Meccano offering for budding builders / MON 7-13-26 / Singer Vikki with three Grammys / Woodsy abode / Human's earliest phase, according to Freud / Metaphorical Cold War barrier / Small aircraft for short flights

Constructor: Lynn Lempel

Relative difficulty: Challenging (when solved Downs-only)

THEME: PLAYTHINGS (57A: Toys ... or the ends of 17-, 25-, 35- and 48-Across) — last words of theme answers are "things" involved in stage "plays":

Theme answers:

• ERECTOR SET (17A: Meccano offering for budding builders)
• ORAL STAGE (25A: Human's earliest phase, according to Freud)
• IRON CURTAIN (35A: Metaphorical Cold War barrier)
• TURBO PROP (48A: Small aircraft for short flights)

Word of the Day: BASTE (49D: Sew loosely) —

: to sew with long loose stitches in order to hold something in place temporarily (merriam-webster.com)

• • •

Holy cow that was harrowing. I could tell that those NE and SW corners were potential trouble for a Downs-only solver (i.e. me), but I had no idea how much trouble. Banks of longer Downs (7-7-8) ... trying to get into those when you're solving Downs-only can be very tough. In general, the longer the answer, the harder it is to solve without any crosses, and when you're solving Downs-only, most of the time, you don't have any crosses. So from the NW to the SE, I was good. No trouble. I cut a diagonal swath through this one without too much effort. But those NE and SW corners, dear lord. First pass at both of them yielded nothing. And I mean nothing. Even the five-letter downs (which ended up being SCANT and BASTE)—nothing. Nada. I thought SCANT was LEAST (10D: Minimal), maybe, and I had no idea about BASTE (really hard BASTE clue for a Monday, imho—way more people are familiar with basting a turkey, say, than basting as a form of sewing). Luckily, because I knew the theme, I was able to get the STAGE part of ORAL STAGE, so I had some small amount of help in the NE, but I could not figure out the TURBO part of TURBO PROP, so in the SW I was even more at sea. My first breakthrough was LOG CABIN (11D: Woodsy abode), and the "G" from STAGE eventually got me ENRAGED, but WEASELS, boy that took some time (13D: Sneaky types). SLE- could've been SLED. AGR- could've been a prefix (AGRI-? AGRO-?). Was it INCAN or INCAS? BED, BEE, BEG, BEL, BEN, BET ...? I was ready to give in with neither of the big corners finished, but I pushed on and the NE fell first. The SW ... I guessed SETTLED and that started the ball rolling. But that [Emphatic affirmative], yikes, that could've been a million things. "YES I CAN!"? "HELL YES!" I think I tried "I SURE AM!" at one point and then "I SURE DO" just worked better. The very last thing to fall was BASTE, but since I had TRIED before TRIAD, even that last little answer was trouble. So ... a satisfying struggle! Victory was mine! And yeah, the theme ... it's pretty good. Nice bit of wordplay in the revealer. Interesting answers. Very Monday. Thumbs up.

Knowing the theme helped a lot with the Downs-only solve (ORAL STAGE in particular), though I was confused at first because an ERECTOR SET is literally a "plaything" (as in a "toy") and so I kind of expected all the themers to be toys. But then I got IRON CURTAIN and thought, "that's not a toy? Is it? Was there an IRON CURTAIN board game or something?" No. I mean, maybe, who knows, but games and toys are not, in the end, the point of the theme answers. The "Play" in PLAYTHINGS = a stage play. Funny—I saw Death of a Salesman in April, and just today (literally, like an hour ago) my friend Dawn saw the same production and posted about it before the play started, at intermission, and afterward. 

Of course my daughter's whole life is theater. She's living in NYC this summer filling in as a technical director on some show before heading to Nantucket (!) to work at some festival. From there, we'll see her in CA for family vacation before she heads back to Yale for the second year of her MFA program. Is any of this relevant to the theme? Only kinda sorta—I just like talking about my kid. Sue me!

The fill is clean today, but ... Vikki CARR felt very dated (36D: Singer Vikki with three Grammys). Not a Monday clue for anyone under, say 50. I knew her name, but a. I'm not under 50, and b. I thought it might be KARR (though now that I look at KARR, that looks awfully wrong). Can you name a Vikki CARR song? I wanna say "The Night the Lights Went Out in Georgia." Is that right??? Whoops, no, that's Vicki "Don't Call me Vikki" Lawrence, of The Carol Burnett Show fame. Vikki CARR sang "He's a Rebel" (!). All of her Grammys were for Latin music. 

In the 1980s and 1990s, Carr had enormous success in the Latin music world, winning Grammy Awards for Best Mexican-American Performance in 1986 for her album Simplemente Mujer, Best Latin Pop Album in 1992 for Cosas del Amor and Best Mexican-American Performance in 1995 for Recuerdo a Javier Solís. (wikipedia)

Along with UNSER, Vikki CARR gives this puzzle an old-fashioned feel, but in general the fill is simply broadly accessible, with very little pop culture to date it at all. 

