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

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Verdant privacy features / TUE 12-9-25 / Pigmented rings / Asahi Super Dry or Kirin Lager / Termites, for an aardwolf / Gossip, in slang / "Edie & ___: A Very Long Engagement" (2009 documentary) / Music app named for a figure in Greek myth

Constructor: Kate Hawkins

Relative difficulty: Medium 

THEME: HEDGEROWS (35A: Verdant privacy features ... or a punny description of the four longest answers in this puzzle) — phrases that "mitigate or weaken the certainty of a statement" (American Heritage Dictionary) (i.e. "HEDGE"s) appear in "ROWS" (i.e. as Across answers ... as opposed to Downs?):

Theme answers:

• "AS FAR AS I CAN TELL..." (17A: "Judging from the information available to me ...")
• "JUST SPITBALLING..." (23A: "These are merely my spur-of-the-moment suggestions ...")
• "FOR WHAT IT'S WORTH..." (50A: "Here's my two cents, which might not amount to much ...")
• "ONLY A THOUGHT, BUT..." (57A: "Feel free to dismiss this idea — however ...")

Word of the Day: Edie & THEA: A Very Long Engagement (2009 documentary) (47D) —

Edie & Thea: A Very Long Engagement is a 2009 American documentary film directed and produced by Susan Muska and Gréta Ólafsdóttir for their company Bless Bless Productions, in association with Sundance Channel. The film tells the story of the long-term lesbian relationship between Edie Windsor and Thea Spyer, including their respective childhoods, their meeting in 1963, their lives and careers in New York City, Thea's diagnosis with multiple sclerosis and Edie's care for her partner, and their wedding in Toronto, Canada, in May 2007, because gay marriage was not then legal in their home state of New York.

Upon its initial release, the film was screened primarily at LGBTQ film festivals in 2009 and 2010. The Edie in the film's title was Edith Windsor, who after the death of Thea Spyer on February 5, 2009,^[1] was hit with an estate tax bill of $363,053 from the IRS. Had Thea been a man, Edie would have been exempt from this tax due to the marital exception. But the U.S. Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), which defined marriage as limited to a man and a woman, was in effect at the time. Windsor filed suit against the federal government on November 9, 2010, which ultimately made its way to the Supreme Court of the United States as United States v. Windsor. In June 2013, the Supreme Court upheld the lower court rulings in Windsor's favor and declared that DOMA was unconstitutional. (wikipedia)

• • •

Conceptually, this is pretty interesting. The execution was a little rough for me in places, primarily because the length requirement (every themer a 15) is a Procrustean Bed that forces the phrases (sometimes painfully) into uniform shape. "AS FAR AS I CAN TELL" and "FOR WHAT IT'S WORTH" are perfect, actually. "JUST SPITBALLING" really wants an "I'm" to start it off and a "here" to follow it (it also kinda wants the final "g" to be elided, but that's a much more cosmetic issue). If you search "just spitballing," the "I'm just spitballing here" option comes up right away in the predictive search box:

So you lop off "here" ... it's still intelligible, it's fine. Doesn't land as smoothly as the first two I mentioned, but it lands. "ONLY A THOUGHT, BUT," on the other hand, feels contorted—ad-libbed, improvised, home-made in the clunkiest way. "Artisanal" hedge. Like "JUST SPITBALLING," it's missing the verb phrase up front, but somehow here, the omission is far more jarring. Which brings me to the next problem, which is "JUST A THOUGHT..." feels way more natural to my ear than "ONLY A THOUGHT”; if you go with "JUST A THOUGHT," you miss the "It’s” less. Also, the attachment of "BUT" starts a separate clause and so the whole answer feels far more awkward and gangly than the others. When you require every themer to be a perfect 15, these are the compromises you have to make.They didn't ruin the puzzle, but I felt their bumpiness for sure.

