Onetime Volvo competitor / THU 12-4-25 / Tourist hot spot in Uttar Pradesh / Also + Frozen water / Precocious literary resident of the Plaza Hotel / Clutch producer / Letters on Ivan Drago's tracksuit in "Rocky IV" / When tripled, a 1962 Elvis movie title / Traditional roofing material for a Cape Cod-style house

Constructor: Stephan Prock and Jeff Chen

Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium (themers were the only tricky part)

THEME: Connections — two answers are linked by a (shaded) word meaning "link," resulting in a longer, unclued answer:

Theme answers:

• TOOK NOTICE (17A: Also + Frozen water)
• NINETIES KID (24A: Three squared + Slide)
• CARAMEL DELITE (36A: Italian "darling" + Top-shelf)
• CREEPING OUT (47A: Northern tribe + Toe trouble)
• CARBON DATE (57A: Auto + Consumed)

Word of the Day: CARAMEL DELITE (36A) —

Vanilla cookies topped with caramel, sprinkled with toasted coconut, and laced with chocolatey stripes. (ABC Bakers)

• • •

Hello. First off, congratulations to Eli Selzer (who did the write-up Tuesday) for his impressive showing on Jeopardy! (also on Tuesday). He didn't win, but he sure as hell won the first half—built up a huge lead only for the champion to come storming back late in the game. Penelope and I both went "Noooooooooo!" when Eli said "Ozarks" instead of just Ozark. That was the cruelest mistake. But he knew so many things I never would've gotten. And I don't know how all you Jeopardy! people are so fast on the draw. I see the answer and I'm like "Oh, oh, it's that cat ... what is ...? ... ugh, you know ... not a cougar ... kinda looks like one ... it's black ..." [time expires] "Sorry, sir, the question is 'Who was George Washington?'" "Dammit!" I hadn't watched Jeopardy! in ages, and it was kinda fun. But only because someone I knew was on it. Gonna return to not watching it now. 

This puzzle didn't make much sense to me. I like a theme without a revealer if the core tenets of the theme are clear, but they weren't perfectly clear to me today. So ... we get two ultra-dull clues linked by a "+" and that "+" is supposed to represent the word in the shaded squares. Those shaded words are all verbs (or nouns, I suppose) meaning "unite," "fuse," something like that. And then, in each case, you get one long unclued answer. The whole premise felt shaky to me—not a tight enough connection between "+" and whatever was in those shaded squares; and those shaded words didn't feel like the tightest set, either. And I don't really believe NINETIES KID is a thing any more than any other decade + KID is a thing. Was I a SEVENTIES KID or an EIGHTIES KID? An argument can be made either way, and either way, neither one of those really belongs in a puzzle. Also, I had absolutely no idea what a CARAMEL DELITE was supposed to be. Zero. Figured it was a type of ice cream. Had to look it up after, only to discover it's basically the same thing as a Samoa (Girl Scout Cookie). Unclued answers are already operating from a joy deficit. They really need to sing. There's no pleasure in having neither a clue (as in, the clue is missing) ... nor a clue (as in, I have no idea what this answer is). The shaded squares don't always break across the two elements of each themer, either, making for an inelegant execution. "KID" and "OUT" are sitting in their respective answers completely unconnected, left out of the bonding scheme entirely. I realize the bonds are only supposed to "bond" the two clued answers (e.g. NINE and SKID), not the words in the longer phrase (e.g. NINETIES and KID), but still, when the "tie" is not "tying" the elements in the longer answer together, it looks funny/failed. Three of the answers manage to get it right, but NINETIES KID and CREEPING OUT miss. This feels like a first draft of an idea. There's potential here ... but the final product doesn't feel fully baked.

The fill is, once again, unfortunate. Bad enough that I stopped to take a screenshot before I ever got out of the NW:

As you can see, I messed up my stupid three-letter Star Wars answers because it's all crosswordese to me (it's REY Skywalker and Kylo REN, sigh). That answer + ELOISE and SERTA and "I LOSE" had me in DOOMER mode. And sure enough, the crosswordese came in buckets: SAAB AGRA OPI BAE ... and that's just the adjoining section. IMPEI, plural HORAS, that Fox ("cable," nice try) News guy NEIL (of all the NEILs, why that NEIL??) ... UGLI, indeed. The NE and SW have very solid colonnades of 7/8-letter answers—those parts, I liked. The rest didn't do much for me.

The only difficulty today was parsing the themers. That REY-for-REN mistake was easy enough to correct, and I don't remember any other missteps except USSR for CCCP (10A: Letters on Ivan Drago's tracksuit in "Rocky IV"). I did need several crosses to get MELON (33D: Noggin), but on a Thursday, I'd expect to "need several crosses" to get many answers, and that just wasn't the case today.

Bullets:

• 1A: Traditional roofing material for a Cape Cod-style house (CEDAR) — I wanted SHALE (?) and THATCH (which wouldn't fit). 
• 22D: Clutch producer (HEN) — a group of eggs laid by a HEN is called a "clutch."
• 49D: When tripled, a 1962 Elvis movie title (GIRLS) — not an Elvis film title that leaps to mind. I couldn't get the VIVA part of VIVA, LAS VEGAS out of my head. "VIVA VIVA VIVA!"—not a movie title. The part of my brain occupied by "GIRLS, GIRLS, GIRLS" ... has been taken (I think this means I'm definitely an EIGHTIES KID, for better or, in this case, worse):

• 15A: Tourist hot spot in Uttar Pradesh (AGRA) — location of the Taj Mahal, which, if you have solved crosswords for any length of time, you damn sure know
• 57D: Greenhorn (CUB) — couple of old-fashioned synonyms for you. I have never heard CUB used in this way except when followed by the word "reporter." I'm much more apt to use "greenhorn," which is a funny word. Curious about its etymology. Here we go ... according to someplace called etymonline (I'm just going to assume it's legit): 

greenhorn(n.)

mid-15c., "horn of an animal recently killed," also "young horned animal," from green (adj.) in sense of "new, fresh, recent" + horn (n.). Applied to new soldiers from c. 1650; extended to any inexperienced person by 1680s.

That's all. See you next time.

Wait, one more thing: For The Next Week Only, I will once again be accepting ...

🌲🐈Holiday Pet Pics🐕🌲

... continuing what is now apparently an annual tradition of posting pictures of readers' pets in "holiday" settings (whatever that means to you). Send your pics to rexparker at icloud dot com. Please include your pet's name, as well as any info you think relevant. I'll post several of them a day in the run up to Christmas and (likely) through the New Year. Here's a teaser for you:

[Christmas crime scene ... Santa's body was never found]
[Thanks, Lesley (you didn't give me kitty's name!)]

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on BlueSky and Facebook and Letterboxd]
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