Bullets:

• 29D: Humorous parody (SEND-UP) — another trouble spot. You know what else fits the clue and starts with an "S"? SATIRE!
• 25A: Human's earliest phase, according to Freud (ORAL STAGE) — something about the wording on this clue feels so strange. "Human?" Like, one? The clue feels like it's being uttered by an alien. [Earliest stage of human development] somehow makes more sense / sounds more natural.
• 31A: Ann Patchett novel "___ Canto" ("BEL") — she has a new book out. It's got a horse on the cover but (I hear) has no horses in it at all. I forget the name, hang on ... Oh, right. Whistler. From the cover, it looks like it's about a horse named Whistler, but apparently it is not, in fact, about a horse named Whistler. I've heard good things so I might try to shoehorn it into my book queue, which is currently filled with Colson Whitehead books (currently rereading Crook Manifesto in preparation for next week's release of Cool Machine, the last book in the Harlem Trilogy). Other books in the queue are Buffalo Hunter Hunter by Stephen Graham Jones (which I started on vacation and am really enjoying) and Employees by Olga Ravn (which I'm reading for my Movie Club Book Club) (my Movie Club started a Book Club, what can I say, these things happen)

[Out July 21]

[Again, according to some guy I saw on Instagram: not about a horse]

• 18D: Ohio port on Lake Erie (TOLEDO) — speaking of my (Lake Huron) vacation, we drove through TOLEDO both ways. Despite having gone to graduate school only an hour or so away, I've only ever driven through Toledo ... except for that one time I went to the museum there. A really first-rate institution. Saw a Rubens exhibit there in the '90s. Stunning.

[The Head of Cyrus Brought to Queen Tomyris (Rubens, c. 1622)]
[This painting is massive: roughly 7.5 ft x 12 ft]

That's all for today. See you next time.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld 

P.S. forgot to mention I had PLED OUT before SETTLED (38D: Avoided a trial, say). It felt so right!

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Bull rings? / SUN 7-12-26 / 2020 Christopher Nolan sci-fi movie / Mesoamerican staple cooked in a cornhusk / Spot treatment provider? / Dude in Jamaica / Noted example of oligopoly, in brief / Professional responsibilities, colloquially / Dress for a job you probably don't want? / The Big Crunch, theoretically, for our universe / What fighter pilots fight, for short / Gridiron unit that includes the nose tackle, informally / Video game setting for noobs / Obsessive supporters, in modern lingo

Constructor: Collin Drown

Relative difficulty: Easy

THEME: "Slight Adjustments" — theme answers are familiar two-word phrases that are critical things describe things someone might say ("slights"), clued with examples that require that you interpret the first word of the phrase in a punny manner:

Theme answers:

• BITING REMARK (23A: "I vant to suck your blood!") (a remark about wanting to bite ... you)
  
• GROUNDLESS ACCUSATION (33A: "I know you're the one who used up the last of my artisanal coffee!") (an accusation about missing coffee, which I guess has already been ground, though usually "grounds" refers to the post-brewing remnants ...)
• THINLY VEILED THREAT (55A: "If you don't find the rings this instant, I'm calling off the wedding!") (a threat from one who is, or will be, thinly veiled, i.e. a bride)
• PATRONIZING REMARK (66A: "I love your paintings so much, I'd like to finance your next exhibition!") (a remark about patronizing an artist)
• BACKHANDED COMPLIMENT (87A: "Wow! With form like that, you're headed to Wimbledon!") (a compliment that is literally (possibly) about someone's tennis backhand)
• BALD-FACED LIE (107A: "I'm so glad you shaved! I hated when you looked like a sexy lumberjack!") (a lie that is literally about someone's bald face)

Word of the Day: EOIN Colfer (62A: Author Colfer of the "Artemis Fowl" series) —

Eoin Colfer (/ˈoʊ.ɪn/; born 14 May 1965) is an Irish writer of children's literature. He is best known for being the author of the Artemis Fowl series, a set of eleven fantasy books. As of 2013, the novels had sold more than 21 million copies worldwide and had been translated into 44 languages, making them one of the best-selling series of all time. In a 2010 public poll, readers also voted Artemis Fowl as their favorite Puffin Books title of all time.

