finding the fourth key letter in this puzzle (DOESN'T HAVE A CLUE) [the one answer in the puzzle that "doesn't have a clue" is 76A: - (TEE), which stands for the letter "T"]
Word of the Day: TIM TAM (38D: Popular chocolate biscuit from Down Under) —
Tim Tam is a brand of chocolate biscuit introduced by the Australian biscuit company Arnott's Biscuits Holdings in 1964. It consists of two malted biscuits separated by a light hard chocolate cream filling and coated in a thin layer of textured chocolate. // The biscuit was created by Ian Norris. During 1958 he took a world trip looking for inspiration for new products. While traveling in Britain, he found the Penguin biscuit and decided to try to "make a better one". // Tim Tam went on the market on 10 September 1964. They were named by Ross Arnott, who attended the 1958 Kentucky Derby and decided that the name of the winning horse, Tim Tam, was perfect for a planned new line of biscuits. Pepperidge Farm, a sister company of Arnott's, began importing the Tim Tam to the United States in 2008. Tim Tams are still "Made in Australia" and packaging in the US bears the slogan "Australia's Favorite Cookie". (wikipedia)
• • •

Full disclosure ... well, two full disclosures. One, I hate escape rooms. Or, rather, I imagine I would, and I have zero interest in them. They sound like hell. I know they are very popular, and very popular with puzzler types, but ... not for me, no thanks, no. Thankfully, this really had no bearing on my enjoyment of this puzzle. Full disclosure two: I met one of these constructors (Zhou Zhang) at the ACPT back in April! And I have photos to prove it:


[That's Zhou on my right and Mallory on my left; they were competing in the Pairs division, just like me and my wife. I don't know what happened between photo 1 and photo 2 to make us all laugh—we were all high on post-tournament adrenaline and/or exhaustion]

Zhou told me that her debut puzzle would be coming out at some indeterminate time in the future, but, if you've ever had a puzzle accepted by the NYT, you know that that can mean weeks, months, even years (though I'm guessing they don't let it get to "years" any more). So I've had my eye out for her name and, well, here we are. I'm happy to report that I had a good time. Thank god solving the "Escape Room" was relatively easy. I normally don't like too much fussy post-solve business, but in this case, finding my way to each of the four letters in "EXIT" was actually kind of fun. The letters range in difficulty; "X" and "T" were pretty self-evident, whereas the other two involved searching the grid a bit for the answer. I identified RODEO DRIVE as the "road" in question (re: END OF THE ROAD) pretty quickly (I assume there are no other "roads" in the puzzle; I didn't check), and at that point I already knew what the missing vowels were going to be (you only need the "X" and "T" to see that the word is going to be "EXIT"), but I still needed to know *why* "I" was the right third letter. I looked for the names of actual seas that the "I" might be "under" ("BLACK?" "RED?" "CASPIAN?"). No luck. Then I tried to reason backward from "I" and went looking for "EYE" (!?). I didn't consider the letter "C" as the "sea" in question until a little later, because I figured there were probably a lot of "C"s in the grid ... but then I looked and looked and there was just the one "C," and under it, the letter "I." Puzzle, solved! Room, escaped!


As usual, starting this puzzle at all was the hardest part. I totally struck out in the NW at first pass. Couldn't make anything out of [Board game recommendation] or [Spot markers] or [Toddler's demand] (MAMA?), and thought 17A: Prevailing fashion (VOGUE) might be TREND, so I abandoned the area. Now that I look, RUSHDIE is in that section, and he was a gimme, so I don't know why I didn't see that clue the first time through the NW (3D: "Midnight's Children" author, 1981). Weird. Anyway, I had SESH and that was it. So I got started in this real roundabout way, from ODS and ROSIN to PSIS and then down the side of the "lock" and back up the west coast until I hit the NW corner again, and at *that* point, I saw RUSHDIE. My grid looked like this:


As soon as I got DOESN'T HAVE A CLUE, I knew (or figured) there'd be a (literally) clue-less answer in the puzzle that would help me figure that one out. But rather than look for it, I just kept solving. Besides the final gimmick ("unlocking" that central answer), there's nothing particularly tricky about the puzzle. It's got lots of entertainment value, and for a puzzle with a *lot* of 3-4-5s, it's pretty clean. I solved it like a themeless puzzle, with no real thought as to how the gimmick worked until the end. Since the "X" and "T" were obvious, I could easily infer "E" and "I" to make "EXIT," but I still needed to know how the "E" and "I" hints work—which ended up being the only real "work" on my end (after the initial flailing around to start things).


