Drive around the office? / FRI 11-28-25 / Bishop for whom a neighborhood in Paris is named / Junk food that, ironically, has an exercise in its name / Foundational skateboard trick / One-named rock idol who was born Paul David Hewson / Colorful capsule that splatters

Constructor: Jacob McDermott

Relative difficulty: Medium

THEME: none 

Word of the Day: ST. DENIS (5D: Bishop for whom a neighborhood in Paris is named) —

Denis of Paris (Latin: Dionysius) was a 3rd-century Christian martyr and saint. According to his hagiographies, he was bishop of Paris (then Lutetia) in the third century and, together with his companions Rusticus and Eleutherius, was martyred for his faith by decapitation. Some accounts placed this during Domitian's persecution and incorrectly identified St Denis of Paris with the Areopagite who was converted by Paul the Apostle and who served as the first bishop of Athens. Assuming Denis's historicity, it is now considered more likely that he suffered under the persecution of the emperor Decius shortly after AD 250.

Denis is the most famous cephalophore in Christian history, with a popular story claiming that the decapitated bishop picked up his head and walked several miles while preaching a sermon on repentance. He is venerated in the Catholic Church as a patron saint of both France and Paris and is one of the Fourteen Holy Helpers. A chapel was raised at the site of his burial by a local Christian woman; it was later expanded into an abbey and basilica, around which grew up the French city of Saint-Denis, now a suburb of Paris. (wikipedia)

• • •

Not enough good marquee fill and too many names. I don't mind names in my puzzle, but, as the puzzle says, YEESH. A name you know might bring a thrill of recognition, but a name you don't know is always kind of awful, so I think you gotta be kind of sparing with names, esp. ones that are not universally known. Like, BONO and ALICE seem fine, and something like ST. DENIS is historical, so even though you might not know it (or, like me, struggled for a bit to get it), it doesn't feel irritatingly insubstantial, or exclusionary in some way. It's not that the names were so marginal today [looks sideways at FAYE and ROSIE], it's that there were so many. Buckets. So many that the puzzle occasionally seemed as if it was trying desperately to reduce the name count by cluing names as if they weren't people's names. DOTTY, UTA, LEE, OLLIE—the puzzle mercifully gives all of these answers non-name clues. But in addition to all the names I've already mentioned there were NAOMI Watts and RORY McIlroy and RENÉ, and then OLE turned into a name (via a "Mexican food brand" I've never heard of) (48D: José ___ (Mexican food brand)), and finally a pair of crossing longer names, neither of which I disliked seeing and both of which I knew, but after all the names I'd already endured, it just felt like a lot. Plus, I'm not sure crossing them at the "A" is the greatest idea; I admit it's slightly hard to imagine anyone being Naticked by ART TATUM / ARMISEN, but it's at least plausible. I know this is a matter of taste and some (usually younger (than me)) constructors really love names and think they're no different from other kinds of fill. It's just that I notice when the puzzle can't seem to lay off the names. And it's distracting. Also, I have to say, names have this annoying way of skewing either very easy (very familiar) or very hard (never heard of it). It's no accident that nearly every answer that slowed me down  today (FAYE, ROSIE, RICK) was a name.

If the marquee fill had been stellar, it's possible that the name parade would've faded into inconsequentiality, but only a handful of long answers today really shined. The first of these was a mercy—I had gotten bogged down in the NW in a way that rarely happens on a Friday, and after giving up on working all the shorter crosses of things I already had in the grid, I decided to try one of the longer answers, for which all I had was the first letter: "S" (23D: "Mind your own beeswax!"). And bam:

Clean across the grid and immediately locked into the SW corner. I don't usually tend to look at clues for longer answers until I've got a bunch of crosses in place (too often a waste of time), but desperate times call for etc. and I caught a nice cross-grid express train. I wish more of the long fill had had the energy of "STAY OUT OF IT!" For me, VENUS FLYTRAP and BAD ATTITUDE are the only other answers to hum and sizzle in the same way. There's a bunch of solid, earnest, eager-beaver stuff—TRIED AND TRUE, WORK ETHIC, "I'M READY"—and there's a DANCE TROUPE, which should be entertaining, but ... then it's actually a flash mob, so the "troupe" is more annoying and dated than entertaining (do people still flash mob? Seems like a very 10+-years-ago activity ... ooh, look, you can flash rob too, that sounds ... illegal, actually). I guess if you like CHEESE CURLS then there are CHEESE CURLS here for you (6D: Junk food that, ironically, has an exercise in its name). As a "food," pass, but as an answer, it seems fine. The puzzle just needed more than "fine." BOOK A ROOM wins the "EAT A SANDWICH" award for this month [superfast pharmaceutical ad voiceover voice: "not an actual award"].

Aside from my unusual struggle in the NW, there were only a few other real sticking points. Beating myself up about struggling to get RICK (21A: James in the National Rhythm & Blues Hall of Fame). I thought "James" was a first name, and BROWN wouldn't fit, so ... pfft. I can see now how people might've been tempted to try ETTA there, but I already had the "R." Of course it's not James RICK, but RICK James, whose music—and luxurious hair—was very familiar to me as a child (even if his music was not exactly suitable for children).

The other thing that tripped me up was an out-and-out mistake: I wrote in PASSWORD instead of PASSCODE (29A: Alternative to a fingerprint, maybe). What kind of junk food are CHEESE WU--S, I wondered. Bah. Once I got solidly beneath the FAYE line (i.e. the equator), the puzzle got a lot easier. Not a lot of green ink on the bottom half of my printed grid today, except for an angry green scribble through SESH (up there with TROU in my Personal Pantheon of Horrible 4s) (55A: Informal get-together).

Bullets:

• 5A: Hustle (SCAM) — realizing now that part of my problem in the NW, besides ROSIE, was the depth of ambiguity in so many clues up there. "Hustle" can mean so many things. And as for 7D: Runs, once again I say YEESH. So many possible meanings. I needed every cross to get AIRS and it still took me a few seconds to understand it (a TV station runs, or AIRS, programs). You've also got the tricky (for me) "?" clue on WORK ETHIC (14A: Drive around the office?).
• 4D: Genre for Toots and the Maytals (SKA) — one thing this puzzle does have is good music:

• 47A: Vegges out (LOAFS) — whoa, is that how you spell "vegges"??? That looks cursed. I don't think that's a word that ever wants to be spelled. Let's agree to never spell it again.

That's all. See you next time.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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