Colfer worked as a primary school teacher before he became a full-time writer. In September 2008, Colfer was commissioned to write the sixth installment of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series, titled And Another Thing ..., which was published in October 2009. In October 2016, in a contract with Marvel Comics, he released Iron Man: The Gauntlet. He served as Laureate na nÓg (Ireland's Children's Laureate) between 2014 and 2016. (wikipedia)

• • •

[you can get this on a t-shirt]

Just not enough humor or thematic coherence for me. Also, the grid is weirdly boring. It's not bad, just dull. It took me a while to understand the title—since the clues themselves are not "slights" (some of them are just statements, some of them are outright compliments), I didn't notice that the answers themselves are typically, in their normal, non-pun contexts, all examples of "slights," i.e. slightly to very derogatory things one might say to another person. "Adjustments" doesn't really get at anything except the punny clues, I guess. So you take negative comments and clue them in exceedingly literal ways. OK. The humor here tops out at mild, and honestly you don't even need to pay that much attention to the clues because the puzzle is so dang easy that if you just work the crosses, the theme answers just kind of fill themselves in. This is true of the longer non-theme answers as well. I literally never saw the clue for HAZMAT SUIT. The puzzle just didn't feel substantive enough on any level. There's a somewhat cute concept at the core, but execution is tepid, and the solving experience was a bit of a yawn. It's all very adequate, but not at all exciting or provocative, in any way.

The theme clues also get a bit wonky in places. If you're mad that someone took the last of your artisanal coffee, you aren't mad about missing "grounds," since the grounds are what you're left with after you make the coffee. I just signed up for a coffee club last week—it's a weekly dealie where you can opt to buy whatever special coffee they are featuring. They text you telling you what the weekly coffee is, you text back if you want some. So it's not really a subscription since you never have to buy. It's kind of cool if you are into coffee and want to experiment with fanciness every once in a while. I ordered my first batch just this week—something co-fermented with peaches (!?). I made my first cup just this morning. It was ... a little too peachy for me. But fun to try. Anyway, if you stole my grounds, I wouldn't care since that would mean I'd already enjoyed the coffee. Weird clue. Also, is the bride threatening the groom literally at the altar!? That's the only way THINLY-VEILED THREAT makes sense. But ... why does the groom have both the rings? Isn't she supposed to have one? I got married so long ago (23 years this September), I forgot how it all works. And there's nothing particularly "backhand"-y about that BACKHANDED COMPLIMENT clue. Just something about "form," which refers to the entire way you play, not just your backhand. So the clues not only don't rise to LOL levels, they're also a bit clunky around the edges.

As for the fill ... what was there? GODSPEED got my attention (in a good way), and HAZMAT SUIT is nice, even if I never did see the clue (14D: Dress for a job you probably don't want?). Otherwise, it's pretty smooth, but also very forgettable. I think the most remarkable thing is the way they decided to clue MON (71D: Dude in Jamaica). I wrote in "MAN" since I thought the pronunciation was just a matter of accent, not spelling, but then I realized "no, no way they're specifying Jamaica if they're not changing the spelling." And sure enough! I like it, I think. Better than just an abbrev. for Monday. Or a French possessive. Oh, I forgot: I really liked the clue on PRANK CALLS (66D: Bull rings?). Took me a while to get, and when I did, I was like "Hey hey hey, look who decided to show up ... finally." Wish the puzzle had exhibited more of that kind of cleverness.

Not much struggle today. No idea who David YATES is. Peter YATES, yes. Dude directed Bullitt, ffs (1968). Classic. David? Shrug, never seen a Harry Potter movie, never gonna. There's also Richard YATES, a novelist who wrote Revolutionary Road (which I remember really liking). "His daughter Monica dated comedian Larry David and was the inspiration for Elaine Benes on David's sitcom Seinfeld" (!?!?!) (wikipedia). What else gave me trouble. Oh, HATS, yeesh (88D: Professional responsibilities, colloquially). I think of HATS as roles, not "responsibilities," so that was rough. I've never heard of ABBA Arena, and resent the exclusion of one of the greatest pop bands of all time. If you're gonna use ABBA in your puzzle (yet again!) you may as well let me have fun by putting a catchy song in my head! Lastly, where struggles are concerned, I took one look at 73A: What fighter pilots fight, for short, saw that it ended with "-CES," and wrote in AIR ACES! Woo hoo! So smart! [fiery crash]

Bullets:

• 11A: You might need to lose a few to get them (ABS) — "lose a few (pounds)"
• 32A: Turkey part (ANKARA) — weird to call a city a "part," though it technically is. I guess the clue wanted me to think of the bird. Mission not accomplished. 
• 114A: The Big Crunch, theoretically, for our universe (END) — first: bleak. Why? Second, I thought the universe was expanding. What's this "crunch" business? The Big Crunch sounds like a Cap 'n' Crunch variant. Or a movie about some dude who's really into his ABS. "The Big Crunch is a hypothetical scenario for the ultimate fate of the universe, in which the expansion of the universe eventually reverses and the universe recollapses, ultimately causing the cosmic scale factor to reach absolute zero, an event potentially followed by a reformation of the universe starting with another Big Bang. The vast majority of valid evidence, however, indicates that this hypothesis is not correct" (wikipedia). Extreme LOL. 