I like the revealer, though the "ROWS" part doesn't ... add much. I mean, crossword answers are, by definition / design, linear, so any answer in any grid might be considered a "ROW." There's nothing especially "ROW"-y about these answers. I suppose you can say that in a crossword grid (or spreadsheet) situation, "ROW"s go Across, whereas columns go Down, and so the Acrossness of the answers matters. But then most theme answers do run Across, so again the "ROW"-iness isn't exactly an exceptional feature of the theme. But no other revealer will do. HEDGES would be anemic. The grid-spanning nature of the theme answers does give them a certain hedgerow quality, in that they seem to divide the grid into lots. If your hedgerow really is a "privacy feature," then I guess you might run it from one end of your property to the other I don't know. I've got sugar maples. I think the theme works. Not spectacularly, but it works.

The fill seems pretty average, though at parts it ran a little tough for me, for a Tuesday. Perhaps the most un-Tuesday moment of the solve was THEA (47D: "Edie & ___: A Very Long Engagement" (2009 documentary)). I'm not sure there's any THEA answer famous enough to qualify as a Tuesday answer, but this one was a real "????" to me. The documentary is about a very important U.S. Supreme Court case, and it sounds fascinating, but yeesh, as a piece of trivia, it's pretty Friday/Saturday. This could easily have been THEO as far as I, the ignorant solver, was concerned (of course if THEA had been THEO then the couple could've legally married in the U.S. and the documentary would never have existed). THEA is one of the few answers where I think I'd prefer the good old-fashioned partial over any one person's name. You can see that the NYTXW relies a lot less heavily on the Billy Strayhorn / Duke Ellington Orchestra song than it used to...

.

..but I say: "Take THE A Train" is way better known than any other THEA option, and any puzzle that reminds me of Ellington can't be all bad. If you must use THEA ... then by all means, take THE A Train:

I stumbled in a few non-THEA places as well. For some reason DIET was not a word that leapt to mind at 14A: Termites, for an aardwolf, so even though I had the "D" in place, I wrote in DISH (?). I was today years old when I learned RICE BEER existed (inferable, but ???) (8D: Asahi Super Dry or Kirin Lager). I hesitated at the final letter of AREOLAS ... then defiantly wrote in the "S," daring the puzzle to do the stupid Latin plural thing to me (which thankfully it didn't) (25D: Pigmented rings). The ZEE / ZED crossing was actually a teeny bit tricky, since there's nothing in either clue to indicate "letter" (33A: 33-Down, across the Atlantic / 33D: 33-Across, across the Atlantic). 

Really loved the GAY / TEA / "Oh, MARY!" nexus. A dishily queer little cluster of words. My daughter did some work on the earliest, off-Broadway production of Oh, MARY! before it even opened (possibly carpentry, possibly something else having to do with production design), then was invited to work on the show once it moved to Broadway but already had other commitments. The show sounds hilarious but I've never seen it. I like that even if you've never heard of Oh, MARY!, you can infer the answer fairly easily because the clue gives you "Mrs. Lincoln."

Bullets:

• 48A: Sound from someone sitting down at the end of a long day ("AAH...") — still not sure how this differs from the sound you make at the dentist. AAH v. AHH is tricky for me. Also, I thought the "sound" here was going to be the sound of someone literally "sitting," like ... PLOP!
• 54A: "Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a ___" (old maxim) ("FIRE") — ugh, this is awful. It's a weak maxim to begin with, but also ... I've never, ever heard this so-called "maxim." Why in the world would you use a quotation if you don't know where it comes from? If the "maxim" is universally familiar, great, but this one is not—too long, too fussy, too banal to be truly well known. So the clue is fussy, overly long, not well known, and not interesting. Four strikes.
• 6A: One who might ask "Fair dinkum?" (AUSSIE) — got this easily enough, but still have no idea what that question is supposed to mean. Merriam Webster dot com says it's a general expression of approval. Not sure why it's appearing here in interrogative form.
• 58D: "J to ___ L-O! The Remixes" (2002 Jennifer Lopez album) ("THA") — first remix album to reach #1 on the Billboard 200 chart (I just learned). I had "THE" here for a half second before realizing "oh, no, if they're going to pop music, that's gonna be a THA"—and so it was.

That's all, see you next time. 

