Secret identity of Don Diego de la Vega / WED 12-10-25 / Final boss in the game God of War / Rapper who co-starred in 1994's "Above the Rim" / Several things in a pagoda / Ax, so to speak / First name in daring jumps / Iconic repeated Keanu Reeves role / "Community" character played by Donald Glover / Performer of the 1992 dance song "Supermodel (You Better Work)"

Constructor: Kareem Ayas

Relative difficulty: Medium

THEME: UNDER REPAIR (28D: Status of 23-, 44- and 69-Across, as indicated by their clues and placement in the grid) — the answers are things that are UNDER REPAIR in two senses: they are in need of fixing (indicated by their warning sign-like clues), and they are under a pair of "RE"s (in shaded squares):

Theme answers:

• PRERECORDED (19A: Like voice mail messages, for example)
•  PRINTER (23A: OUT OF ORDER! 🚫🚫🚫 PAPER TRAY REQUIRES MAINTENANCE!)

•  NATURERESERVE (42A: Protected lands for plants and animals)
• ESCALATOR (44A: OUT OF ORDER! 🚫🚫🚫 USE STAIRS UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE!)

• ROSESARERED (63A: Love poem opener)
•      TOILET (69A: OUT OF ORDER! 🚫🚫🚫 USE SECOND-FLOOR BATHROOM INSTEAD!

Word of the Day: pagoda (34D: Several things in a pagoda => TIERS) —

A pagoda is a tiered tower with multiple eaves, common in Tibet, Thailand, Cambodia, Nepal, India, China, Japan, Korea, Myanmar, Vietnam, and other parts of Asia. Most pagodas were built to have a religious function, most often Buddhist, but sometimes Taoist or Hindu, and were often in or near viharas. The pagoda traces its origins to the stupa, while its design was developed in ancient India.^[1] Chinese pagodas (Chinese: 塔; pinyin: Tǎ) are a traditional part of Chinese architecture. In addition to religious use, since ancient times Chinese pagodas have been valued for the spectacular views they offer, and many classical poems attest to the joy of scaling pagodas. (wikipedia)

• • •

That was a long way to go for that revealer joke. For me, too long. I can admire the construction of this puzzle while also being frank about the fact that most of the solve was not very enjoyable to me, both because the fill was generally below average (not surprising given the structural demands of the theme), and because staring at RERE after RERE without having any idea why was just unpleasant. Shaded nonsense ... not my idea of a good time. Yes, the revealer explains the RERE perfectly well. But a pair of "RE"s, as a visual element, is just plain ugly to my eyes. The first RERE made me think I had a mistake ("why would you put gibberish like that in shaded squares?"). The second RERE made me realize the first RERE was right and the puzzle was just doing some mysterious, elaborate bit. The second RERE also made the third RERE self-evident—I just filled those remaining shaded squares in and the whole answer there was instantly clear:

So I solved this exactly as it was designed to be solved—all the RERE business and then ... the Big Reveal! I was grateful for that revealer—the whole puzzle is dependent on it, as there is nearly no pleasure to be had before it or without it. So, your enjoyment of this puzzle will probably ride on how much of a pleasure burst you got from the revealer. For me, it merely explained what was going on and pulled the puzzle back from "bad" to "just fine." I don't know that the rickety build-up was worth the finale. But I do think it's a creative and ambitious theme. Ambivalence! That's the real word of the day.

The fill started creaking real early, with the resurrected corpse of EVEL Knievel jumping into the grid right up top and the resurrected corpse of PEI joining him soon after—two crosswordese icons of yore, linked together by ... EVENER 🙁 I'm pretty sure I uttered many actual UHS today (including when I got the answer UHS). There's just a giant angry swirl of green ink on my puzzle print-out around the entire section that extends above and below RICE PADDY. The ugliness arguably stretches all the way to the bottom of the grid (down where ARLO DTS URSA live), but it's densest there around RICE PADDY, with ATMS MCS SEEDER DOER AVEC PROSIT SRI congealing into an unappetizing mass. As I said above, I know why the theme buckles like this—you don't have three themers today, you have six, and they come as conjoined pairs, and that much fixed theme material would be very, very hard to build a clean grid around. You too would find yourself resorting to clumps of ECO CFO NSFW and the like. The puzzle does manage to get off a couple of longer colorful answers, specifically RUPAUL strutting with VEGGIE BACON (PETA would be so happy). But overall, wading through this puzzle was often somewhat tedious (if not particularly difficult).

[Performer of the 1992 dance song "Supermodel (You Better Work)"]

I had trouble primarily with small stuff today. Stuff like END, what the hell is with that clue? (12D: Ax, so to speak). Is this like a program that you "END"—so "END" as in "cut"? And "Ax" as in "cut"? Is that it? OK. Not natural synonyms to my ear, but defensible, I guess. I thought the thunderbolt wielder was THOR (11A: Thunder bolt wielder => ZEUS). I forgot that the [Secret identity of Don Diego de la Vega] was ZORRO and thought maybe EL CID. I was convinced that Donald Glover played a TREY on Community (58D: "Community" character played by Donald Glover), which made the TOILET hard to find for a bit. No idea if the N.F.L. linemen were DTS (defensive tackles) or DES (defensive ends) (although DES is never clued that way, which I should've realized). Forgot there was a Matrix character called ORACLE. Two Matrix characters in this grid why?? There was a niche-iness to the pop culture answers that grated a little. Community character, "final boss" of some video game, multiple Matrix characters ... none of these had to be pop culturey at all. I think once or twice you can steer regular words and phrases into pop cultural territory if that floats your boat, but doing it again and again = 🚫🚫🚫.

Bullets:

• 29D: Trampoline mats (BEDS) — as with END, I just stared at this answer wondering "really?" Are the mats beside the trampoline? For when you ... dismount? Or in case you fall off. Because I've never seen a mat *on* a trampoline. This illustration says the thing you actually jump on is called a "jumping mat"—is that the BED? Words can't express how uninterested I am in trampolines.

• 33A: Green dispensaries? (ATMS) — I think this wants to be a (marijuana) dispensary joke, but if ATMS wants to hide from me, it's going to have to do a way better job than this.
• 34D: Several things in a pagoda (TIERS) — big vocabulary fail today. I looked at "pagoda" and all I could see in my mind's eye was one of those wooden structures ... you see them in backyards and parks ... open on the sides, covered, maybe domed? ... eventually I realized that my brain was stuck somewhere between "pergola" and "gazebo" (the latter of which was the more elusive of the pair—I literally googled "small covered structure in garden or park" in order to jog "gazebo" loose from my brain, ugh. Anyway, most gardens and parks don't have pagodas.

[not a pagoda]

• 56A: Hole in the wall (RAT TRAP) — "Hole in the wall" suggests somewhere out of the way, undiscovered. "A small, very modest, often out-of-the-way place," says American Heritage Dictionary. Nothing in there about ****ing rats!? RAT TRAP is intensively negative in a way that "Hole in the wall" just isn't. I might eat at a hole in the wall. A RAT TRAP ... probably not.

That's all. See you next time. Remember, my annual 🌲🐈Holiday Pet Pics🐕🌲 extravaganza starts tomorrow, so if you want your pet to be part of the parade (which will likely extend into the new year), get that photo to me today (rexparker at icloud dot com). Many of the photos are memorial photos, which adds to the poignancy of the whole endeavor. Please feel free to send me holiday pics of your recently deceased buddies. Like Miley here, who died just after the holidays last year. What a sweetie. I miss her and I didn't even know her. 

[Thanks, Michael and Lisa!]

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on BlueSky and Facebook and Letterboxd]
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