1980s cartoon foe of Gargamel / FRI 8-29-25 / Eminem song that samples Dido / What fan fiction is not / Coaster, usually / Home to the torus-shaped Museum of the Future / "Seriously!," in slang / Places where it's OK to push someone at school

Constructor: Jesse Cohn

Relative difficulty: Very Easy

THEME: none 

Word of the Day: KILLER BEE (17A: Queen's guard?) —

The Africanized bee, also known as the Africanized honey bee (AHB) and colloquially as the "killer bee", is a hybrid of the western honey bee (Apis mellifera), produced originally by crossbreeding of the African honey bee (A. m. scutellata) with various European honey bee subspecies such as the Italian honey bee (A. m. ligustica) and the Iberian honey bee (A. m. iberiensis).

The African honey bee was first introduced to Brazil in 1956 in an effort to increase honey production, but 26 swarms escaped quarantine in 1957. Since then, the hybrid has spread throughout South America and arrived in North America in 1985. Hives were found in south Texas in the United States in 1990.

Africanized honey bees are typically much more defensive, react to disturbances faster, and chase people farther than other varieties of honey bees, up to 400 m (1,300 ft). They have killed some 1,000 humans, with victims receiving 10 times more stings than from European honey bees. They have also killed horses and other animals.

• • •

Welcome back to SMURF Week here at the NYTXW! (see ... yesterday). We hope you are SMURFing a SMURFy SMURF! (26D: 1980s cartoon foe of Gargamel)

It is grim how easy themeless puzzles have become. They are really, conspicuously bringing down the difficulty level of the puzzle in general, but you (I) really feel it on Friday and Saturday, because those are the days that used to have real punch. I've heard people hypothesize "well maybe you're just getting better" and lol no, I'm too old to be getting "better." I got "better" during the first 5-7 years of writing this blog. That's when I was at my fastest, that's when my regional ACPT trophies are from, that's when I placed as high as 31st (or so) overall. And back then, at the peak of my speed-solving abilities, a Friday or Saturday could still bust my lip wide open. The intervening twelve years or so have given me more experience, obviously, but they haven't made me faster, and if anything, with puzzles being made by people younger and younger than I am, with life experiences different from mine, the puzzle *should* be at least as challenging as it ever was, if not more so. And yet I burned through this puzzle today like it wasn't even there. Friday puzzles used to have at least a little fight, but now my only hope is Saturday, which every once in a while (as with Byron Walden's puzzle a couple weeks ago) can be counted on to push me around. But mostly the crossword is being made more accessible, presumably so it can be more salable in the long term. When you specialize in bite-size games, what sense does it make to continue with a product that takes a long time to learn how to do, that ends in failure for most novices for a long time? Who has the patience for that? Lower the bar so that people can get to "success" more quickly! So they don't "waste" so much of their valuable time getting up to proficiency. Time is money! Easiness is business! Have you heard of this new game PIPS!? Meanwhile, I gotta do Fireball or the Saturday Stumper (Newsday) in order to feel anything. Thank you for indulging me in this "old man yells at cloud" moment.

["I'm like young LL, / 'cause I'm hard as hell / Makin' n****s screw-face like Gargamel"]

LUNAR LAMP PIE ABODE DUBAI DISC and off to the races. If this puzzle was too easy (and it was), at least it had me careering (and possibly careening) around the grid in bizarre, seemingly reckless ways. Can't remember when I ever took quite this path through a puzzle before:

I just kept going, termite-like, not taking much time to look side-to-side. A long answer would take me to a new part of the grid and I'd just follow, not even bothering to go back and finish up the part I just came from. Down to the bottom and up past the equator again without having filled in a single answer in the middle third of the grid. So definitely lots of whoosh-whoosh today, though the marquee answers felt a little on the tepid side. The puzzle is trying hard to be FUN-FILLED, and ... well, it's not unfun, but I've done funner. The problem is that CELESTIAL EVENT is just too vague a term for me to like. And I've seen MEETCUTE too many times for it to seem like exciting marquee material any more. The 9s in the NE and SW corner are fine, but "fine" is about as high as the puzzle gets today. CREATION OF ADAM is a cool answer (I thought it was CREATION OF MAN, but when that wouldn't fit ... well, ADAM was the next logical guess). I think FUN-FILLED and (weirdly) AUTODIDACT were my favorite moments in this one. I also kinda liked the clue on SWING SETS (24A: Places where it's OK to push someone at school). Not hard, but playful and clever. 

I didn't get the clue on KILLER BEE, and still mostly don't. I put WORKER BEE in there at first, since it seemed to be asking for a subset of bees, one part of the bee org chart, not an entire subspecies of bee. If you are distinguishing the answer from the "queen," then the answer should be a different type of bee, and there are only two other types: WORKER BEES (which do, in fact, protect the hive) and DRONE BEES: "His only role is to mate with a maiden queen in nuptial flight" (wikipedia). The KILLER BEE doesn't really work as "the queen's guard" since she herself is (presumably) a KILLER BEE (even if she herself is not doing the "killing"). 

[CREATION OF ADAM]

Bullets:

• 1A: Coaster, usually (DISC) — thought this might be a roller coaster, so ... RIDE? I didn't chance it. Best to move on to something you're sure of when you're trying to get your first bit of traction, which is what I did. Tested LUNAR at 13A: Kind of rover, which gave me LAMP, then PIE, and that was that.
• 31A: Plot device in many a rom-com (MEET-CUTE) — they meet and it's cute. I recently watched While You Were Sleeping, a classic 1996 rom-com, for my Movie Club. That movie has three meets, none of them particularly cute (Peter Gallagher gives Sandra Bullock his "L" train token every day but doesn't really notice her; she pulls him off the tracks out of the way of an oncoming train; he wakes up from a coma weeks later and finally "meets" her—she's been pretending to be his fiancée ... while he was sleeping). And then a totally different guy (Bill Pullman) ends up being the love interest ... and that meet isn't particularly cute either. In fact, I don't remember it. They really don't have much chemistry. But there are lots of great actors in the movie, including Peter Boyle and Glynis Johns, and lots of Dunkin' Donuts (emphasis on the Donuts; RIP "Donuts"), so if you're nostalgic for the '90s and want something that goes down easy (some might say "blandly"), you could do worse.

• 38A: What fan fiction is not (CANON) — a nice, modern clue for CANON, which has extended its meaning from "an authorized set of books" (see, uh, the Bible?) to "an authorized fictional storyline."
• 55A: "Seriously!," in slang ("NO CAP!") — yes, you have seen this before. Yes, you have. I swear. First in 2023, and now three times this year. NO CAP!
• 1D: Home to the torus-shaped Museum of the Future (DUBAI) — mmm, torus.

• 10D: Kathryn of "Law & Order: Criminal Intent" (ERBE) — her name threatened to become established crosswordese in the late aughts, but then disappeared. This is her first NYTXW appearance since 2011! (ERBE appeared once in the intervening years as Italian for "herbs") (!).
• 32D: Dog's post-op wear (CONE) — my first and only outright mistake, and it was a glorious one. I had the "O," saw "post-op," and wrote in GOWN.

That's all. See you next time.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on BlueSky and Facebook and Letterboxd]
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