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

P.S. two more days to send in your 🌲🐈Holiday Pet Pics🐕🌲 by Thursday of this week. Expecting to see a whole lotta cats in trees, just like Calypso here. Don't disappoint me!

[Thanks, Andrea]

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Gesture suggesting "I see what you did there" / MON 12-8-25 / Wyoming skiing mecca / Center of a stone fruit / Stuff on an artist's palette

Constructor: Dan Kammann and Zhouqin Burnikel

Relative difficulty: Medium-Challenging (solved Downs-only)

THEME: DIGIT (40A: Finger or toe ... or, when read as two words, what you can do to the ends of 17- and 62-Across and 10- and 34-Down) — last words of themers are things you can "dig":

Theme answers:

• JACKSON HOLE (17A: Wyoming skiing mecca)
• WORK OUT WELL (62A: End successfully)
• LAST-DITCH (10D: Eleventh-hour)
• CHERRY PIT (34D: Center of a stone fruit)

Word of the Day: Robert Benchley (13A: "___ is where a guy gets stabbed in the back, and instead of dying, he sings": Robert Benchley => OPERA) —

Robert Charles Benchley (September 15, 1889 – November 21, 1945) was an American humorist, newspaper columnist and actor. From his beginnings at The Harvard Lampoon while attending Harvard University, through his many years writing essays and articles for Vanity Fair and The New Yorker and his acclaimed short films, Benchley's style of humor brought him respect and success during his life, from his peers at the Algonquin Round Table in New York City to contemporaries in the burgeoning film industry.

Benchley is remembered best for his contributions to the magazine The New Yorker; his essays for that publication, whether topical or absurdist, influenced many modern humorists. He also made a name for himself in Hollywood, when his short movie How to Sleep was a popular success and won Best Short Subject at the 1935 Academy Awards. He also made many memorable appearances acting in movies such as Alfred Hitchcock's Foreign Correspondent (1940) and Nice Girl? (1941). Also, Benchley appeared as himself in Walt Disney's behind the scenes movie, The Reluctant Dragon (1941). His legacy includes written work and numerous short movie appearances. (wikipedia)

• • •

Felt lucky that I was able to get this to WORK OUT WELL in the end, because the Downs-only solve was definitely a struggle for me today. It started out very smoothly, as I ran the table on the first five Downs I looked at, but after that, my progress became halting and awkward. Got OAKS and could see that the first word of 17A had to be (probably) JACKSON, but I crossed that "N" with FINS (6D: Scuba gear = TANK), and screech, no more progress in that direction. I managed to get down the west side of the grid, all the way down through CHERRY PIT, but once down there, yeesh, that SW corner. Couldn't decide on SCAB v. SCAR (56D: Covering over a wound), had no idea about LULL, but the real problem was that I could not figure out how to make any kind of answer out of S-YN--. Even after I got it down to S-YNOD, I just stared at it. I know the word "synod," but there was an extra space in there. SKY NOD, is that a thing? I figured I had something wrong, but all the crosses were very right, and so eventually I just had to run the alphabet to come up with SLY NOD. Not a happy discovery. SLY NOD must've come from someone's overcrowded wordlist. I can imagine sly looks and sly grins, but SLY NOD ... man, it just doesn't look good. I'm not sure how a nod can be "sly." Metaphorically, maybe, in the sense of a subtle reference ("... De Palma's SLY NOD to Hitchcock..."), but as clued, it's harder to see (56A: Gesture suggesting "I see what you did there"). I just searched ["sly nod"], in quotation marks, and most of the first hits that come up are crossword-answer sites referencing this clue. I didn't actually work out SLY NOD until the very, very end of the solve. 

["... and giving a [SLY?] NOD, up the chimney he rose!"]

