Perishable bit of apparel / WED 8-20-25 / Electronic setting on a floor model / Custom in Japanese food service / Expel with jeers / Actor Lamorne of Fox's "New Girl" / Frenemy of Betty in comics / Went letter by letter, to Brits / Material in some eco-friendly clothing / First receptionist on "The Office"

Constructor: Victor Schmitt

Relative difficulty: Easy

THEME: A single tumbling DIE (39A: Item seen rolling through this puzzle) — six sets of 3x3 shaded squares represent dice—or, apparently, a single tumbling DIE in six different states of "rolling"; every "O" on every DIE is a PIP (33D: What every "O" in this grid represents), and each side of the DIE is represented exactly once in the grid:

Theme answers:

• there aren't any except DIE and PIP

Word of the Day: Josephine TEY (9A: Mystery author Josephine) —

Elizabeth MacKintosh (25 July 1896 – 13 February 1952), known by the pen name Josephine Tey, was a Scottish author. Her 1951 novel The Daughter of Time, a detective work investigating the death of the Princes in the Tower, was chosen by the Crime Writers' Association in 1990 as the greatest crime novel of all time. Her first play Richard of Bordeaux, written under another pseudonym, Gordon Daviot, starred John Gielgud in its successful West End run. [...] MacKintosh's best-known books were written under the name of Josephine Tey, which was the name of her Suffolk great-great grandmother. // In five of the mystery novels, all of which except the first she wrote under the name of Tey, the hero is Scotland Yard Inspector Alan Grant. (Grant appears in a sixth, The Franchise Affair, as a minor character.) The best known of these is The Daughter of Time, in which Grant, laid up in hospital, has friends research reference books and contemporary documents so that he can puzzle out the mystery of whether King Richard III of England murdered his nephews, the Princes in the Tower. // The Franchise Affair also has an historical context: although set in the 1940s, it is based on the 18th-century case of Elizabeth Canning. The Daughter of Time was the last of Tey's books published during her lifetime. Her last work, a further crime novel, The Singing Sands, was found in her papers and published posthumously.

• • •

As with Monday's puzzle, which was just a list of some of the voices Mel Blanc did, the rationale here escapes me. It's one DIE ... "rolling through" the puzzle? To what end? Why? If we were really supposed to see a "rolling" DIE, then the various representations of that DIE wouldn't be positioned like this. No one DIE could ever "roll" through those six positions, unless it was rolled into some kind of box with sides that would allow it to careen around. The visual effect of "tumbling" just isn't there. But then nothing is there. You've got each side of a DIE, the "O"s are PIPs ... and that's it. That appears to be the whole of the gimmick. No particular game is being represented. Since it's just the one DIE, there is no ... outcome? At first I thought this puzzle was going to have something to do with Yahtzee!, but that would entail five dice, not six, and anyway, as you know, these aren't six dice—these are the six sides of a single DIE. Tumbling. For some reason. Pretty thin. And the one word that might've been brought in as a bonus answer (ROLLED) ... isn't (3D: Like some oats).

From a structural POV, there are two challenges, which the constructor meets quite well. Actually, it's one challenge that has to be met two times—the triple-"O" sequence. That "6" side forces a nearly abutting pair of "OOO" phrases, the type of phrase you don't see TOO OFTEN oh hey, look at that, there it is. Still, you *don't* see it too often, and here, you've got two: TOO OFTEN and (my favorite) BOO OFF STAGE. It's very inventive, and for that reason maybe feels a little home-made, a little loose, a little improvised, drifting into EAT A SANDWICH territory a little, but I like it, perhaps because I've heard the phrase used in real life (if Eminem's "Lose Yourself" can be said to be real life). 

["I've been chewed up and spit out and BOOed OFF STAGE..."]

Those triple-"O" answers give the grid some much-needed pizzazz, as do SCOUT'S HONOR and the best answer in the grid: DOG KISS! (47A: Slobbery smooch). I miss slobbery smooches. We lost our dogs and then almost immediately, completely unexpectedly, became a cat house (which is what happens when you find a kitten literally under your house). I love my cats, but slobbery smoochers, they are not. Most of the time they barely seem to tolerate us. They put on the appearance of "loving" when they want food. And they kinda sorta like being in the same room we're in. But, yeah, the love appears to be completely, overwhelmingly one-way. We're obsessed with them, they mostly ignore us. I know snuggly cats exist. I had one once. But ours ... no. Too much ... let's call it "dignity," though considering how much they barf, fall off furniture, etc. that may be too generous.

[My dad, Lola]

Beyond that good longer fill, this grid is somewhat overfilled with less pleasant short stuff. Old crosswordese like ALMA TEY (whom we've seen twice this week?!), and then a slew of less-than-great stuff like ELMST VPS SAN CEE APEMAN REC ONO YEP ERE LEI SRO (also twice this week!?!?) NOTIPS ORI NAV ABE TSA MSG ... any of these answers would be OK on their own, but in high dosage like this, it wears.  I'm quite sure the visual gimmick of the rolling DIE put a lot of pressure on the grid—all those fixed "O"s would've made it difficult to fill the grid cleanly. And isolating those DIE shapes probably also contributed to the grid's being somewhat choppy, which in turn makes for a lot of short answers. So subpar fill is the price you pay for the gimmick. The gimmick just doesn't seem substantial enough to justify the trade-off.

Bullets:

• 1D: Change seeker (BEGGAR) — winced at this one. There's just something so condescending and dehumanizing about calling the person who "seeks change" from you a BEGGAR. I'm sure I'm more sensitive than I ought to be here, but I guess I don't mind providing counterbalance to the absolute cruelty being visited upon unhoused people in this country. While I'm being "oversensitive," please keep all HP content, including Ron Weasley and his PET RAT, out of my grid. Embarrassing that constructors / editors keep going to this poisoned well.
• 22A: Only U.S. prez born in Kentucky (ABE) — Andy Beshear was born in Louisville. I don't really have a horse in the 2028 race yet, but ... we could do worse (have done worse, are currently doing much worse).
• 59A: Frenemy of Betty in comics (VERONICA) — never ever gonna be mad at Archie Comics content. My daughter absolutely devoured every Archie imprint for like six years of her life ... maybe more. My house and office are still full of digests and double digests, despite the fact that I have given scores of them away to my comics students. I actually find reading Archie oddly soothing, esp. the older Archies. My favorite Archie artist is Harry Lucey. Yes, I have a favorite Archie artist. Here's some crossword-related Archie content—featuring VERONICA—that my friend Doug sent me the other day:

• 43D: Actor Lamorne of Fox's "New Girl" (MORRIS) — absolutely no idea. Easy to infer from crosses, but ... nope. And because of kerning issues, I'm not even sure if it's "Lamorne" or "Lamome," hang on ... OK, it's Lamorne, with an "r" (that makes more sense), and ... weirdly, I wondered, after I got MORRIS, "wait, is this the guy who played Garrett MORRIS on Saturday Night (2024)?," which I saw for the first time earlier this month. And it is! I remember noticing that the actor who played MORRIS was also named MORRIS, and I thought "wow, is he being played by his son??" But it appears that Lamorne MORRIS and Garrett MORRIS are, in fact, unrelated. 

That's all. See you next time.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on BlueSky and Facebook]
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