Courting disaster, slangily / THU 2-19-26 / Spot to play baccarat / Medieval cure-all / Metaphor for a challenging puzzle / Japanese word that's sometimes translated as "planted in a pot" / Australian actor Eric / One-half of a golf partnership

Constructor: John Ewbank

Relative difficulty: Easy

THEME: LESSER OF TWO EVILS (60A: Better choice, given the options ... or the circled squares vis-à-vis the shaded ones?) — theme answers have two "SIN"s (i.e. "evils"): one regular-sized (in the shaded squares), the other shrunken ("lesser") inside a single (circled) square:

Theme answers:

• CRUISIN' FOR A BRUI[SIN'] (18A: Courting disaster, slangily) / CA[SIN]O (13D: Spot to play baccarat)
• SING[S IN] THE SHOWER (29A: Uses a shampoo bottle as a microphone, perhaps) / SAS[SIN]G (19D: Talking back to)
• BUSINES[S IN]SIDERS (48A: They may have knowledge of corporate secrets) / RE[SIN] (39D: Varnish ingredient)

Word of the Day: OLGA Kurylenko (58D: Actress Kurylenko) —

Olga Kostyantynivna Kurylenko (born 14 November 1979) is a Ukrainian and French actress and former model. She rose to prominence by playing the Bond girl Camille Montes in the James Bond film Quantum of Solace (2008).

Kurylenko began her career modelling in Paris before making a transition to acting. She had her breakthrough role in the action thriller Hitman (2007) after making her film debut in the drama The Ring Finger (2005). Following Quantum of Solace, she went on to star in the romantic drama To the Wonder (2012), the crime comedy Seven Psychopaths (2012), the science fiction film Oblivion (2013), the political satire The Death of Stalin (2017), the comedy The Man Who Killed Don Quixote (2018), the superhero films Black Widow (2021) and Thunderbolts* (2025), the Netflix spy thriller miniseries Treason (2022) and the action thriller Extraction 2 (2023). (wikipedia)

• • •

Father forgive me, for I have sinned. Twice! One of them was pretty small, though, so ... We good? Awesome, thanks. I liked this puzzle for a few reasons. First of all, I like a good rebus puzzle, and this was a really original rebus variant. Shaded squares + rebus! Two puzzle types that (apparently) taste great together. I liked how the theme unfolded for me, with the "SIN" in the shaded squares going right in no problem, but then the circled square remaining more mysterious for a bit. At first I thought there was some kind of loop or wormhole in effect. Since the first themer ends with the circled square, I thought maybe I was supposed to loop back to the first (shaded-square) "SIN" to complete the answer. The next one didn't work that way, though: if I loop back to the first "SIN" when I hit the circle, I get SING-SINGS THE SHOWER, which obviously makes no sense (unless you are turning your shower into a notorious New York prison). The way I figured out what the circled square was doing was by trying to solve the crosses, specifically CASO. "What's a CASO!? Shouldn't it be CASIN... Oh!" Since I had SASSY for 19D: Talking back to, I had missed the "SIN" square on my first attempt to cross it. So ultimately it was CASINO that gave me the full picture of the theme. First time I've ever been grateful to a CASINO for anything—thanks, CASINO! All that was left after that was to understand why I was getting this Mutt & Jeff pair of "SIN"s in every theme answer. And today, the revealer really delivered. I was calling this puzzle "Two Sins, Fat and Thin" in my head, but LESSER OF TWO EVILS is definitely better. I love when a revealer is a perfect expression of the theme gimmick—or the theme gimmick is a perfect expression of the revealer, whichever. The theme answers get weaker as they go along, opening very strong and closing somewhat feebly (hard to get excited about BUSINESS INSIDERS), but they all work just fine. So, good job today, themewise. 