I also had some trouble remembering pets with food in cheek pouches (44D: Pet that stores food in cheek pouches). Chipmunks aren't really pets. Weirdly wanted ECHIDNA. Are those pets? Maybe I'm thinking of chinchilla? Echidnas are spiny anteaters of Australia and Papua New Guinea, so no, probably not pets. Anyway, not sure why HAMSTER wouldn't come to me, but it wouldn't. For a while. Until I got the "H" from HO-HUM. As for the WEI dynasty—no way, no how (64D: Early Chinese dynasty). I worked out WELL from the theme (which I could see at that point), and just inferred the other two letters. Eventually had to get back up to the top and fix the whole FINS debacle. After that, I bounced to the SW corner where I finished up with (ugh) SLY NOD. While I didn't like SLY NOD, I did like the theme. Or, rather, I thought it was just OK ... when I thought it was just a bunch of holes in the ground. Because I solved Downs-only, I didn't notice that DIGIT was a revealer. I thought that maybe the puzzle didn't have a revealer at all. But the reinterpretation of DIGIT is clever, and, combined with mostly solid fill, lifts this one into somewhat above-average territory. 

Bullets:

• 52A: "Let me clarify ..." ("I MEANT...") — somehow "I MEANT" is 10x worse than "I MEAN" as fill, and the clue today compounds the problem. The clue and answer aren't grammatically parallel. "Let me clarify" is a complete sentence. "I MEANT" is not. After "Let me clarify...," despite the ellipsis, you would start a new sentence, whereas "I MEANT" would be followed immediately by a dependent clause ("... [that] I can't..." "... [that] you don't ..."). There's probably some way to swap them out one for the other, but my brain can't hear it.
• 12D: From ___ to dusk (DAWN) — easy enough, but I know the phrase the other way around: "from dusk to (or til) DAWN." Maybe I've been listening to too much music about partying all the time. Or else the Tarantino movie title is wielding undue influence. Oh, no ... I remember now who's responsible:

• 30A: "Enola Holmes" actress ___ Bobby Brown (MILLIE) — I feel like crosswords are single-handedly keeping Enola Holmes in our collective memories, usually as the non-ENOLA Gay clue for ENOLA. For that reason, I think it's important to steer away from Enola Holmes whenever possible. The first half of the final season of Stranger Things just dropped last month. That's the show that made her famous. I would've used that show here, for reasons of timeliness, and also to prevent ENOLA Fatigue.

• 1D: Magic charms (MOJOS) — got this right away, which feels like a very Crossword reflex. Like, I don't think I ever thought of "mojo" this way before crosswords, but now ... it's right there. Top of the brain.
• 34D: Center of a stone fruit (CHERRY PIT) — At the center of *a* stone fruit is a "pit." At the center of one specific type of stone fruit is a CHERRY PIT. This distinction caused me several seconds of hesitation, but once I got the "C" in there (from LYCRA, where it was easy to infer—not much else can go in that empty place ... nothing, in fact), I was able to imagine CHERRY and that was that.

That's all. See you next time. 

And remember: 🌲🐈Holiday Pet Pics🐕🌲 can be sent to me through this Thursday (rexparker at icloud dot com), at which point I'll start posting them in waves, after every post through the end of the year. I'l be waiting patiently by my Inbox ... just as Sunny here waits patiently by the tree for Santa ... or for you to leave the room so she can destroy your tree:

[thank you, "crayonbeam"]

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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Future birthplace of Captain Kirk / SUN 12-7-25 / Sister to Lex Luthor / Arabic greeting and farewell / One chain x one furlong / A urinal, according to Duchamp / Solos at a party / Crazy Horse and fellow tribespeople / Russian crepes / Personification of England, Scotland and Wales / Trees commonly confused with birches / Bit of letter-shaped hardware / Farm-share program, for short / Alter, as a T-shirt for a Phish concert, say / It's often rapped but never spoken

Constructor: Kate Jensen

Relative difficulty: Medium

THEME: "Original Thinkers" — puns describing inventors or discoverers of various kinds (but also mountain climbers? I don't really understand the parameters, tbh)

Theme answers:

• POWER COUPLE (23A: Nikola Tesla and Thomas Edison?)
• BIRDBRAIN (25A: John James Audubon?)
• CABLE GUY (38A: Samuel Morse?)
• MOUNTAIN GOAT (43A: Sir Edmund Hillary?)
• MOTION DETECTOR (59A: Sir Isaac Newton?)
• SEEDY CHARACTER (80A: Gregor Mendel?)
• DRIVING FORCE (93A: Henry Ford?)
• AIRHEADS (98A: Orville and Wilbur Wright?)
• DREAM TEAM (115A: Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung?)
• STAR WITNESS (118A: Galileo Galilei?)

