Maori dance with rhythmic chanting / MON 10-27-25 / Computer-controlled players, in gaming lingo / Longtime Supreme Court justice Frankfurter / Words set in stone? / Olympic gymnast Sunisa

Constructor: Tarun Krishnamurthy

Relative difficulty: Medium (solved Downs-only)

THEME: SIDE EFFECTS (60A: Secondary medication results ... or a phonetic hint to 18-, 24-, 40- and 51-Across) — theme answers begin with "F" and end with "X"; so, the letters "F" and "X" are on the "sides" of the answers (hence SIDE EFFECTS (i.e. "side 'f' 'x'")).

Theme answers:

• FALL EQUINOX (18A: Celestial event on September 22 or 23, typically)
• FLOOR WAX  (24A: Application that might be put on with a spray mop)
• FIREFOX  (40A: Browser that competes with Chrome)
• FORT KNOX  (51A: Location of many gold reserves)

Word of the Day: FELIX Frankfurter (7D: Longtime Supreme Court justice Frankfurter) —

Felix Frankfurter (November 15, 1882 – February 22, 1965) was an American jurist who served as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1939 until 1962, advocating judicial restraint.

Born in Vienna, Frankfurter immigrated with his family to New York City at age 12. He graduated from Harvard Law School and worked for Henry L. Stimson, the U.S. Secretary of War. Frankfurter served as Judge Advocate General during World War I. Afterward, he returned to Harvard and helped found the American Civil Liberties Union. He later became a friend and adviser of President Franklin D. Roosevelt. After Benjamin N. Cardozo died in 1938, Roosevelt nominated Frankfurter to the Supreme Court. Given his affiliations and alleged radicalism, the Senate confirmed Frankfurter's appointment only after its Judiciary Committee required him to testify in 1939, a practice that became routine in the 1950s.

His relations with colleagues were strained by ideological and personal differences, likely exacerbated by some antisemitism. (wikipedia)

• • •

The "X"s really take this puzzle to interesting places, more colorful places than a Monday puzzle typically goes. Solving Downs-only, I was impressed by the quality of the fill, both for the answers whose clues I was reading and for those whose clues I wasn't. So before I even knew what the gist of the theme was, I was pretty impressed with the grid. EPITAPH, WINE STORE, ROOFTOP, MARXIST, BEST OF ALL, these all add character to the grid, as do some of the shorter answers like FLUFF (one of the harder answers for me to get Downs-only) and HAKA (46D: Maori dance with rhythmic chanting). I thought I saw my first HAKA in Scotland in the late '80s during a rugby match between Scotland and the team from Fiji, but the Fijian war dance is not called the HAKA. It's called the CIBI (put that in your grid and smoke it!). The HAKA has been popularized (made famous worldwide) by the NZ rugby team, which performs one before each match. Conan O'Brien even participated in one in the episode of his HBO TV show (Conan O'Brien Must Go) where he visits NZ. I enjoyed seeing HAKA in the grid today. Is it a debut? I don't remember seeing it before. Looks like it debuted last November, and this is just its second appearance—and it's already a Monday answer. That suggests the word has pretty broad familiarity, although apparently FELIX Frankfurter is also Monday material and I've never heard of that guy (possibly because he hasn't been a clue for FELIX since 1999). 

As for the theme, it's simple and elegant, and makes for some colorful answers. Not much else I can ask for from a Monday. The revealer makes perfect, punny sense of the initial "F"s and terminal "X"s. Nothing more to say about the theme than "good job." Solving Downs-only didn't present much difficulty today. As I said, FLUFF (the answer to the very first clue I looked at) was about the hardest thing I had to handle. Even after I had the final "F" in place, and all adjacent answers in place, I just stared at it for a bit. The clue was too vague for me to grasp, and none of the crosses were particularly helpful. Usually with Downs-only solving, you get some help on the Downs you can't crack immediately by inferring some of the crosses, but I could only confidently infer that last "F." The remaining four letters were all first letters in very short answers, and they all could've been multiple things. Which means FLUFF just had to ... come to me. Which it did, eventually. The only other clue to throw me like that was the one for BOTS (33D: Computer-controlled players, in gaming lingo). BOTS are just ... BOTS. I had no idea about the "gaming lingo." I wrote in NPCS ("non-player characters"). Luckily, -RAIT only had two possibilities and one of them was "K" (which seemed unlikely), so I got the answer down to B-TS and still didn't consider BOTS because that word seemed too ordinary for the specialized-looking clue. I thought maybe "gaming lingo" meant the answer was an initialism or abbreviation. But no. Just BOTS. Shrug.

Wanted WINE BAR and then ... well, nothing, before WINE STORE (11D: Establishment with red, white and rosé options). Wine is sold in liquor stores here (NY)—I don't even think you can get it in supermarkets, the way you can in California (my main point of reference, since that's where I grew up). So the phrase WINE STORE is one that never passes my lips, though I'm in no way doubting its validity. Just trying to explain why STORE didn't leap to mind. One other hiccup in today's solve—wrote in NAMED (?) before NOTED (53D: Famous).

A few more things:

• 14A: Olympic gymnast Sunisa (LEE) — I probably would've gotten this if I'd been looking at Across clues, but I thought (correctly, it turns out) that she was best known as "Suni." Weirdly, SUNI has never been in the grid. Not as the gymnast, that is. SUNI has appeared four times, between '67 and '91. How was it clued? ... Well, you're probably never going to need this information, but you can go ahead and add SUNI to your mental store of antelopes now if you like. If you think you don't have one of those, think again: ELAND? RHEBOK? IMPALA? GAZELLE? GNU? And if you wanna get real crosswordy, there's ORYX, ORIBI, NYALA, and KUDU. There's also something called a STEENBOK (four appearances, once just last year) and a DIKDIK (multiple appearances, all of them old). And now SUNI, theoretically (": either of two very small delicately built antelopes (Nesotragus moschatusand N. livingstonei) of southeastern Africa" (merriam-webster dot com))

[suni]

• 3D: Like 20 Questions questions (YES/NO) — do people still play this? Feels like a permanently pre-digital experience. Or maybe there are digital versions of the game, that seems likely. FRY crossing YES/NO reminded me of my home town (FR-ESNO), and the fact that my friend Malcolm would always call it "Fres-yes!" (always in the voice of some kind of promotional slogan).
• 10D: Words set in stone? (EPITAPH) — maybe my favorite Downs answer. Certainly my favorite Downs clue. Me: "They probably mean the stuff ... you know, they write it on your tombstone ... epi-something ... epigram? No, that's not it ..." My brain did this for a few more seconds and then the answer clicked. And it was right! No help from crosses! And since it's Halloween week, and tombstone decorations still adorn the landscape, it's timely. Speaking of timely, or, rather, extremely untimely—they started putting up Christmas decorations at my local park yesterday (that is, October 26!!!!). I thought surely Halloween was a firewall, a barrier beyond which the Christmas Creep could not travel. I was wrong.

[evidence (Otsiningo Park, Sun. 10/26/25)]

See you next time.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on BlueSky and Facebook and Letterboxd]
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