• 15D: Apt name for a tuxedo cat (OREO) — so not TUXY? Or ORCA? Or MR. FANCYPANTS? Okay, it's your cat ...

That's all for today. See you next time.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on BlueSky and Facebook and Letterboxd]
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Voltaire's penultimate play / SAT 7-11-26 / Bandleader who mentored Louis Armstrong / Statue in East Asian temples / Nookie nook? / G-rated verbal double-take / Julia Child catchphrase / Angsty feeling associated with exclusion / "Splendid" things in a Khaled Hosseini title / Target of a therapeutic tea bag / Boxing ring encouragement

Constructor: Jim Quinlan

Relative difficulty: Medium

THEME: none 

Word of the Day: KING OLIVER (3D: Bandleader who mentored Louis Armstrong) —

Joseph Nathan "King" Oliver (December 19, 1881 – c. April 10, 1938^:) was an American jazz cornet player and bandleader. He was particularly recognized for his playing style and his pioneering use of mutes in jazz. Also a notable composer, he wrote many tunes still played today, including "Dippermouth Blues", "Sweet Like This", "Canal Street Blues", and "Doctor Jazz". He was the mentor and teacher of Louis Armstrong. His influence was such that Armstrong claimed, "if it had not been for Joe Oliver, jazz would not be what it is today." (wikipedia)

• • •

So many would-be Words of the Day today, which is to say, so many things I didn't know or barely knew, starting with KING OLIVER (embarrassing, since I own a bunch of Armstrong records and have a picture of Armstrong on my wall downstairs (on a movie poster) (The Beat Generation (1959))). He died in the late '30s, so maybe I shouldn't feel too bad, but still ... gap in knowledge, revealed. Another gap: IRENE. Voltaire's penultimate play? What was his ultimate play? His first play? What were literally any plays he wrote? What else did he write besides Candide? Legit LOL'd when I (finally) got IRENE. Oh, IRENE, of course, how could I forget, penultimate, yes, I thought maybe ultimate, but no, no, silly me. I don't know JOSS as anything but a stick (23A: Statue in East Asian temples). A JOSS stick? That's like incense, right? Well, yes, but it turns out that a JOSS stick is just a "stick" of incense that you burn before a JOSS, which is a Chinese idol: "A joss is an English term used to refer to a Chinese deity or idol. It generally describes a Chinese religious statue, object (such as joss paper), or idol in many Chinese folk religions." (wikipedia). I'm sure I've heard of the SAVANNAH BANANAS, but I forgot about them—certainly forgot about the BANANAS part. Luckily I knew the plot of Sweeney Todd, I'd actually read BOSSYPANTS (Tina Fey's autobiography) and I'd at least heard of A Thousand Splendid SUNS. I still haven't seen the APU TRILOGY (throw that on my Shame Pile with KING OLIVER), but it's very, very famous, so at least that didn't give me any trouble. Mostly I enjoyed how wide-ranging the fill was today, but yeah, it asks or some very specific, often proper noun-related knowledge today, so you gotta be a polymath or else fight a little. I fought a little.

I called Thursday's puzzle "Easy," which it very much was for me, but Apparently Not For Others, as I got yelled at a lot. Well, today, let me make it up to you by highlighting the very funny (to me) initial faceplant I did at the very beginning of this puzzle. First, a run-of-the-mill mistake:

But the first thing I did after AÇAI was check the "I" cross, and it wouldn't do anything with an "I" in the first position (4D: Greek counterpart of 12-Down). I then checked 12-Down ([Roman counterpart of 4-Down]). I thought then that maybe the Greek answer might be IOTA, but ... the Roman IOTA is just "I" so ... that was going nowhere. Out went AÇAI. Now what? Well, if you're thinking about four-letter words that are Greek/Roman equivalents of one another, there's only one answer! 

And LAIR "confirmed" it! Sigh. Turns out, there's not only one answer. There are two answers. At least. It's not like POKE bowl hadn't entered my mind, but I got so excited by the ARES/MARS find that I forgot all about POKE. Weirdly, the terminal "A" now made me think TUNA, which is a common POKE bowl ingredient. At any rate, comically inept start today as the wheels came off while the car was basically still in the garage. And then I ran immediately into KING OLIVER. So yeah, getting started today was something of a challenge. But once I got going, this felt like a pretty typical Saturday puzzle of recent vintage (that is, not as hard as the back-breaking Saturday puzzles of yore, back when the NYTXW absolutely did not care about your feelings, but kind of hard; new-era hard; modern hard; sufficiently hard for a Saturday in 2026).  

