Symbol of transformation in "The Silence of the Lambs" / SUN 1-25-26 / Triangular sail / Property of curium, but not cerium / Either side of a cheerleader's "A" / Cable co. that was purchased by AT&T in 1999 / Canning package? / Prosthetic facial feature of Peter Falk / Sneaker brand that popularized cantilever heels / Pete who co-wrote "If I Had A Hammer" / N.H.L. team with the longest Stanley Cup drought, familiarly

Constructor: Mark MacLachlan

Relative difficulty: Medium

[59A: Sci-fi princess]

THEME: "Alert! Alert!" — computer alerts are clued as if they were alerts about ... something else entirely:

Theme answers:

• OUT OF DISK SPACE (23A: "That cabinet with plates looks awfully full")
• RUN-TIME ERROR (43A: "It's saying you completed the marathon in under two hours, which can't be right")
• VIRUS DETECTED (51A: "Is that a cough I hear?")
• WINDOWS UPDATE FAILED (70A: "Sorry, we'll have to put the old panes back in")
• STACK OVERFLOW (91A: "Those pancakes are piled way too high!")
• FILE TOO LARGE (98A: "Your emery board will never fit in this tiny toiletry bag")
• SEVER NOT FOUND (122A: "Your waiter's nowhere to be seen!")

Word of the Day: P.E.I. (75D: Smallest Canadian prov.) —

Prince Edward Island is an island province of Canada. It is the smallest province by both land area and population, and has the highest population density in Canada. The island has several nicknames: "Garden of the Gulf", "Birthplace of Confederation" and "Cradle of Confederation". Its capital and largest city is Charlottetown. It is one of the three Maritime provinces and one of the four Atlantic provinces.

Historically, the island has formed an integral part of the Mi'kmaw homeland, Mi'kma'ki, comprising one part of the district Epekwitk aq Piktuk (also spelled Epegwitg aq Pigtug, lit. 'PEI and Pictou'). Come 1604, Epekwitk would be colonized by the French as part of the colony of Acadia, where it became known as Isle St-Jean (St. John's Island). It was later ceded to the British at the conclusion of the Seven Years' War in 1763 and became part of the colony of Nova Scotia. In 1769, St. John's Island became its own British colony and its name was changed to Prince Edward Island (PEI) in 1798. PEI hosted the Charlottetown Conference in 1864 to discuss a union of the Maritime provinces; however, the conference became the first in a series of meetings which led to Canadian Confederation on July 1, 1867. Prince Edward Island initially balked at Confederation but, facing bankruptcy from the Land Question and construction of a railroad, joined as Canada's seventh province on July 1, 1873. (wikipedia)

• • •

A wholly unlikeable puzzle. Why would I want to see a bunch of error messages in my puzzle when they're so annoying in real life? I'm just trying to imagine whose idea of a good time this is. And anyway, most of these "alerts" are things that seem made up or extremely situational. The following mean nothing to me: STACK OVERFLOW; RUN-TIME ERROR. As for the others, I understand them, but I don't know that I have ever actually seen them, ever. Maybe if your entire life is working with computers, this all means something to you. To me, it was wall-to-wall off-putting. Nothing clever about it, either. I see all the wacky clues, and god knows I love wackiness, but in the service of these mundane error messages—blah. There was absolutely no pleasure to be had in figuring out what the "wacky" clues were going for. And by "wacky," I'm being very generous. Are you really asking me to imagine that someone would refer to plates as "DISKS?" (23A: "That cabinet with plates looks awfully full")? I understand, yes, plates are technically disks, in that that is their shape, but no one would ever ever ever refer to them that way (the way someone would, say, refer to a waiter as a "SERVER" (see 122A). Also, Isn't a plate a DISC? I would've said DISC. Also, given the context, I might've said DISH. But the DISK = "plate" idea is meh, at best. Add to that a highly choppy grid loaded with crosswordese and you have one heck of a bad time. A Sunday-sized bad time.  

