Record-keeping device made of strings and knots / SAT 7-5-25 / Glass production / Brendon of Panic! at the Disco / French musician/composer ___ Tiersen / Fortnite developer / Dance move that slid into English as "sashay" / Getting in one guess, as Wordle / Subject of the books "Jonathan Loves David" and "Take Back the Word" / Dance move that slid into English as "sashay" / Eerie phenomenon when a robot seems too lifelike

Constructor: Tracy Bennett

Relative difficulty: Medium

THEME: none 

Word of the Day: QUIPU (46D: Record-keeping device made of strings and knots) —

Quipu (/ˈkiːpuː/ KEE-poo), also spelled khipu (Ayacucho Quechua: kipu, [ˈkipu]; Cusco Quechua: khipu, [kʰipu]), are record keeping devices fashioned from knotted cords. They were historically used by various cultures in the central Andes of South America, most prominently by the Inca Empire.

A quipu usually consists of cotton or camelid fiber cords, and contains categorized information based on dimensions like color, order and number. The Inca, in particular, used knots tied in a decimal positional system to store numbers and other values in quipu cords. Depending on its use and the amount of information it stored, a given quipu may have anywhere from a few to several thousand cords.

Objects which can unambiguously be identified as quipus first appear in the archaeological record during 1st millennium CE, likely attributable to the Wari Empire. Quipus subsequently played a key part in the administration of the Kingdom of Cusco of the 13th to 15th centuries, and later of the Inca Empire (1438–1533), flourishing across the Andes from c. 1100 to 1532. Inca administration used quipus extensively for a variety of uses: monitoring tax obligations, collecting census records, keeping calendrical information, military organization, and potentially for recording simple and stereotyped historical "annales". (wikipedia)

• • •

[37A: Babe, for one]

Lots of stuff I flat-out didn't know in this one, though it was still very doable—didn't play any harder than an average Saturday. I had no idea there was such a thing as QUEER THEOLOGY (46A: Subject of the books "Jonathan Loves David" and "Take Back the Word"). QUEER THEORY, sure—I went to grad school in the Humanities, after all. But THEOLOGY, no, that got by me. I mean of course there's QUEER THEOLOGY, there's QUEER everything, and yet still, this particular phrase—unknown to me. Got the QUEER part and then... no idea. QUEER TEENAGER? Sadly, no. Never heard the "8" / asterisk key called the STAR KEY, though as with QUEER THEOLOGY, that was eventually inferable (34A: *, to a typist). Never heard of QUIPU ... though I have this weird feeling that I "learned" it from crosswords and then forgot it (solve for long enough and this will happen to you, over and over and over and...). Looks like this is the first NYTXW appearance of QUIPU in over fifty-four years (!), so I don't feel so bad now about not recognizing it. Never would've remembered URIE without help from crosses (56A: Brendon of Panic! at the Disco). Absolutely no idea who this YANN composer person is (5A: French musician/composer ___ Tiersen). If the YANN is not Martel, I do not know the YANN. Looks like he scored the popular French movie Amélie (2001). Huh. OK. Ultimately, all the crosses on YANN are fair, though that second "N," yeesh. Who calls it NEAT VODKA? (8D: It's a straight shot). You can order any liquor "neat" but somehow the phrase "NEAT [insert liquor]"—while understandable and defensible—just sounds off. I would say someone was drinking whiskey neat, not neat whiskey. Of course I don't understand drinking vodka any way at all—it's the least interesting (and least taste-having) of all your major liquors. We have a well-stocked liquor cabinet—no vodka. But that's neither here nor there. The big-picture point here is that I got held up a lot by stuff beyond my ken. But through the magic of fair crosses, I got through it easily enough (easier as I went along, easiest at the finish, in the SE, where I didn't really know EPIC GAMES but had -IC GAMES filled in before I ever even saw the clue, so what else was it gonna be?) (30D: Fortnite developer).