There were a few things I didn't know, or muffed at first. Let's start with ... "toilet TRAIN"??? (60A: Word with bullet or toilet). Oh my god, I just got it. Both my wife and I, last night, were like "what the hell is a toilet TRAIN?" We thought maybe it was a toilet ... on a train? Like maybe the "with toilet" part of the clue meant that TRAIN came not after but before "toilet." TRAIN toilet. You know, like this one:

[you can't tell, but Cary Grant is hiding in that toilet; this is a still from Hitchcock's famous movie, Toilets on a Train]

I see now that "toilet train" is like "potty train." "Train" as verb (rather than locomotive). It's been so long since I had a small child in the house, the phrase "toilet TRAIN" has apparently become alien to me. I also couldn't make sense of [Breaking maneuver] for a while, since I kept thinking it was "braking." Eventually, I realized "breaking" here referred to breakdancing. Easy crosses meant HANDSTAND eventually filled itself in. Didn't know PEPE, which I'm assuming means "pepper" (?) (19A: Italian seasoning). Yes, it means "pepper." My favorite mistake came at 13D: Kind of joke ... or a response to a really bad one (GAG). I wrote in "DAD." There are DAD jokes, of course, and then, if your dad actually makes one of his corny jokes, you might respond with an exasperated / irritated / eye-rolling "DAD!" As in "Daaaaad, why do you do that, please stop." Had no idea about the philosopher at 1A: Philosopher who wrote "The bureaucracy is a circle from which no one can escape" (MARX). I appreciate (now) the way this clue subtly introduces you to the "escape" theme. Lastly, where my ignorance / failure is concerned, I don't think I've ever had a TIM TAM, but I know of them, so I got that answer easily after a cross or two.



More things:
  • 22A: Its freedom is granted in the First Amendment (PRESS) — not sure what "freedoms" any of us are going to have left after all [waves hands toward wider world] this. I went through a mental list of 1st amendment freedoms and got speech, religion, and assembly ... and then blanked. Finally getting PRESS was a definite "d'oh!" moment.
  • 119A: One taking the words right out of your mouth? (LIP READER) — what a great clue. Just a perfect repurposing of a familiar idiom.
  • 34A: Put a PIN in it (ATM) — again, clever repurposing of a familiar idiom. No need for a "?" on this clue, since it ends up being quite literal (PIN = personal identification number, of course).
  • 7D: Journey in which you might carry quite a load? (GUILT TRIP) — very tricky. I never thought of the "trip" in that phrase as a "journey," even metaphorically, so I needed a lot of help from crosses on this one.
  • 82D: Of extremely unreliable quality, in slang (JANKY) — love this word. Colorful, with high-value Scrabble letters to boot. Crossing JANKY with WARTY, really ... vivid.
Overall, I liked this far more than I tend to like Sunday puzzles. I declare it non-JANKY. That's all, see you next time.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

P.S. if you're headed out to any kind of pool- or lake- or seaside vacation this summer, or any vacation that involves a significant amount of down time, and you want to solve crosswords but do NOT want to be on your phone or iPad or whatever all the time, why not pick up a delightful crossword puzzle book (yes book! Made of paper!). I have one that I'm saving (mostly) for my Santa Barbara vacation later in the summer—it's Name That Movie—Crossword Puzzles for Movie Lovers by Jeff Sinnock and Desirée Penner. I had their Name That Tune crossword book on my Holiday gift list last year, and now they've moved from music to movies. These are relatively easy 17x17 puzzles, all of them movie-themed, with a related movie title you have to figure out by unscrambling circled letters in the grid. The puzzles are relaxing, not taxing, and will (maybe?) help you with certain pop cultural blind spots that I know many of you have (as I do myself). 51 puzzles, 13 bucks. Worth it. Happy summer solving!

P.P.S. if you have crossword-related stuff you want me to promote, just ask. I can't promise I'll say "yes," but I usually do, and it costs you nothing :)

P.P.P.S. if I told you I'd promote something and haven't done it yet, give me a nudge. I feel like I lost track of these things a little this past (busy) spring.

P.P.P.P.S. Holy cow, Zhou (today’s co-constructor) and Mallory (both pictured with me, above) have today’s Apple crossword as well! Real breakout day for Z.Z.

[Follow Rex Parker on BlueSky and Facebook]
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