The marquee fill was very good today. OAHU, HAWAII is one of those geographical redundancies that always make me roll my eyes (see TEHRAN, IRAN, whenever that was ... recently), but everything else—all 11 of the other 10-letter answers—really pop. I enjoyed the crossing of FOMO and "I'M ALL ALONE"—gave the puzzle a really angsty, modern vibe. I object to the clue on "WHAT THE HEY?" (53A: G-rated verbal double-take). "WHAT THE HEY?" is more like "sure, why not? let's do it." There's a spirit of willingness, of gameness. The G-rated "double-take" (the thing you say when you can't believe what you just saw) is "WHAT THE HECK?" Also, I'm not sure LOVERS' LANE can plausibly be described as a "nook" (56: Nookie nook?). It's a lane. Is it not a literal lane? I think it's just a figurative term for any place you can park and make out. If you don't know what "nookie" is, ask your parents. Grandparents, actually. I think I learned it from '70s movies / TV. Maude? All in the Family? The Marin County satire Serial (1980), which my family owned on laser disc in the '80s and watched a lot? Wherever I learned it, I know I didn't learn it from this alleged children's TV show from 1981:

Bullets:

• 16A: .08 for 49 of the 50 states (LEGAL LIMIT) — this clue is basically begging you to ask the question, "Which state has a different LEGAL LIMIT than all the others!?" I don't know, but I'm going to find out for you now. I thought maybe Wisconsin's would be higher ("Some of the drunkest counties in America are in Wisconsin and the state has 7 of the 10 U.S. cities with the highest alcohol consumption per capita."), but no. The one state that's different actually has a lower limit. It's Utah, at .05.

• 19A: Some docking helpers (TUGS) — I wanted USBS. Later, USBS actually turned up (28D: Some ports, for short). We call that a "malapop." I think Andrea Carla Michaels came up with that name. It's a phenomenon that happens more than you'd think. Or ... no, you probably know, since, if you're solving a Saturday, you probably solve a lot.
• 42A: Get out of Dodge (BOLT) — really thought this clue was doing some kind of wordplay and the answer was going to have something to do with disembarking from a car.
• 44D: Boxing ring encouragement ("GET 'EM!") — since the opponent you are telling the boxer to "get" is just one person, 'EM feels slightly wrong. But then "GET 'IM!" also feels wrong. Do people even say this at boxing matches? Kinda savage.
• 36D: Arkansas : Nebraska :: Argon : ___ (NEON) — one of my favorite clues in a while.  Bizarrely incongruous, and yet simple, elegant, perfect (AR : NE :: AR : NE)

That's all for today. See you next time.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on BlueSky and Facebook and Letterboxd]
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Acronymic weapon / FRI 7-10-26 / Suffix with caffe- / Relative of a bandeau / Wu Zetian of the Zhou dynasty, for one / Speculative musings / Smug know-it-all type / Branzino, by another name / Pescatarian steak option

Constructor: Willa Angel Chen Miller

Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium

THEME: none 

Word of the Day: Wu Zetian (8D: Wu Zetian of the Zhou dynasty, for one = EMPRESS) —

Empress Wu (17 February 624 – 16 December 705), commonly known as Wu Zetian, personal name Wu Zhao, was the only undisputed female sovereign in the history of China. She had previously held power as the empress consort of Emperor Gaozong of the Tang dynasty from 660 to 683 and as empress dowager during the reigns of her sons, Emperors Zhongzong and Ruizong, between 683 and 690. She was the sole ruler of the self-styled Zhou dynasty from 690 to 705.

In her early life, Wu served as a concubine of Emperor Taizong. After his death, she married his successor, Emperor Gaozong, becoming empress in 655. Wu exercised substantial political influence even before her elevation and gradually came to dominate court affairs. After Gaozong suffered a debilitating stroke in 660, she effectively administered the empire on his behalf until his death in 683. Breaking with precedent, Wu then consolidated power and prevented her sons from ruling. In 690, she proclaimed the Zhou dynasty in place of the Tang and crowned herself emperor. [...] 

In her later years, her governance became increasingly autocratic and extravagant. She was removed from power in the Shenlong Coup, which abolished the Zhou dynasty and restored the Tang, and died a few months later. (wikipedia)