Word of the Day: LENA Luthor (87A: Sister to Lex Luthor) —

Lena Luthor is the name of two fictional comic book characters in DC Comics. The first one, introduced in 1961, is the sister of Superman's nemesis Lex Luthor, while the second one, introduced in the year 2000, is Luthor's daughter, named after her aunt.

On live-action television, the original Lena Luthor was portrayed by Denise Gossett in a 1991 episode of Superboy, Cassidy Freeman in three seasons (2008–2011) of Smallville, and by Katie McGrath in five seasons (2016–2021) of Supergirl. (wikipedia)

• • •

[Sir Edmund Hillary]

People who love puns will probably like this. I think. I don't know. Some of the puns are decent, but the whole concept doesn't seem very coherent to me. I think the problem starts with the title: "Original Thinkers." What did Sir Edmund Hillary "think" of, besides climbing Everest? Most of these guys (all guys) are scientists of one kind or another, people who invented or discovered ... things. But then there's Hillary, who was just the first to do something. Same with the Wrights, maybe? And Ford ... he didn't invent the automobile, but he pioneered ... well, Fordism. The assembly line. Ford's Model T was the "first mass-affordable automobile," so like the others, he's associated with being "first" (or "Original??") at something. Ford is a big name, obviously, but he doesn't seem quite as in-keeping with the apparent theme of the puzzle is concerned. Is Hillary the GOAT in the sense of "Greatest of All Time?" I think that's what's meant. I just found myself shrugging a lot. Like, the puns are fine, but the theme set seems very loose, and the puzzle seems to be trying to make up for its lack of coherence with sheer volume (ten themers is a lot of themers). Figuring out the pun phrases did involve a bit of a challenge (for a change), so that was nice. And like I say, they mostly work, as puns. They didn't seem particularly funny to me, but I'm kind of immune to puns unless they are incredibly ambitious and ridiculous. POWER COUPLE is very apt, but aptness isn't exactly hilarity. As for the fill, it's a bit below average, but only just a bit, and I'm not that surprised if it buckles a little under the weight of all these themers. Still, CERSEI GRIS EERIE IDEST INRE TSAR SSNS is a lot of unpleasantness ... and that's just the SE corner. Other parts of the grid do fare better, but not much better. ANOD, OTIC, ENROOTS ... ****ing REMEND!?!? YIPES. All in all, this wasn't terrible, but it just fell a little flat. 

Maybe we should look at the dudes in the themers systematically. What were the "original thoughts" that made them worthy of being in this grid? 

• Edison invented the electric light bulb (among many other "power"-related things), and Tesla helped designed the modern AC electricity supply system
• Audubon, of course, invented birds
• Morse invented a code used for telegraphs (sent by wires or "cables")
• Hillary climbed a big mountain
• Newton developed laws of motion
• Mendel was the founder of modern genetics (due to his experiments with pea "seeds")
• Ford, we covered
• Wright Brothers were "First in Flight" (according to a license plate I read once)
• Freud and Jung, like Freddy Krueger (Freudy Krueger?), are big names in "dreaming"
• Galileo looked at stars ("the father of observational astronomy")

The nature of the theme is what gave this puzzle most of its difficulty (which, as I say, was about average). I got BIRD but then had to piece together the second part, I got MOUNTAIN but had to piece together the second part from crosses, lather rinse repeat. Not all the themers were like that, but most were. The toughest part of the puzzle for me was the deep south, where I absolutely could not remember CERSEI's name (never made it past ep. 1 of that show), and I definitely could've used her for O-RING, which I absolutely needed in order to get GRIS (????). Is that Spanish for "gray?" And "gray" is a "drab color?" How is any drabber than most house colors. White, off-white, brownish ... those all seem pretty "drab" to me. Nothing about "house color" says "gray" to me, at all. Also, foreign colors, meh. Anyway, CERSEI / O-RING / GRIS had me knotted up a little bit. Other problems were relatively small, sometimes just one square. Is it YIKES (me) or YIPES (the puzzle)? Is it GAITER or GAITOR? (it's the former) (65A: Shoe covering). CHAMP or CHOMP? (38D: Bite down hard) (if you "champ at the bit" you "bite down hard" on it, don't you?) (that last question is for horses only) (see: chomping v. champing (at the bit)). I could've sworn Buffalo was NNW from Pittsburgh, but ... no, it's NNE (I always think Buffalo's much closer to Erie than it really is). 

