Major product of Milan / SAT 1-31-26 / Variety of dog associated with King Charles / Daughter of King Minus, in myth / Tubers from which a gluten-free type of flour is derived / Tree growth indicative of good air quality / Protection, as from an organization / Foundation of music?

Constructor: Nick Maritz

Relative difficulty: Easy/Medium



THEME: None

Word of the Day: NEANDERTHAL (56A: Old man?) —

Neanderthals (/niˈændərˌtɑːl, neɪ-, -ˌθɑːl/ nee-AN-də(r)-TAHL, nay-, -⁠THAHL;^[8] Homo neanderthalensis or sometimes Homo sapiens neanderthalensis) are an extinct group of archaic humans who inhabited Europe and Western and Central Asia during the Middle to Late Pleistocene. Neanderthal extinction occurred roughly 40,000 years ago with the immigration of modern humans (Cro-Magnons), but Neanderthals in Gibraltar may have persisted for thousands of years longer.

• • •

Hi again, friends! It's Rafa with another guest blog post. Happy to be back so soon! I hope everyone is having a lovely start to the year. It's a weird time because even though Things In The World seem to be going in quite a scary direction, I've had a really wonderful last few months in my personal life. If that's not the case for you, at least know that we've made it through January! There is sunlight at 5:30pm now! And it's only going to get better!!!

It's quite rare to debut with a Saturday puzzle, so congrats to this constructor on his first NYT crossword! I really really wanted to love this puzzle but to me it was ... just ok. I'm not usually a big fan of this kind of grid shape. It doesn't have that many long entries, so a lot rests on the quality of the top and bottom stacks. The SANTA MONICA PIER / ROLLER COASTER pairing is cute ... but VANILLA ICE CREAM is such an on-the-nose vanilla answer. Just kinda boring. Who is getting excited about VANILLA ICE CREAM in their crossword? Or in real life, for that matter. Don't get me wrong, VANILLA ICE CREAM is delicious, but is it ever the most exciting dessert option?

This is a jaguar (animal)

I've also always been a multi-word answer purist. One-word answers always feel less sparkly to me than multi-word answers, even if the answers are objectively cool and interesting things like PEDIATRICIANS and NEANDERTHAL. Is this something people notice or care about? Let me know! Both those answers did get solid clues -- [Ones who handle minor health problems?] and [Old man?] -- which helped elevate them.

This is a Jaguar (car)

Anyways, I find that for this kind of grid to work, the mid-length answers need to pack a lot of juice. But here stuff like BUILDS UP and ITALIANS and SUPERIOR and MENTORS and CLINICS and REPLIES, etc., while all absolutely solid answers, didn't really do much to zhuzh up the grid, for me. (ZHUZH UP, on the other hand, with its absolutely absurd spelling and scrabbly letters, would certainly have zhuzhed things up.)

This is the Wanamaker Trophy

Having said that, the whole thing was really clean. I'm not sure what ARR means in a sheet music context, and stuff like LAH and PATER feels kinda partial-adjacent, but there is very little to even nitpick in terms of gunky entries. (Some might dislike INCUBI, but I think it's a fun word.) Some solid cluing all around, too. The two aforementioned ones were bangers, plus stuff like [Bolognese, Parmesan, etc.] for ITALIANS and [Part of great deal?] for ACE (the playing card) also made it a fun solve.

That's all from me today. Hope to be back soon!

Bullets:

• 35D: CHIGNON [French bun] — I loved seeing this answer. (This is a hair bun not a food bun, for those unfamiliar.)
• 32D: SUPERIOR [Largest freshwater lake in the world by surface area] — Though I noted this wasn't the most exciting answer, it's nice to get non-ERIE Great Lake representation in crosswords.
• 19A: CEOS [They're at the top of some ladders, informally] — The "informally" in this clue felt really off to me. I don't think "CEOs" is in any way informal. Is anyone saying "chief executive officer"? To me, CEO has reached ATM-level ubiquity, and thus does not require any sort of "informal" tag in the clue.
• 11D: SNELLEN [Herman ___, Dutch ophthalmologist known for his visual acuity testing] — I thought this was the same guy of Snell's Law fame (tbt to high school physics), but, no, Snell is a different Dutch dude.

Signed, Rafa

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