Pertaining to hair / WED 1-21-26 / Classic P.O.W. movie starring Steve McQueen, with "The" / Polarizing punctuation choice / Transaction on an online marketplace / German steel city / Inflation measures, for short / Like government bonds and Uber drivers / Spar on a sailing boat

Constructor: Ginny Too and Avery Gee Katz

Relative difficulty: Medium

THEME: Across the Pacific — clues form a poem about someone named Lee going about his day—parallel poems, actually: one on the left (west) side of the puzzle, and one on the right (east). On the left, the clues indicate that Lee lives in China (or maybe Taiwan); on the right, that he lives in North America. Dividing the two poems, appropriately: the PACIFIC OCEAN.

Theme answers:

• Lee has a hot bowl of ___ to start his day (14A: CONGEE / 15A: OATMEAL)
• Says ___ to his neighbors, then heads on his way (37A: NIHAO / 39A: HELLO)
• With gossip and beer over Friday's ___ game (65A: MAH-JONG / 66A: BRIDGE)
• Life across the ___ is much the same (17D: PACIFIC OCEAN)

Word of the Day: PILAR (32D: Pertaining to hair) —

: of or relating to the hair or a hair : hairy (merriam-webster.com) 

• • •

Great idea, disappointing execution. I just can't deal with the corny poem. The very concept of the poem doesn't work that well from a solving standpoint, because solvers don't always (or even usually) solve in a regular top-to-bottom fashion; so what ends up happening is that you run into "verses" all out of order. This wouldn't be so bad—certainly themes often unfold in top-to-bottom order—but in this one, the poem starts in the Acrosses but finishes in the Downs, which is super-awkward, as that "final" Down clue starts way up where the beginning of the poem is. So I'm looking at the revealer, the final line, the "punchline" of the poem before the poem even has a chance to unfold. It's all very awkward, from a poetic standpoint. But more than the awkward layout, it's the poem itself that is the problem (for me). It doesn't work as poetry. It rhymes, but it doesn't scan At All. It has none of the regular rhythm that rhyming poetry usually has. Plus, the poem depicts the most arbitrary "day" anyone has ever had. OK,  you get up and eat breakfast and head out for your day, saying hi to your neighbors along the way, that makes a kind of sense. But then ... the only thing you do for the rest of your day is play MAH-JONG / BRIDGE? Also, BRIDGE??? That's your definitive "(North) American" game??? Actually, I don't think anything right-side Lee does is particularly "American." I know that the demands of grid symmetry can be onerous, but you gotta find a better, more plausible way to fill out this guy's day. The fact that the poem seems like a child wrote it, that it doesn't even have "roses are red"-level rhythm to it, and that it's awkwardly laid out, all these things diminished my experience of the theme, despite the fact that conceptually, structurally, visually, I really admired it. Using the PACIFIC OCEAN as a divider like that—ingenious. 

The fill in this one gets pretty rough in places. The grid is carved sections that are loaded with 3-4-5s, and those sections (all of them constrained by theme elements) occasionally get ugly or rough. The suffix -ICAL is truly awful fill, but I have some sympathy there, as MAH-JONG's immovable presence was always gonna make that SW corner a tight squeeze. The "J," as well as the "H" placement, really restricts what you can do down there. But the ugliness in the SE I understand less. Both longer answers there feel at least semi-awkward. EBAY SALE ... those do happen (50A: Transaction on an online marketplace), but I don't love that as a standalone answer, any more than I'd love AMAZON SALE or BOOKSTORE SALE or whatever. And EPA LABS? (45D: Govt. sites for testing pollutants). I am sure those exist (or existed—does the EPA even function any more? I assume by this point it's just been converted into an arm of the petrochemical industry). But I don't think anyone would ever use EPA LABS in their puzzle unless software suggested it. PSIS as clued is absurd (just admit you've got a plural Greek letter on your hands) (60A: Inflation measures, for short). ESSEN is the capital of Crosswordeseville (everyone thinks it's OSLO, but it's ESSEN) (54D: German steel city). You've also got the partial ABU down there. It's not great. 

The hardest part for me was the NIHAO section in the west, partly because HELLO also ends in "O" (so that's what I filled in when I got the "O"), and partly because I only barely know the word PILAR and certainly couldn't recall it without help from crosses. Also, in that same section, the clues on PLOTS and EARS were both hard. I had EPEES instead of PLOTS at first (40A: They might be foiled). Aren't EPEES also called "foils?" They're both fencing weapons, anyway. As for the clue on EARS (43A: All ___), pfft. No idea. Could've been DONE, GONE, OVER, RISE, who knows what else? I also continue to believe that the Italian excuse is spelled SCUSI, not SCUSE, so that caused a bit of a hang-up, as did RATABLE, which ... wow, what an ugly "word" (8D: Like government bonds and Uber drivers). Everything is RATABLE if you try hard enough. Things are rated all the time, but RATABLE, however real a word, is borderline nonsense.

Bullets:

• 19A: Like those local to Universal Studios Japan (OSAKAN) — weird to divide your grid into Asia on one side and North America on the other, and then have the OSAKAN somehow living on the International Date Line.
• 42A: Like the villain at the end of a "Scooby-Doo" episode (OUTED) — somehow this doesn't quite feel like the right word for what happens in "Scooby-Doo." UNMASKED is the mot juste here, I think. OUTED is defensible, but off. 

• 4D: Bird with a plume that, ounce for ounce, was once worth more than gold (EGRET) — ah, the despoiling of the Everglades in the service of ladies' fashion. Love to start my morning with the wholesale slaughter of animals. The clue makes the EGRET plume sound kind of mysterious and romantic. The reality is somewhat uglier. "By 1900, more than five million birds were being killed every year, including 95 percent of Florida's shore birds" (wikipedia). 
• 51D: Spar on a sailing boat (SPRIT) — this is one of those words that continually gets me into trouble in Quordle (the 4x Wordle game I play every morning after Wordle), because your letter choices will really look like the answer's gonna be STRIP, but ... there's always the possibility that SPRIT lurks in the shadows, waiting to ruin your guess.
• 26A: Polarizing punctuation choice (SERIAL COMMA) — better (or also) known as the Oxford comma, it's the comma before the conjunction in a list of things. The NYTXW does not use it. I know because I have typed out more revealer clue lists than I care to remember (you know, this sort of thing: "... as seen in the answers to 17-, 26-, 46- and 64-Across"—no comma after the "46-"). I should add that I love this answer, best thing in the grid besides The GREAT ESCAPE, which is maybe the best action film of all time (I am normally immune to the alleged pleasures of quintessentially "guy" movies, but I watched this last year and it's honestly a perfect action film, filled with incredibly likeable actors—Steve McQueen and James Garner?! Bullitt and Rockford!? I'm in) (46A: Classic P.O.W. movie starring Steve McQueen, with "The")

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on BlueSky and Facebook and Letterboxd]
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