There were also two "S" plurals that I don't think of as conventionally being "S" plurals. That is, BLINI and OGLALA both seem inherent plural to me, so putting an "S" on the end of either is ... odd (26D: Russian crepes + 37D: Crazy Horse and fellow tribespeople). In fact, the crossword has definitely taught me that BLINI is the plural and that BLIN is the singular, so BLINIS is like say horseses (I blame "champ/CHOMP" for this example). 

[see? BLIN! No foolin']

Bullets:

• 40D: Personification of England, Scotland and Wales (BRITANNIA) — forgot that BRITANNIA was a ... person? Just sounds like an olde-tyme name for "Britain." But now that I think about it, I can picture her. Really wanted JOHN BULL here. 

[BRITANNIA]

[JOHN BULL]

• 1D: Solos at a party (CUPS) — I know what Solo Cups are (they litter the streets in student neighborhoods on Sunday mornings), but this was still tough for me. "Solos" is disguised very neatly as a verb here. Han Solo at his family reunion, that would also involve [Solos at a party].
• 89D: Like many couples at theaters (ON DATES) — oof. Double oof. First oof is for the non-answer of it all (ON A DATE would be bad enough, but ON DATES, yeesh). Second oof is for the fact that "COUPLE" is already in the grid and therefore should not not not be in a clue. You can dupe short words, but COUPLE is too long to dupe, too conspicuous. This answer into REMEND was probably the most face-making part of the puzzle for me.
• 19A: Bit of letter-shaped hardware (U-BOLT) — bad enough to have one letter-shaped answer in the grid, we get to suffer through two (see O-RING—108A: Bit of letter-shaped hardware). Giving them the same clue does not provide nearly enough whimsy to overcome the gag factor).
• 51A: Trees commonly confused with birches (ASPENS) — me: "... all of them?" (I cannot identify trees to save my life—sugar maples, those are in my front yard, so I know those; and I know pines ... and palms ... and fig trees, weirdly (these were in my back yard as a child). But otherwise, I'm extremely tree illiterate. I know the names, but not the actual trees those names go with. I probably know more trees than I think I do, but I wouldn't steer toward the "Trees" category on Jeopardy!, is what I'm saying.
• 76A: Rain on your wedding day, perhaps (OMEN) — it rained on my wedding day. Is that bad? It's been 22 years and my marriage seems fine. Is that ironic? What does "ironic" even mean? Who can say? Let's ask this lady:

• 4D: Pest whose name is a homophone for what you might do when you see it (FLEA) — kept reading the first word as "Pet" and thinking "What do I do when I see a pet? Smile? GRIN? Say 'Who's a good boy!?'?" No idea. But it's a "pest." You flee from a FLEA. I guess you might. But if they're on your own pet, I don't think "fleeing" is gonna help you much.

Speaking of pets (and hopefully not fleas), it's 🌲🐈Holiday Pet Pics🐕🌲 time once again, so get those pictures of your animals in holiday settings in to me (rexparker at icloud dot com) before this Thursday, and then I'll start the animal parade, which (given how many pet pics I've received already) should continue through the New Year. Here's a preview—look how easy it is to turn your photo of Cinnamon and chewed-up tissues ...  

... into a lovely holiday greeting card!

Just add a frame and a caption and voila! The tissues are now, uh, snow! Yeah, snow. [Thanks, Janine!]

That's all. See you next time.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on BlueSky and Facebook and Letterboxd]
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