• • •

This seemed fine. This square racetrack format (interlocking gridspanners around the edges of the puzzle) is not uncommon in lateweek themeless puzzles, and it usually provides for some interesting answers, as well as a fair amount of whoooosh—and today was no different. Not sure the marquee answers were as killer as I'd've liked. I liked SPILLED THE BEANS, but "I CAN ONLY IMAGINE..." was the only one that really made me sit up and take notice. Actually FAN INTERFERENCE is pretty good too. So I guess that bottom stack of 15s was the one real highlight for me ... which is interesting, because it was also the one real lowlight. Certainly a lowlight in my own personal solving performance, but also a kind of ugly patch where fill and cluing were concerned. I'm talking about the entire lower middle section, everything due south of the "+" mark at the center of the grid. I had both long answers driven straight through that section and so expected to make short work of it, but ... oof, no. Total spinout. The first issue was that I wrote in TANK TOP instead of TUBE TOP for 51A: Relative of a bandeau, but even after I tested TUBE TOP, I was getting nowhere because of all the Downs. No way the one-word clue [On] was getting me to ENABLED. As for a 2005 viral video about Hobbits, are you ****ing serious? (42D: "___ Taking the Hobbits to Isengard" (viral video from 2005)). A 21-year-old "viral video"?? What was I doing in 2005? New marriage, new home, new dog, little kid. Viral videos were not on my radar. Nor was most popular culture, frankly. Anyway, I looked at the "---YR-" pattern at the end of this answer today and thought "what the hell kind of Elvish-language bullsh*t am I dealing with here?" To have the answer end up as a mere contraction, man, that was the disappointment of the day. You made me think about LOTR and "viral videos" ... just to get to THEY'RE? Buzzkill. Then there was the -IFS ending on 39D: Speculative musings (WHAT-IFS). I was assuming the answer was one word (one non-hyphenated word). Like MOTIFS, only ... longer. 

But wait, there's more (of me struggling in the south): HAHAS??? People actually call laughs "yuks" but they absolutely do not call them HAHAS, my god (45A: Yuks). Never would've considered HAHAS without that initial "H" and ... that was Not forthcoming because that clue on HUNT was impenetrable (45D: Proceed with a game plan). I call foul on that clue—it really, really needs a "?" (which I'm surprised the puzzle didn't use, given how liberally it was doling them out today). I guess when you HUNT you "plan" to get "game," but come on. If you're going to do tortured wordplay like "game plan," throw me a "?" at least. I wanted PUNT at one point, figuring the game plan involved football (where, unlike hunting, you may actually have a "game plan"). I don't know how long I got held up down there—maybe not that long, by the clock. But by comparison to every other section of the puzzle, I was absolutely mired down there.

Not much else to say about this one. I rolled my eyes at the idea of "-INE" as a "suffix" for "Caffe-" (6A: Suffix with caffe-). I'm gonna start pronouncing it "kah-fay-EEN!" in "honor" of this dumbass clue. Speaking of suffixes, and the -ass suffix in particular, the NYTXW's ASS Era continues today with WISEASS (39A: Smug know-it-all type). I'm neutral on the whole ASS thing. On the one hand, who cares, people say these words, they're not really profane, so ... shrug. On the other, there is such a thing as oversaturation. ASS-containing answers no longer have novelty on their side. They've been done. They're not that exciting. More of a shrug. So I guess I shrug either way—because I don't think it's a big deal and because I don't think it's that impressive. ASS away, as far as I care. I just wish this puzzle had found a way to bring WISEASS and SEA BASS closer together. Who wouldn't love a WISEASS SEA BASS? That's a winning puzzle mascot right there.

Bullets:

• 1A: Acronymic weapon (TASER) — I forgot TASER was an acronym. I generally hate all things TASER (incl. the verb TASE) and wish the puzzle would stay away from that particular instrument of brutality, but those letters are so common, so useful, I understand why TASER and TASE and TASED keep coming back.
• 4D: Things that come with waffles? (ERS) — when you waffle, you are indecisive, and you might utter a sound of hesitation, such as "er..." If you make several such utterances, then there you are: ERS. That wasn't so bad, was it?
• 9D: Ginormous quantity (SCAD) — I will continue to maintain that there is no such thing as a singular SCAD. Only scads. See also "kudo" (sorry for not getting angry about that one yesterday, as so many of you seem to have wanted)
• 5D: Short Instagram video (REEL) — one reason I didn't get TASER more quickly is that I had CLIP here, which made my "Acronymic weapon" end in "C." "REELs" is the proprietary name for Instagram's short-form in-app video production format.
• 36A: Creator of the Detroit Industry Murals (RIVERA) — say what you will about Geraldo, he's very talented.

[I know it's Diego]

• 16D: Subjects of certain reviews at Untappd.com (ALES) — easy for me. I don't drink beer, but some of my beer-drinker friends will post their Untappd reviews to social media. It's an app for discovering beers and logging your own ... personal beer journey? I think? 
• 51A: Relative of a bandeau (TUBE TOP) — a bandeau is essentially a strip of cloth that wraps around the breasts, like a strapless bikini top, but if Google Image Search is at all accurate, it looks like "bandeau" is being used to describe a garment that covers much more of the midriff than a bikini top would—strapless and tight-fitting, but more regular streetwear than beachwear.