The rest of the grid is harder to assess. Or rather, I'm a little ambivalent about it. On the one hand, it is admirably clean. It's got its share of tired repeaters (PSST ETRE SSN TKO BANA ALI NSA ITO etc.) but in that 6-7-8 range it's got mostly solid, real words—nothing to gripe about at all. But also not a lot to cheer. Not a lot to sit up and clap for. TOUGH NUT is indeed a metaphor ("a tough nut to crack"), but not one I would use, and it's kinda weird on its own, divorced from the metaphor. ACES HIGH is good—maybe the best non-theme thing in the grid. I don't care for CASINOs, but that doesn't mean I can't appreciate ACES HIGH! After that, though, there's SEA BEDS, IGNEOUS, BONSAI, GALLONS, WRITERS, PAUPER, "NO GOOD!" ... these are all perfectly fine words / phrases, and they make for a really smooth solving experience (hurray), but there's nothing that really stands out, and the clues simply aren't helping. This is true for the whole puzzle: the cluing was quite bland and straightforward. Perhaps the thought was that the theme was (somewhat) tricky, and so the clues on the regular fill shouldn't be? I dunno. I could've used more tricky, or at least clever, or at least interesting like the SSN clue (29D: You can request a new one on religious grounds if it contains "666": Abbr.). If you look the clues over, you'll see that it's mostly phoned-in, boilerplate stuff. I've been known to complain about an overabundance of "?" clues in puzzles, but this one doesn't attempt even one!? No wait, sorry, there is 54A: Big beginning? (MEGA), but that was transparent—not exactly original or twisty. Not a TOUGH NUT! I needed tougher (or at least cleverer) nuts in the fill clues. But again, the fill itself is largely solid. Maybe workmanlike, but it's doing its job—helping showcase the theme by not being a hellish distraction.

Bullets:

• 51D: Medieval cure-all (LEECH) — this one was a little tough. It was the "cure-all" that got me. I knew LEECHes were used medicinally (as they are today), but the "cure-all" part I was not aware of. Is anything used to treat a wide range of illnesses a "cure-all"? It's the "all" that's throwing me. But LEECHes did have a lot of (supposed) applications in the Middle Ages:

In medieval and early modern European medicine, the medicinal leech (Hirudo medicinalis and its congeners H. verbana, H. troctina, and H. orientalis) was used to remove blood from a patient as part of a process to balance the humors that, according to Galen, must be kept in balance for the human body to function properly. (The four humors of ancient medical philosophy were blood, phlegm, black bile, and yellow bile.) Any sickness that caused the subject's skin to become red (e.g. fever and inflammation), so the theory went, must have arisen from too much blood in the body. Similarly, any person whose behavior was strident and sanguine was thought to be suffering from an excess of blood. Leeches, by removing blood, were thought to help with these kinds of conditions — a wide range which included illnesses like polio and laryngitis. (wikipedia)

• 24A: One-half of a golf partnership, perhaps (PRO) — if there's one thing I don't care for, besides CASINOs, it's golf. What the hell is a "golf partnership," I wondered for a second or two, Then I remembered that PRO-Am tournaments existed. Professional + amateur. There's your partnership. 
• 66A: Some colorful plastic items in the seasonal aisle in the spring (EGGS) — this is almost timely. Semi-timely. The Lenten season began yesterday (Ash Wednesday) and it will end on Easter, the day of colorful plastic eggs! (you fill these with candy, and put them in Easter Egg Baskets for kids, or whomever—such a bizarre ritual for the holiest day on the Christian calendar). 

• 38A: Makes noise like an electric fan (WHIRRS) — turns out I have no idea what the difference is between one-R WHIR and two-R WHIRR. Turns out there isn't one—WHIRR(S) is just a variant (less common, acc. to merriam-webster dot com)
• 38D: Dickens and Dickinson (WRITERS) — we're well past the middle of February and I'm still reading Dombey & Son! I started on Jan. 1 but then my blog fundraiser started and then my semester started (lots of other reading to do) and then I visited my daughter and now I have a cold ... and while having a cold might seem like the perfect time to plow through Dickens, I, sadly, have a pile of papers to grade. The goal is to be done by month's end. I'm over 700 pages in now, so ... let's see, that leaves just ... hmm, looks like well over 200 pages to go still. I really love it! It's just ... long. And my copy is falling apart. I had to duct tape it together, but it's still on the verge of disintegration at every moment. 

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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