And even in the non-theme fill, the puzzle goes back again and again to boring computer stuff. ACCESS LOG. CARTRIDGE. DATA SETS. Why don't you move your focus around a little, maybe branch out? And OPERANDI? That's a lot of real estate to give over to a Latin partial. Speaking of Latin (almost) ... LATEEN? Just what this puzzle needed—highly technical sailing language! (25A: Triangular sail).  I'm trying really hard to find parts of this puzzle that I genuinely enjoyed, and I'm not finding many. I always like thinking about Peter Falk, but usually I like thinking about what a great actor he was, not about his GLASS EYE (15D: Prosthetic facial feature of Peter Falk). My wife is a Kiwi so KIWIS is always an answer I can get behind. But otherwise we get an Apple TV show that started out OK only to get increasingly cloying and unbearable as the seasons wore on (TED LASSO) (6A: Apple TV comedy that received 20 Emmy nominations for its first season), another Apple TV show that is great, but is somehow not clued as an Apple show (SEVERANCE) (80D: Canning package?), CLUE ME IN instead of the more natural FILL ME IN (21A: "I want to hear about that!") ... bah. Really not for me, this puzzle. Yesterday's puzzle was such a joy. This is a real come-down. 

[Mikey & Nicky (d. Elaine May, 1976)]

There were definitely some moments of difficulty in this puzzle, but most of it was occasioned by the theme answers themselves, many of which weren't terribly familiar to me, so that I had to conjure them out of the letters I got from crosses. Some of the short stuff was a mystery to me as well. TCI???? (6D: Cable co. that was purchased by AT&T in 1999). What in the world is that? I was very much alive in 1999, and I have no memory of a .... cable company? ... called TCI. I know a university called TCU. I remember an MCI, because I was a young person at the height of the "Long Distance Phone Wars"—in which MCI was a major competitor of AT&T—but TCI ... you got me there. Was that regional? Hmm, Tele-Communications, Inc. ... nope, not ringing a bell. Bygone business initialisms—not exactly prime fill. TCI has appeared in the NYTXW eight times over the years. In true NYTXW fashion, only one of those times was from the period during which TCI was actually operative (1997). All others are from the post-1999 period, when it was defunct. A handful of appearances in the early '00s, but since then, pretty rare. This is only the third appearance since 2002, and the first in four years. Desperation fill, for sure. Not knowing TCI contributed to that northern section getting a little sticky for me (I abandoned it early on and then ended up finishing the puzzle there). No one section was particularly tough, but I just remember little things holding me up here and there. Orwell's given name, for instance. Or TICKS as clued (73D: Exam marks). I mark exams on a fairly regular basis, and while I have used checks (i.e. check marks, √√√), TICKS ... no, not really. Also, a weird confession: I've never seen Silence of the Lambs! I feel like I've seen it, since it's so much a part of popular culture, but nope, never seen it. So the clue 107A: Symbol of transformation in "The Silence of the Lambs" meant nothing to me. I eventually got it by remembering the MOTH image on the poster:

I'm generally a big Jodie Foster fan, and (according to my Letterboxd account) I watch hundreds of movies a year, so even I'm surprised I've never seen this movie. I think the reason I didn't see it originally was I was horror movie-averse, or certainly serial killer movie-averse, and then, even after all the Academy Awards and everything, I just ... never got around to it. Maybe this year. Yeah, I think I'll put it on my Watchlist now. Jodie Foster has a new French-language (!) movie coming out soon (I just saw a trailer for it last week). It's called A Private Life. Wikipedia calls it a "French black comedy mystery thriller film." Too many words, wikipedia. Those are words I like, but ... too many. Anyway, I'm gonna see it. 

Also of interest, perhaps, to some of you: Jodie Foster is the most recent person to do a Criterion Closet video:

Bullets:

• 20A: Home of Diego Velázquez's "Las Meninas" (PRADO) — I once did a jigsaw puzzle featuring Las Meninas. Fascinating, I know. I had the PRAD- here and without looking at the clue instinctively wrote in "A" for the last letter (as in The Devil Wears ___), but then remembered the museum existed and decided to actually read the clue (good general advice: read the clues).

