Stickler for military discipline / SUN 3-29-26 / Turn into logs / Internet-influenced writing genre / Gertrude who swam the English Channel / Common vessel for a cosmopolitan / Tired old advertising mascot? / Pertaining to genetic copies / Leader ousted in 1955 / "The Office" accountant who kept a cat in her desk drawer / Religious title that translates to "ocean monk" / In Norse myth, world held up by the branches of Yggdrasil

Constructor: Michael and Oliver Schlossberg

Relative difficulty: Medium-Challenging

[51D: "Star Wars" title (DARTH)]

THEME: Roundabouts — the grid has five "roundabouts"; one answer enters the roundabout from the west and stops right there; three other answers are extensions of that first answer, and they "exit" the roundabout at the south, east, and north, respectively, and you have to follow the the letters in the roundabout to make the answers make sense:

First roundabout:

• MART (37A: Convenience store)
• MARTIALART (48D: Kendo or aikido)
• MARTINET (40A: Stickler for military discipline)
• MARTINIGLASS (5D: Common vessel for a cosmopolitan)

Second roundabout:

• BUT (42A: Nevertheless)
• BUTTIGIEG (52D: "Mayor Pete")
• BUTTOCKS (43A: Rear end)
• BUTTONFLIES (14D: Alternatives to zippers on blue jeans)

Third roundabout:

• BAL (68A: The Orioles, on a scoreboard)
• BALLGOWN (73D: Fancy dress)
• BALLOTS (69A: They're cast in November)
• BALLOONANIMAL (25D: Entertainer's creation at a child's birthday party)

Fourth roundabout:

• MICH (101A: Wisc. neighbor)
• MICHELLE (107D: One of the Obamas)
• MICHELOB (102A: Brand from Anheuser-Busch)
• MICHELINMAN (72D: Tired old advertising mascot?)

Fifth roundabout:

• ARM (103A: Branch)
• ARMANIS (110D: Some expensive suits)
• ARMAGNAC (104A: French brandy)
• ARMAGEDDON (75D: It's the end of the world)

Word of the Day: MARTINET (40A) —

 

[merriam-webster.com]

• • •

I completed this puzzle without fully understanding the gimmick. I could see that answers were entering and emerging, but I tried to make that little arrow-circle square at the middle of each "roundabout" mean something—I thought it represented letters, somehow, and I couldn't understand why it seemed to be representing different sets of letters for each answer. Over time, I could see that the answer going south had no letters added, the one going east seemed to have just one, and the one headed south had two, but I was solving at a reasonable clip and never really stopped to try to figure it all out. I kept waiting for a revealer to explain it all to me, but ... it never arrived. Perhaps if the roundabouts were circles (like actual roundabouts) and not squares (wtf????), the whole "roundabout" concept would've been clearer to me earlier, I don't know. No "roundabout" I have ever been in has ever had ninety-degree angles like that. I go through traffic circles like that nearly every day, all of them circular. So I'm not a fan of the visual representation of the roundabouts, but I am a fan of the concept in general. It is elaborate and kinda wild and really well executed. Also, that giant open section in the north features some of the most inventive grid-building I've seen. You've got the back end of BALLOON ANIMAL shooting up into the center of that section, and then a bunch of stellar long non-theme answers filling the spaces around it, including TRIVIA APP, PRICELINE, DALAI LAMA, ON VACAY (!) and always adorable RED PANDAS. OK, you also have the decidedly ugly CLONAL (8D: Pertaining to genetic copies), but hey, it's a small price to pay for the rest of it. This theme is so architecturally complex and so dense that it must've been an adventure filling the grid At All, let alone filling it so creatively. Maybe the one (high difficulty level) begat the other (extreme inventiveness). Whatever. This is the rare Sunday puzzle that seems worthy of the real estate it takes up. And one of the rare "architectural feats" that was actually interesting to solve (even if my aha moment came very, very late).

Two parts of the puzzle seemed particularly treacherous. The first was MARTINET. I know the word ... but it's not exactly an everyday word, and because it was involved in the first "roundabout" I came to, and I didn't really understand who the "roundabout" worked, I wasn't entirely sure MARTINET was even right. What if it was something like, uh, MARINE VET, and I just wasn't seeing how the theme was working? I think of MARTINETs as being stern, but I don't associate the word with specifically "military" discipline, so I hesitated there. And I knew EDERLE! (crosswordese to the rescue!) (31D: Gertrude who swam the English Channel). Seems like MARTINET might've been even harder to pick up without EDERLE to help you confirm it. Aside from MARTINET, the other yikes part of the grid was CRONUS (71A: Father of Zeus). This is because my brain hiccuped and I wrote in URANUS (so many shared letters ...) without blinking, without hesitating, instantly. But URANUS was not Zeus's father, but his grandfather. Close, no cigar! Anyway, URANUS gave me "OH, LARDY" at 56D: "Good heavens!," and I was totally prepared to accept "OH, LARDY" as some horrid phonetically-spelled regionalism (actually thought to myself, "'OH, LAWDY' would be better”). The only way I caught the URANUS error was by (luckily) noticing that I had INUA as the answer for 62D: Early empire builder (INCA). No such thing as INUA (I'm pretty sure). So in went INCA and LARDY (!) became LORDY (better!) and that was the very last thing I wrote in the grid.

