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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