• 12D: Relatives of sloths (ANTEATERS) — huh. Did not know they were related, but it's true. Together they make up the order Pilosa.
• 22D: Branzino, by another name (SEA BASS) — I thought Branzino was some kind of beef. Isn't there some special expensive beef dish that sounds like "Branzino"? Maybe I saw "branzino" on a menu and just assumed it was beef. Anyway, when this came up fish, I was mildly surprised. 
• 29D: Not be square with (OWE) — yes, I too wrote in LIE here at first.

[Thanks for this, Maura]

Thats all for today. See you next time. 

 Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on BlueSky and Facebook and Letterboxd]
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Caddies, in golf slang / THU 7-9-26 / Dinosaur named for a lizard tooth / Rowers' workout machines, informally / Caucasus region / Hit 1977 musical that included Franklin D. Roosevelt as a character / Show that ends in disarray? / Hydrox lookalike / One of the six sluggers on baseball's Murderer's Row / Double-decker checker / Hamilton author of the classic "Mythology: Timeless Tales of Gods and Heroes"

Constructor: Brad Wiegmann and Nat Wiegmann

Relative difficulty: Easy

[2D: "Star Wars" planet where Luke Skywalker rides a tauntaun (HOTH) / 44D: Padmé ___ (mother of Luke and Leia Skywalker (AMIDALA)]

THEME: FORGONE (38A: Renounced ... or a phonetic hint to reading the answers to the starred clues) — FORGONE = "four gone"; theme answers contain four letters (all the same) that must be removed in order for the clues to make sense:

Theme answers:

• STUTTGART (w/ four "T"s gone => SUGAR) (17A: *Honeybunch)
• TELL-ALLS (w/ four "L"s gone => TEAS) (25A: *Afternoon socials)
• BASSISTS (w/ four "S"s gone => BAIT) (49A: *Worms or flies, often)
• APIA, SAMOA (w/ four "A"s gone => PISMO) (60A: *___ Beach, Calif.)

Word of the Day: OSSETIA (42D: Caucasus region) —

Ossetia [...] is an ethnolinguistic region on both sides of the Greater Caucasus Mountains, largely inhabited by the Ossetians. The Ossetian language is part of the Eastern Iranian branch of the family of Indo-European languages. Most countries recognize the Ossetian-speaking area south of the main Caucasus ridge as lying within the borders of Georgia, but it has come under the control of the de facto government of the Russian-backed State of Alania. The northern portion of the region consists of the Republic of North Ossetia–Alania within the Russian Federation. (wikipedia)

• • •

This theme is kind of interesting, even if at its core it's just a bunch of ordinary clues for ordinary short fill. I mean, [Worm or flies often] = BAIT—you might see that in any puzzle and not give it a second look. The opposite of remarkable. But add those four letters (in the case of BAIT, four "S"s) and you've got yourself enough wackery and confusion for a Thursday theme, I guess. I say "I guess" because I'm not quite sure it's enough. Once you suss the theme—not hard to do, since the revealer is easy to uncover—then you really are just dealing with ordinary clue/answers and the only "mystery" is what those extra four letters are going to be and where they're going to go, and that's never hard to figure out, esp. with all four extra letters being the same letter. Plus the rest of the puzzle, the non-theme part, was something like Tuesday-easy. The concept feels Thursday-worthy, but in practice, it provided about as much resistance as a wet paper towel. Still, the wordplay at the core of the puzzle works, and it was kind of fun watching the four- or five-letter answers appear from inside the longer answers. It's got something, this puzzle, even if that something does feel a little slight.

Outside the theme, results are mixed. First of all, as usual, the puzzle is just too easy. I solve by working crosses rather than hopping around, and today this resulted, strangely, in my going coast-to-coast before I'd even really started. I drifted into the middle and once I got there I was like "can I just keep going?" and it turns out yes. All the way:

Corner to corner, nonstop! Across Down Across Down, bam bam bam bam all the way! I got to the bottom, looked back up, thought "well, that was weird," and then continued, knowing that whatever theme trickery awaited me, it probably wasn't going to hold me up for long. That first pass through the grid alone gave me So Much Traction. Without even knowing it, I'd already filled in almost half the revealer! While I liked much of the fill (AS WE SPEAK, IGUANODON, that clue on STRIPTEASE (28D: Show that ends in disarray?)), a little too much of it SWUNG toward crosswordese. A lot of overfamiliar stuff. From EGAD and ASONE and ASP in the SW to ELL and ENTS in the NE ... ATIT APU CEO ETAS ERGS IONA ... the always odious ODEA. And then there's SAPOR, a word I've only ever seen in crosswords (it's adjectival form is SAPID, so, you know, keep your eye out for that ... someday). It's been four years since we've seen SAPOR, which tells you how ungreat a word it is. With those letters? If it were anything like an ordinary word, we'd be seeing it way more often. I wouldn't really mind it if the puzzle weren't already drowning in crosswordy stuff. Also, even though I think it's a fair cross for APIA, SAMOA, I can easily imagine that some solver(s) wrote in SAVOR, which seems like a perfectly reasonable answer for 52D: Taste. That would give you AVIA, SAMOA, but if I'm being very very honest ... you could convince me that AVIA was, in fact, the capital of Samoa. Like, if you just called it that in conversation, I probably wouldn't blink. Of course AVIA is a shoe, not a city, but crosswordese lives in weird heaps and jumbles inside my brain, and I can't always tell one bit from the other when I'm fumbling around in the dark. Would love to know if there were any AVIA / SAVOR victims today. Confess! It's OK, you're pre-forgiven!