[this is not the band in question—it's a song on a CD compilation that came with some NZ music mag I bought years and years ago. The compilation is called Awesome Feeling II. Presumably there was an Awesome Feeling I, but I don't own it]

Struggled up front with LONE, which really should've been SOLE, shouldn't it? LONE tracks, but SOLE alliterates, which is what all good crossword answers are supposed to do. Just discovered that Sole Survivor was the name of a 1970 TV movie starring William Shatner, about a WWII bombing mission gone awry, if that's of any interest to you. It's also the name of a 1984 horror movie whose poster has a cool-ass '80s digital font:

LONE survivor is just not as poetic or evocative as SOLE, though I can imagine someone saying it on the 6 o'clock news, so OK. Sticking with the NW corner—when I [Careen wildly], I do not SLUE. I VEER. So there was that. I had the 3D imaging as a CAT SCAN at first (my retired radiologist father would be disappointed). I know what ONION ROLLs are but I confess I didn't know they were particularly Jewish (3D: Jewish bakery specialty). So... struggle struggle struggle ... then I built that NW corner from the bottom up, and then ... the easiest answer in the NW, which I almost wish I'd looked at first:

I don't think UNCANNY VALLEY is clued quite right (22A: Eerie phenomenon when a robot seems too lifelike). The point isn't that it's "too lifelike"—it's that it's both too lifelike *and* not lifelike enough. That's the valley. The "eeriness" is when the robot crosses that threshold into "close but not there." Lots of A.I.-created animation falls in this category for me. See also, famously, the animation in Polar Express (2004). Anyway, you can't have the titular "valley" if you don't have both the concept of "too lifelike" *and* the concept of "not lifelike enough." See ... the valley is not a mythical place, it's a literal shape on a graph:

Though there was lots I didn't know, and some stuff I didn't love, in this grid, there were a few winners, for sure. I liked UNCANNY VALLEY as an answer (just not the clue). QUEER THEOLOGY looks great (my ignorance of the term notwithstanding). RINKY-DINK is hard not to like. GUTTER BALL—funny (in real life, and as clued) (50A: Alley oops) (i.e. a mistake ("oops!") made in a bowling alley). And I like CADET BLUE, which was an answer I found myself writing in off the first few letters without really knowing if it was real (27D: Uniform shade). That is, the phrase occurred to me, so I wrote it in, but I didn't know how I knew it or what shade of blue it was, exactly. Sometimes your brain just whispers the answer to you and you go with it. Of course sometimes your brain whispers VEER and CAT SCAN, so you've got to keep your eye on it.

[originally entitled "LOAN Provider" ... I mean, probably]

What else?:

• 29A: Michigan's ___ Marquette River (waterway named for a missionary) (PÈRE)— I guess the "missionary" part of the clue was supposed to suggest the religious PÈRE ("father"). No help to me. Tracy (today's constructor) is from Michigan, so this seems like one of at least two little personal flourishes in the puzzle. The other, perhaps more obvious flourish is the Wordle clue (41A: Getting in one guess, as Wordle). Tracy happens to be the editor of Wordle, in case you didn't know. I didn't love ACING as the answer there, but I guess in the golf sense, in the hole-in-one sense, it's true. In the sense of "ACING a test," though, no. ACING in that sense implies a demonstration of ability, whereas getting Wordle in 1 is just dumb luck.
• 55A: Glass production (OPERA) — as in Philip Glass. He has written 15 operas, including The Perfect American, a portrait of Walt Disney in his later years as a "power-hungry racist." Gotta check that one out.
• 60A: Somewhat audible disparagements (TSKS) — not getting the "somewhat" on this clue and the identical (if singular) clue on HISS. They are both definitely audible, or else they don't work. If a disparagement falls in the woods and nobody hears it ... did you even disparage, bro?
• 19D: Dance move that slid into English as "sashay" (CHASSÉ) — love the "slid into" part of this clue, since sliding is what's involved with a CHASSÉ.

That's it. Gonna go do Wordle now. Probably not in 1 (my starter word this week is BORIC—if I get it in 3, I'll feel like a hero). See you next time.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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