Gentlemen, jocularly / SAT 1-17-26 / Longest number writable in standard Roman numerals / Korean barbecue rib dish / Setups for some elaborate group pictures / Servant in "The Handmaid's Tale" / Carlos Jobim, father of the bossa nova / Artificially unsophisticated / "All that really matters is if your rhymes was ___" (MF Doom lyric)

Constructor: Adam Aaronson

Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium

THEME: none 

Word of the Day: GALBI (43D: Korean barbecue rib dish) —

Galbi (Korean: 갈비; pronounced [kal.bi]), kalbi, galbi-gui (갈비구이), or grilled ribs is a type of gui (grilled dish) in traditional Korean cuisine. "Galbi" is the Korean word for "rib", and the dish is usually made with beef short ribs. When pork spare ribs or another meat is used instead, the dish is named accordingly. Galbi is served raw, then cooked on tabletop grills usually by the diners themselves. The dish may be marinated in a sweet and savory sauce usually containing soy sauce, garlic, and sugar. Both non-marinated and marinated galbi are often featured in Korean barbecue. In Japan, this and many other dishes in Korean barbecue influenced yakiniku, a fusion cuisine that often makes use of galbi (glossed as karubi). (wikipedia)

• • •

Seems like this comes down to whether figuring out the longest possible Roman numeral is your idea of a good time or not (8D: Longest number writable in standard Roman numerals). For me: not. Not awful, just ... tedious. Actually, in the end, not that hard. I just kept writing the Roman numerals in descending order, as many as I could write of each without the number looking wrong ("DD" = "M," so ... wrong; "LL" = "C," so ... wrong). And there it was: 3,888. That is ... something. A number. That is what that is. A very arbitrary number. Feels like a showy kind of stunt, but it left me cold, as did the somewhat juvenile fill. FARTSY and F-BOMB and PIT STAINS are the kind of thing that seem designed to get a laugh out of a twelve-year-old. I could've gone my whole life without seeing FARTSY in the grid, honestly. You'll be fascinated / thrilled / bored to know that this is not the first FART in the NYTXW—that great moment in crossword fill history came back in 2023 ([Brain ___]). But this is the first FARTSY. You can just imagine me tapping the Not All Debuts Are Good™ sign here. This is all to say that I could feel the puzzle trying to be flashy, "young," etc., and it felt like it was trying a little too hard. But most of the grid is actually pretty solid. Ordinary. Fine. The three "X"s from the Roman numeral and the four "K"s from KNICK-KNACK make for some lively fill in the crosses. None of the marquee fill really wowed me, but MEGAPIXELS has some juice (41A: Units for. high-resolution camera). FAUX-NAIF is also kind of cool (39A: Artificially unsophisticated). I thought "NAIF" was the noun and "NAIVE" was the adjective, so FAUX-NAIF (as an adjective) seemed odd to me, but it's right. Even though "naive" is much more common as an adjective than "naif," when you add "FAUX" to the front, only NAIF survives. No such thing as "faux-naive." I guess the "FAUX" Frenchifies it, and since "naif" (unlike "naive") is a French word ... voilà! 

[38A: "All that really matters is if your rhymes was ___" (MF Doom lyric)]

Not loving the triple "IN" in the puzzle today (MIX-INS, ASK IN, LAID IN). LAID IN is particularly awkward, in that those exact words aren't really likely to leave your mouth in that particular formation. There's definitely such a thing as a LAY-IN, and you can LAY (the ball) IN, but you'd probably never say "she LAID IN the basketball." "Laid it in" is the phrase I'm hearing in my head. The answer here is grammatically correct, but awkward-sounding. Also awkward: DELINT. I am quite sure it is a verb. It just looks silly. The only real trouble I had today involved (shockingly!) names. ANTONIO was certainly the best guess for how that name was going to turn out, but I thought maybe ANTONIN or maybe some other Brazilian spelling as yet unknown to me (6D: ___ Carlos Jobim, father of the bossa nova). As for the [Servant in "The Handmaid's Tale"] (RITA), no idea. I read that novel when I was in college (on my own, not for school), and liked it, and saw the (somewhat maligned) movie adaptation starring Natasha Richardson, and liked that, but once it came around again as a TV show, I was like "meh, I get the idea, I think I don't need to see this." And I haven't seen a single episode. So the names of anyone in that novel / movie / TV series are all unknown to and/or long forgotten by me. I'd also never heard of GALBI. Haven't lived near a good Korean place since I left Ann Arbor, and back then, all I ever ordered was bibimbap. I looked at GALBI (the last answer I got—I needed every cross), and thought, "isn't that some bygone Roman emperor?" And no, it's not, but yes, almost. I was close. GALBA has been in the NYTXW 20 times, usually clued as [Nero's successor]. It's somewhat less common these days than it was in the pre-Shortz era. 