The one ????? today was OSSETIA. Talk about a no-hoper. I had -SSETIA and still wasn't sure how to finish it off. The Times used it once back in 1956, and then once again in the mid '90s, and then I guess it's in constructors' wordlists now. A real "my software said it's real!" kind of answer. Of course, OSSETIA is located precisely in that part of the world where my geographical knowledge (only semi-reliable on a good day) is the absolute worst. That Europe-Asia blur. Near the western Stans. Just a mental-map dead zone for me. Doesn't help that OSSETIA is not a country but a region, one that straddles countries and is divided into a North and South. North OSSETIA is in Russia and South OSSETIA is in Georgia ... but South OSSETIA has now apparently been annexed by Russia, or is essentially under Russian control, so who the hell knows? All I know is that answer stood out like a fly in my cereal—the one thing I didn't know today, and I really didn't know it. Extreme not-knowing. Random letters. Between AVIA I mean APIA, SAMOA and OSSETIA, a real geographical adventure today.

[62A: Hit 1977 musical that included Franklin D. Roosevelt as a character]

Bullets:

• 19A: Group of spellers? (COVEN) — "spellers?" = ones who cast spells. It's a (very) old pun.
• 21A: Back-to-basics regimen (PALEO DIET) — does this clue work for the PALEO DIET industry? Big Paleo? "Back-to-basics" is ... questionable. What is "basics?" This is PR, not science. Avoiding heavily processed food is a good idea, sure, but this idea that you can (or should) eat like Paleolithic Man seems dubious at best:

The diet avoids food processing and typically includes vegetables, fruits, nuts, roots, and meat and excludes dairy products, grains, sugar, legumes, processed oils, salt, alcohol, and coffee.^[Historians can trace the ideas behind the diet to "primitive" diets advocated in the 19th century. In the 1970s, Walter L. Voegtlin popularized a meat-centric "Stone Age" diet; in the 21st century, the best-selling books of Loren Cordain popularized the "Paleo diet". As of 2019 the Paleolithic diet industry was worth approximately US$500 million.

In the 21st century, the sequencing of the human genome and DNA analysis of the remains of anatomically modern humans have found evidence that humans evolved rapidly in response to changing diet. This evidence undermines a core premise of the Paleolithic diet—that human digestion has remained essentially unchanged over time. Paleoanthropological evidence has indicated that prehistoric humans ate plant-heavy diets that regularly included grains and other starchy vegetables, in contrast to the claims made by proponents of the Paleolithic diet. (wikipedia)

• 26A: Caddies, in golf slang (LOOPERS) — golf slang, BRODATEs, and PALEO DIET—puzzle's trying real hard to flex its manliness. I weirdly knew LOOPERS from ... some dimly remembered James Ellroy novel? One of his early ones? I'm reading online that Ellroy himself was a golf caddy for years, so the connection makes sense, even if I can't remember what exactly I read. I just remember thinking LOOPERS was pretty cool, as golf slang goes.

• 33A: Scare off (DETER) — for some reason, this was the second-hardest thing in the puzzle for me to get (after OSSETIA, lol). I had -TER and no idea what to do with it. In my mind, there's some kind of intensity gap between "scaring" and merely "deterring." 
• 24D: Hydrox lookalike (OREO) — I like that the clue gets the timeline right here. Hydrox preceded OREO by five years or so.

Oreo was created in 1912 as an imitation of Hydrox, but eventually surpassed it in popularity. This resulted in the Hydrox cookies being perceived by many as an imitation of Oreo, despite the opposite being the case. Compared to Oreos, Hydrox cookies have a less sweet filling and a crunchier cookie shell that is less soggy when dipped in milk. (wikipedia)

• 32D: Long time follower? (AGO) — in the common phrase "a long time AGO" (in a galaxy far, far away) (double Star Wars day today! that happens once in a blue moon ... therefore, the double Star Wars clue phenomenon will be known henceforth as a Blue Endor)

That's all for today. See you next time.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on BlueSky and Facebook and Letterboxd]
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❤️ Support this blog ❤️: 

• Venmo (@MichaelDavidSharp)]

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📘 My other blog 📘:

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