Tales are related about them / FRI 7-11-2025 / Org. with the pioneering Artemis program / "Don't Worry Kyoko" singer / Acquirer of GeoCities and Broadcast.com during the dot-com bubble

Constructor: James McCarron

Relative difficulty: pretty straightforward, not terribly challenging


Word of the Day: BENIHANA (Restaurant chain where chefs make onion volcanoes) —

Benihana (Japanese: 紅花; "Safflower") is a chain of Japanese restaurants. Originally founded by Yunosuke Aoki as a cafe in Tokyo in 1945, Benihana spread to the United States in 1964 when his son Hiroaki "Rocky" Aoki opened its first restaurant in New York City. 

...

Benihana introduced the teppanyaki restaurant concept which originated in Japan in the late 1940s to the United States, and later to other countries. [wikipedia, and in case you're wondering, the two people mentioned here are the grandfather and father of DJ Steve Aoki]

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Hey hi howdy hello, Christopher Adams here filling in for Rex today! As noted above, not too difficult. There's a lot of good longer entries in this puzzle: the entire center stack, plus the four long downs intersecting that, plus three of the four long entries crossing those! I've never heard of DRILLS DOWN, and imo the DOWN part of that feels redundant, but ymmv, and still, that's a lot of good long entries!

That said, where this puzzle missed the mark for me was that there was very little attempt to add spice to the puzzle beyond that. Not many difficult, tricky, misdirecting, etc. clues, which is not necessarily a problem per se (it's fun to have a nice and breezy themeless every so often), but you can still be easy while also fun, and while the entries themselves were fun, their clues very much did not feel like that. A lot of just plonking in answers one after the other, with the bulk of the appreciation coming from "gee, that's a great entry" after it's filled in, rather than in the act of actually figuring it out and filling it in myself, or in learning something neat and interesting along the way.

This is probably on me and my expectations; most of the puzzles I solve these days are not the New York Times, and can (and should, and do!) get more interesting cluewise than the Gray Lady does. So perhaps it's a bit unfair for me to want the puzzle to be something it isn't, but at the same time there's certainly room for clues that go beyond the house style and inject some personality and such into the clues.

Also, the long entries were great, but at the same time there were a few too many short answers holding things together that bothered me while solving: WEK, I MET, OWLY, PISH, NOR (only because it's clued as an abbreviation), IVER (only because there's really only one way to clue that). 

we would've also accepted a reference to "Half as Interesting" for HAI

A few attempts for slightly trickier clues, but none really convincing; it almost felt as if they were pretending to be harder than they were to make you feel better about seeing past their flimsy disguise. No need to have the question mark on HAI or COGS or RACE CAR DRIVER. The phrasing for SOLAR ECLIPSE, [Event requiring special specs], isn't fully convincing as a misdirect for "specifications" rather than "spectacles". I enjoyed SENTINEL and CAMPFIRES more for their reparsing of "watch" and "about" that wasn't immediately obvious from the clues. (Even then, in the first case, [One with a watch] is stilted enough to set off the "probably a misdirect" spidey sense on first pass.)

[Actress Rapp of "Mean Girls"]

Olio:

• ABA [Isaac Asimov novel "Murder at the ___"] — Possibly an attempt at finding a new angle for this entry (I hadn't seen it before), but it resulted in massive headscratching because it's not at all clear what the answer means after you fill it in. Like, if it was MANOR or something, you'd just shrug and think "haven't heard of that, but "Murder at the Manor" absolutely sounds like it could be a real title, and "manor" is an actual place..." and move on with the solve, but for me it was "what ABA are we talking about here? is this even an acronym or is there some place I've never heard of called Aba, or...". For the record, it stands for "American Booksellers Association", and the book is a metafictional tale about a murder at a convention held by the ABA, and Asimov himself appears as a character in his own book, and doesn't knowing this make it sound more interesting and make you want read the book more? That's the sort of info that should've been included with this cluing angle, not just to make the clue more fun but also help prevent the puzzled feeling of filling in the answer without knowing what it means.
• YEN [Kind of coin that features a Buddhist temple on one side] — Yes! More of this! Fun things to learn while still being easy to infer and fill in!
• ALMODOVAR [Pedro ___, Oscar-winning screenwriter for "Talk to Her"] — I've always found this format (fill in the blank for last names) to be one of the weirder parts of the NYT style guide, and wish they would do away it, especially since it's easy to rewrite to remove the blank, even if you wanted to keep the first name as an additional hint.
• OARED [Four-___ (like some shells)] — "Shell" as in a racing boat here; the clue's difficulty definitely sticks out compared to the rest of the puzzle. (And, while I'm thinking of FITB clue styles that bother me, using a FITB for half of a hyphenated word is one of them, especially since this could be something like [Rowed, rowed, rowed your boat] to avoid the FITB altogether.)
• ANTS [Colonial group] — Currently in a war against the ants who are living under the backyard patio where I'm trying to put a fire pit; such is life when you're committed to leaving 99% of your yard natural (for the birds, the bees, and especially the deers) but still want to have a small section for yourself.

Yours truly, Christopher Adams, Court Jester of CrossWorld

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