Speaking of "less common these days than it was in the pre-Shortz era," I did another 1986 crossword today (printed out from the "Times Machine," which shows you old editions of the paper, and which I was using to look at movies that were in theaters this week forty years ago). It was a Thursday puzzle and I managed to solve it all perfectly. It had a theme, but it was very rudimentary (answers containing a standalone letter, e.g. C-RATIONS, DOCTOR K, MISTER T, etc.). The letters didn't even spell anything. Felt like a themeless. But doable. Why am I talking about it? Because it contained one answer that looked so nuts that I was sure it was wrong. That answer: ETAH (18A: Peary's winter base). I knew (or mostly knew) that Admiral Peary was an arctic explorer, but ... ETAH? Really wanted to change it to UTAH, but first of all, weird place for a "winter base" if you're exploring the Arctic, and second of all, the "U" would've given me EDUNS in the cross (5D: British noble family), and while I'm willing to buy almost any name, I was fairly sure EDENS had to be right. Which left me with ETAH. Unavoidably ETAH. So I looked it up and—sure enough:

There's also an ETAH in Uttar Pradesh. Just FYI. ETAH is a great example of Shortz's obscurity-eliminating effect on the puzzle. ETAH is emblematic of the kind of obscure geographical trivia that used to run rampant in crosswords, short answers you were expected to know if you wanted to solve crosswords. ETAH was going gangbusters for decades. 108 appearances before Shortz. Margaret Farrar, Will Weng, Eugene T. Maleska, they all loved ETAH. Then Shortz took over, and the ETAH pipeline went dry overnight. There were three appearances in 1993 (just before Shortz took over), and then ... none for over a decade. And after that single appearance (2004), there haven't been any more. None. Zip zero zilch. The only other thing in the 1986 grid that I really didn't know was SHEE, which is apparently a [Gaelic fairy].

We now return to our regularly scheduled puzzle: 

Bullets:

• 10A: What "margarita" means in Spanish (DAISY) — maybe it's because I'm solving at night instead of in the morning (when I usually solve), but my brain couldn't make sense of this clue. That is, I thought the wording meant that the answer would be "in Spanish." So my brain was like "well, there's a 'margarita' pizza, so it must be Italian, and now the puzzle wants to know what it means in Spanish ... weird." Well, first, the pizza is actually "Margherita," and second, "margarita" is already Spanish, and the clue just wants to know what it means in English. Needless to say, I got DAISY mostly from crosses.
• 16A: What Anora and Vanya do in 2024's "Anora" (ELOPE) — new ELOPE clue! Those are hard to come by. Surprised we haven't seen ANORA in the grid yet. Best Picture winner, short answer, all common letters. It's tailor-made. Ticks all the boxes. Valid in every way, and almost certainly useful from a constructing standpoint. I assume we'll see it by the end of this year. 
• 46A: Setups for some elaborate group pictures (RISERS) — I had to get this cross down to _ITA / -ISERS before I finally saw RISERS (as we've established, I didn't know the Handmaid's Tale woman). And yes, people arranged on stairs, I can see how such a photo might get "elaborate." Coincidentally, RISER (singular) was in the 1986 puzzle I just solved (above). 

• 4D: Grandson of Eve (ENOS) — here's the thing about crosswordese—it can bail you out when you're stuck, or help you get started, as it did for me today. First full answer in the grid for me today. I am no bible expert, but I am an expert on biblical names likely to appear in the crossword. ENOS is up near the top (when it not getting a chimp clue, or an early-'80s TV clue)

• 28D: Worker who's the subject of the song "Sixteen Tons" (COAL MINER) — if you look real carefully at the town square in Back to the Future (the square as it appeared in the '50s, that is), you can see a record store with a "Just Arrived" sign out front. The records that have "just arrived": "The Ballad of Davy Crockett" and ... "16 Tons"! Bizarre that I noticed this at all when I watched the movie last year, let alone remembered it today. It's completely irrelevant to the plot. Just a background detail. 

• 36D: Good marks? (SAPS) — "mark" here is a potential victim of a scam. A target. A patsy.
• 42D: Gentlemen, jocularly (GERMS) — from the (Vaudevillean??? Milton Berlean??) expression, "Good evening, ladies and GERMS." You can find some dudes being weird about the phrase on a "Men's Rights" subreddit here. 
• 45D: Dough at a taquería (PESOS) — didn't love this, as there are countless taquerías in the United States and they all take U.S. dollars. The "dough" at a taquería is going to depend entirely on where that taquería is. If the taqueria is in Mexico, then sure, PESOS. Unless PESOS is an actual dough, like MASA. It's not, is it? We're talking about money, right? Yes, I'm sure that's right. If it's not, I'll hear about it.

That's it. See you next time.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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

• Venmo (@MichaelDavidSharp)]

=============================
✏️ Upcoming Crossword Tournaments ✏️

• American Crossword Puzzle Tournament (Stamford, CT, Apr. 10-12, 2026) (registration opens January 8!)

=============================
📘 My other blog 📘:

• Pop Sensation (vintage paperbacks)