Hopelessly internet-brained / TUE 3-17-26 / Indigo dye / "It's super-appreciated!," in a modern initialism / Home to Shibuya Crossing, the world's busiest pedestrian intersection / Title girl in a Beach Boys hit / Sci-fi character who says "Your father, he is" / Deli order that may lead to pungent breath / Midwest capital named for a president

Constructor: Kiran Pandey

Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium

[22A: Sci-fi character who says "Your father, he is"]

THEME: TERMINALLY ONLINE (62A: Hopelessly internet-brained ... or a description of the ends of 17-, 26-, 37- and 47-Across?) — answers end with things associated with a web browser (making the answers themselves TERMINALLY ONLINE, so to speak)

Theme answers:

• GIRL SCOUT COOKIES (17A: Thin Mints and Tagalongs)
• SAUSAGE LINK (26A: One in a breakfast chain?)
• LSD TAB (37A: Dose dropped for a trip)
• HIGH PROFILE (47A: Likely to attract attention, as in a criminal case)

Word of the Day: cookies (see 17A) —

An HTTP cookie (also called web cookie, Internet cookie, browser cookie, or simply cookie) is a small block of data created by a web server while a user is browsing a website and placed on the user's computer or other device by the user's web browser. Cookies are placed on the device used to access a website, and more than one cookie may be placed on a user's device during a session.

Cookies serve useful and sometimes essential functions on the web. They enable web servers to store stateful information (such as items added in the shopping cart in an online store) on the user's device or to track the user's browsing activity (including clicking particular buttons, logging in, or recording which pages were visited in the past). They can also be used to save information that the user previously entered into form fields, such as names, addresses, passwords, and payment card numbers for subsequent use.

• • •

Well I love the phrase TERMINALLY ONLINE, but I don't know about this themer set. It feels like a very sparse / loose / arbitrary grouping: cookies, link, tab, profile. I guess they are all generally in the "being online" universe, but that's a pretty big universe, and these four things don't feel like a complete or meaningful set. Not as complete or meaningful as I might like my themer set to be. I can't see "cookies" and so even though I know I have (sometimes) "accepted" them, I don't meaningfully, purposefully interact with them, the way I very clearly do with, say, a "link." And "link" is a part of an internet site, while "tab" and "profile" are parts of the browsers themselves. Actually, "profile" is really ambiguous, because I've got a "Profiles" option on my browser menu (I appear to be operating currently under my "Rex Parker" profile, on my Chrome browser), but then a "user profile" might be part of all kinds of websites, particularly social media sites, so I don't really know what "profile" is supposed to evoke for me here. The overall "online" grouping here seems weak. The revealer is great, and I can see how you'd want to take that phrase and do a theme in precisely this vein, but the execution here was just a little disappointing. Got an "oh, I guess, yeah," rather than a "wow, nice!" from me.

And before I got to the (admittedly great) revealer, I was slogging through some rough stuff, starting with ANIL, which made me stop short (14A: Indigo dye). "Really, we're doing ANIL? On an easy Tuesday puzzle in the year of our lord 2026? Back to 1999 with you, ANIL!" Certain words scream "crosswordese!" and boy that is one of them. Not hard (if you have been solving for decades), but unappealing. IDED and HST and CUDI and a handful of other repeaters made the top of this puzzle unpleasant to hack through. The most off-putting thing in the grid, for me, was TYVM (short for "thank you very much") (32A: "It's super-appreciated!," in a modern initialism). I think I'm not TERMINALLY ONLINE enough to appreciate it. I think it's more often used sarcastically, as when you are ironically defending yourself, the way you might use the full phrase ("thankyouverymuch"). Here is a random example that Wordnik scraped from some dank corner of the internet:

In my day (yes, I'm old and I know it, tyvm) our public school back in Ohio had FRUIT machines where we could buy apples, oranges or banana's.

and another:

Our blog isn't "DEAD", 'tis just on a prolonged hiatus tyvm :/

But it also just means regular old "thank you very much." I type thx, but have never been able to bring myself to use "ty" ("... who's Ty?"), and have definitely made the leap to "tyvm." Anyway, this initialism is a real enough thing, I just hate it. The rest of the non-theme fill in this grid is mostly blah. Inoffensive. OK. ALL THUMBS got a metaphorical "thumbs-up" from me as I plunked it down in the grid, and MOVIE CLIP and AVANT-GARDE are both rock solid. Kind of weird to have extra, non-thematic internet stuff going on in the grid (stuff like BLOG POST (40D: Bit of internet writing), or SENT (as clued) (61D: Label that's typically between "Inbox" and "Drafts")). Always seems more elegant when theme-related material stays contained entirely within the theme answers. Overall, this is a neat idea, semi-clunkily executed.

Bullets:

• 10D: Home to Shibuya Crossing, the world's busiest pedestrian intersection (TOKYO) — this probably should've been my "Word of the Day." You may never have heard of Shibuya Crossing, but I'm fairly sure that if you've seen any shots of TOKYO on movies or television, you've seen it. It's as iconic as Times Square.

Shibuya Scramble Crossing (渋谷スクランブル交差点, Shibuya sukuranburu kōsaten), commonly known as Shibuya Crossing, is a scramble crossing in Shibuya, Tokyo, Japan. It is located near Shibuya Station in Shibuya, a major commercial and entertainment district in Tokyo. It has been described as the world's busiest pedestrian crossing, with as many as 3,000 people crossing during a single green light cycle. Inaugurated in 1973, the intersection is a popular tourist destination and a widely recognized symbol of the city of Tokyo through its frequent appearances in television, film, and other media. (wikipedia)

• 5D: Old-fashioned, for one (COCKTAIL) — in my NYTXW spreadsheet, I track not only Star Wars references ("Hello darkness YODA my old friend..."), but COCKTAIL-related answers as well. I like the latter a lot better. I love a good Old-fashioned, though we don't really make them at home (we're more Manhattan and Manhattan-variant people, although my favorite COCKTAIL is the 100-Year-Old Cigar). Not sure this is the recipe my wife uses, but it'll do—from Difford's:

[I don't even like cigars, but this drink ... !]

• 12D: Like patrons at the door of a "21+ only" nightclub, informally (IDED) — was looking for some kind of "informal" word for "adult" and was prepared to be very annoyed by some horrible new slang like "ADDO" or something. "Thankfully" the answer was just IDED (I say "Thankfully" quote-unquote because IDED is terrible ... but at least it's understandable)

That's all. See you next time. 

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

P.S. All my love to my beautiful wife, Penelope, who is leaving (on a jet plane) tonight to attend her aunt's memorial in NZ. The cats and I will miss her. (The flight was supposed to leave yesterday but weather conditions in NYC made that impossible.) Oh, and thank you all very much (hey, TYVM!!!) for yesterday's condolences.  

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

• Venmo (@MichaelDavidSharp)]

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

• Grid Prix (Detroit, MI, Thu., Mar. 19, 2026) 
• American Crossword Puzzle Tournament (Stamford, CT, Apr. 10-12, 2026) (registration closed!)

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

• Pop Sensation (vintage paperbacks)