[1656]

• 47A: Sneaker brand that popularized cantilever heels (AVIA) — I ... did not know these were "popular." Or that they were a thing at all. AVIA is, of course, brand name crosswordese, just like ARIA and AIDA are opera crosswordese, "ADIA" is pop music crosswordese, ODA Mae Brown is Ghost crosswordese, etc. etc. etc. (101D: ___ Mae Brown (Whoopi's role in "Ghost"))
• 127A: Chips may go into it (ONION DIP) — would've loved something a little more ... onion-specific here. Chips might go into literally any kind of DIP.
• 17D: Pete who co-wrote "If I Had A Hammer" (SEEGER) — this one made me laugh because there was so much folk singer drama yesterday, when half the world seemed never to have heard of Phil OCHS. And since the "H" in OCHS was crossed with yet another singer many solvers also didn't know (Charlie PUTH), there were many cries of "Natick!" I did not cry that, but some did. So when SEEGER showed up today I was like "here we go again!" But no Charlie PUTHs today. There is a Bob SAGET though (30A: Bob who hosted "America's Funniest Home Videos"). If you don't know Pete SEEGER or Bob SAGET, lord help you, you are stuck in Natick. By the way, I hope you do not literally get stuck in Natick today—if you live in the eastern 2/3 of the country, you should probably just stay home today; the storm looks like it could be Devastating.

• 29D: Either side of a cheerleader's "A" (ARM) — somehow I can imagine only a "V"—gonna need a visual, hang on ... well, here's GIF but ... that isn't an "A," it's a "V," so I don't know what we're doing here.

• 46D: One of Adolf Anderssen's sacrifices in the "Immortal Game" against Lionel Kieseritzky (QUEEN) — blah blah sacrifice blah blah game ... I got this fairly easily while understanding almost none of it. Luckily the "Q" was already in my head because I was in the process of trying to make an IRAN/IRAQ distinction (45A: Persian Gulf nation).
• 57D: Animal whose name sounds like a pronoun (EWE) — this is rebus puzzle 101 stuff, but that didn't stop my brain from going "EEL!" and then "No, EMU!" EEL kinda sounds like a pronoun. "Where's your brother?" "He went to the store but EEL be back soon." EMU has the "you" part down, but the "me" part is backward. Meanwhile, EWE = "you." Just like EYE = "I."
• 74D: N.H.L. team with the longest Stanley Cup drought, familiarly (LEAFS) — this is an iconic Canadian franchise so I was kind of stunned by this fact. Then again, I don't really follow hockey. I know that Mike Myers is a LEAFS fan because he was wearing a LEAFS jacket when I saw him in Kate Mantilini (a Beverly Hills restaurant) one time in the mid-'90s. Jon Cryer was also there (separately, gently swaying to Culture Club's "Do You Really Want to Hurt Me?" while he waited for his date to return from the restroom before they left). It was all very surreal. But the LEAFS jacket, I remember.  
• 108D: Property of curium, but not cerium (HARD C) — a "letteral" clue, in that it refers to a letter in the clue. The letter here is the initial "C" in "curium." It's hard ("k"). As opposed to the one in "cerium," which is soft ("s").
• 123D: Illegally interfere with, as an election (RIG) — not now, puzzle! I got enough horrifying political things on my plate at the moment, thanks.

Stay safe out there, fellow storm-sufferers. I'm probably gonna get a substitute for Monday's write-up since there's at least an outside chance that my power and / or internet will be compromised. So I'll see you when I see you.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

P.S. the Orca Awards (for achievements in crossword puzzle construction) are coming up next month (Feb. 23). More info on that later, but for now I wanted to highlight the fact that there's a charity puzzle pack associated with the awards featuring a whopping 81 (!) puzzles. Here's the info from organizer Rich Proulx:

14th ORCAS Puzzle Pack

 There’s something special about the 14th ORCAS.

Sure, we added five new awards (did someone say cryptics?) Yeah, the ballot contains 15 categories comprised of 124 nominations from 59 different outlets. But, this year, you can solve these spectacular ORCA-nominated puzzles in our first-ever puzzle pack!

All funds raised support The Trevor Project, a suicide hotline for LGBTQ+ youth. Although suicide rates for LGBTQ+ youth are surging (39% seriously considered suicide in 2024), HHS terminated its contract for FY2026.

The puzzle pack includes 76 ORCA-nominated puzzles from 44 outlets plus five original puzzles from the Constructor of the Year nominees. Along with the puzzle pack, donors will receive early access to the ORCAS ballot, which will be posted publicly on February 3.

For information on how to make a donation and receive the puzzle pack, email:  theorcaawards@gmail.com.

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