I kept wanting the letters inside the roundabouts to spell something or mean something ... and of course they did "mean" something, ultimately—you have to follow them around in order to make sense of all three answers that exit from the roundabout. Which brings me to the only part of the theme that doesn't quite work: that first answer, the one that enters but does not leave the roundabout. If you enter a roundabout you have to leave the roundabout. You do not stop on a roundabout. Have you ever been behind someone who stopped on a roundabout?! Chaos. Nightmare scenario. You have to keep moving and you have to (eventually) leave. So in order for three of the theme answers to work beautifully, one of them has to kick things off by awkwardly driving into the roundabout and ... stopping. I'm trying not to cling too hard to roundabout realism today. You can't have three answers exit if you don't first have one answer enter. A little unrealism is just the price you pay for the overall effect. I'm OK with that. I'm much more bothered by the square roundabouts than I am by the non-exiting answers.

Outside the theme answers, things look pretty good. I'm not too bothered by the doubling up of UP—I just wish one of those UP answers wasn't SAW UP, what in the world!? (93A: Turn into logs). What are we doing here? Who's supposed to be saying this, a cartoon pioneer? "After I SAW UP some wood I'm gonna scare up some grub!" SAW UP appears to be on a cycle, reappearing in the grid every thirty years like some kind of strange crossword comet (1965, 1996, 2026). I hope I live to see its next appearance, and yet I also hope I never see it again. The other "up" phrase is LACES UP, a perfectly fine phrase. If there's another "up" phrase I've missed, clearly it's not bothering me.

Bullets:

• 50D: Tots' pops (DADAS) — this is a ridiculous plural. I know it seems like an acceptable plural, but no tot would ever say DADAS. Just the one. There are mamas and there are papas but there are not DADAS. I suppose if a child had two dads, then DADAS is theoretically possible, but even then, I just don't see her describing them collectively. By the time she got the whole plural-with-an-S thing down, I think she'd be past the "dada" stage. Strange that I've seen DADAS so many times (fourteen since I started this blog), and this is the first time it struck me as absurd. 
• 90A: Classic Andy Warhol subject (MARILYN) — hey, did you know that SOUP CAN and MARILYN have the same number of letters?! It's true! Ask me how I know!

• 94D: Leader ousted in 1955 (PERON) — I had to keep shouting at my brain, "No, not PEROT! The other guy ... the Evita guy ... come on!"
• 27A: "The Office" accountant who kept a cat in her desk drawer (ANGELA) — I laughed just remembering ANGELA. The clue-writing today was really colorful and entertaining, on the whole. The groaner clue on U.C.L.A. (122A: What you do when you tour a certain SoCal campus, phonetically?). The bizarro trivia clue on UFO (125A: Purported sighting recorded by Puritan governor John Winthrop in 1639). I mean, 54A: Heart on one's sleeve, perhaps, in brief (TAT)!?! What a great literalization of a common idiom (in case you were unaware, a "sleeve" is a large tattoo covering most or all of a person's arm). And [Tired old advertising mascot?] for MICHELIN MAN!? That's primo stuff right there.

["Tired!"]

• 89A: Predator that might hunt by electrolocation (EEL) — I love that "electrolocation" is a real thing (I did not know that) and that I could use the word to infer EEL (via "electric EEL")
• 79D: Purple smoothie add-in (AÇAI BERRY) — there's something decadent about getting the whole BERRY when normally (quite normally—regularly, constantly) we just get AÇAI. Amplified crosswordese. I like it.
• 29A: Internet-influenced writing genre (ALT-LIT) — I have never heard of this genre. I don't really believe it's a genre. "Alternative literature brings together people with a common interest in the online publishing world" (wikipedia). Wait, is this ALT-LIT? Am I ALT-LIT? Are we ALT-LIT?

That's all for today. See you next time.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

P.S. I'm going to see John Mulaney today! His stand-up tour ("Mister Whatever") is, improbably, coming through Ithaca, so we're going. No idea why I'm telling you; I'm just excited is all. Big names (that I want to see) rarely come to my neck of the NY woods. Fun fact: MULANEY (7) has never appeared in the NYTXW. So, if you're playing at home, that's three SAWUPs, zero MULANEYs. Also zero OZUs, btw. But you knew that. I've said that many (many) times before. 

[Follow Rex Parker on BlueSky and Facebook and Letterboxd]
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