Calls home, as a bird might / SAT 4-11-26 / Adam's first wife, in Jewish myth / Hungarian sheepdogs / Old Syrian political party whose name means "resurrection" / Writer of "Esmé" and "The Open Window" / Arboreal symbol in Billie Holiday's "Strange Fruit" / Term for an ambiguously worded news headline / Alexandre Dumas's Count de la Fère / Line running roughly parallel to Interstate 95 / Figures in a speed trap? / "True West" playwright Sam

Constructor: Kareem Ayas

Relative difficulty: Easy

THEME: none 

Word of the Day: SAKI (44A: Writer of "Esmé" and "The Open Window") —

Hector Hugh Munro (18 December 1870 – 14 November 1916), popularly known by his pen name Saki and also frequently as H. H. Munro, was a British writer whose witty, mischievous and sometimes macabre stories satirise Edwardian society and culture. He is considered to be a master of the short story and is often compared to O. Henry and Dorothy Parker. Influenced by Oscar Wilde, Lewis Carroll and Rudyard Kipling, Munro himself influenced A. A. Milne, Noël Coward and P. G. Wodehouse.

Besides his short stories (which were first published in newspapers, as was customary at the time, and then collected into several volumes), Munro wrote a full-length play, The Watched Pot, in collaboration with Charles Maude; two one-act plays; a historical study, The Rise of the Russian Empire (the only book published under his own name); a short novel, The Unbearable Bassington; the episodic The Westminster Alice (a parliamentary parody of Alice in Wonderland); and When William Came, subtitled A Story of London Under the Hohenzollerns, a fantasy about a future German invasion and occupation of Britain. (wikipedia)

• • •

[40D: Hungarian sheepdogs (PULIS)]

The only critical things I have to say about this puzzle are a. it's too easy for a Saturday and b. NESTS IN!!? As for a., it's hard to be mad when you get a great Friday puzzle on a Saturday. Like, just close your eyes and pretend it's Friday and then when you open them, bam, what a great puzzle! This had all the whoosh and long-answer magic that I hope for on a Friday. Most Saturdays don't flooooow like this one, but the grid shape here really helped. None of this heavily segmented drudgery—we get a wide-open grid with long answers spilling into long answers spilling into long answers, and nearly every one of those long answers a winner. Seriously, the density of Good-to-Great Marquee Answers is truly impressive. This puzzle definitely has a right to be wearing its "SO FUN!" t-shirt. As for b. (NESTS IN) ... LOL, the non-greatness of that answer is totally offset by the hilarious way in which I misunderstood it. Obviously birds "nest in" trees of various sorts, so the phrase exists, it's just not the most wonderful standalone phrase. The problem today—for me, and perhaps me exclusively—is that I completely misread the "Calls" in [Calls home, as a bird might]. I was thinking of "bird calls" and I was thinking of human beings "calling home" (to say they're going to be a little late, or whatever), so I thought the bird was calling to its home, like ... tweeting in some way where the nestlings (maybe!?!?!) could hear it. So NESTS IN would mean something like "checks in." Like if the local birds are out drinking somewhere and the robin goes "hang on, fellas, I gotta NEST IN or they're gonna wonder what happened to me." So he goes to the bird phone booth or (more likely?) just calls out with some special call that his family back at the nest can understand. It was only after I'd finished the puzzle that I realized that "calls home" means "makes a home in." Very weird human idiom to apply to birds, since birds (probably!!?!?) don't have a "word" for "home." Really got tangled in my ornithological laces there—the long glitch in an otherwise butter-smooth solve.

Pretty easy to get into this one via the short crosses up top. THY (1D: Your of yore) and HATS (2D: They're tipped out of respect) were gimmes. After I put in STD (20A: Part of E.S.T.: Abbr.), both THEFT (4D: It's a steal!) and SALUD (5D: Spanish blessing) seemed plausible, but I left them for a bit and picked up AVON and YEN ... then looked back at the long Acrosses to see what I could see, and, well, I could see "a lot":

All the long Acrosses opened up from there, and what a stack that is. Incredibly vivid and solid group of colloquial phrases, none of them too old-fashioned or too contemporary, every one of them just Goldilocks right. And with no grating crud in the crosses!? Truly this is NO MEAN FEAT (again, I feel like the puzzle knows how good it is and is kinda showing off, but whatever, go off, puzzle, you earned it). And the long Acrosses just keep coming, including a central stunner and a stack down below that's maybe not as loveable as the one up top, but is every bit as original. And once again, the short crosses simply do not buckle. The only thing in this grid that gave even a whiff of crossword arcana was BA'ATH (Old Syrian political party whose name means "resurrection"), and that answer didn't even debut in the NYTXW until 2017. I'd rather never see anything associated with Bashar al-Assad in the puzzle (not a big fan of murderous dictator content!) but again, the rest of the puzzle is so lovely that I'm willing to just write that one off as the cost of doing (glorious) business. 

[28A: Arboreal symbol in Billie Holiday's "Strange Fruit"]

Bullets:

• 13A: Rued remark? ("WHAT HAVE I DONE?") — because of "remark," I briefly wrote in "WHAT HAVE I SAID!?," figuring that it was the "remark" that was being rued, instead of (in this case) a remark made by one who has rued their behavior.
• 39A: Figures in a speed trap? (NARCS) — me: "state troopers aren't NARCS!" Later me: "Oh ... speed ... I get it now."
• 38D: Adam's first wife, in Jewish myth (LILITH) — a gimme. Why, I don't know. Just one of those factoids that stuck.
• 3D: Alexandre Dumas's Count de la Fère (ATHOS) — ATHOS, Porthos, Aramis—the Three Musketeers.
• 55A: Term for an ambiguously worded news headline (CRASH BLOSSOM) — not my favorite term, and (thus?) one I have not retained in my brain very well. Needed many crosses to remember it (those crosses came quickly)

• 6D: Big publisher of romance novels (AVON) — helps to be a book collector. My collecting period is earlier than most AVON romances, but I have scores of old AVON paperbacks, and I've spent so much time in used bookstores, and talking with other collectors of various sorts, that AVON was the first thing that sprang to mind when I saw that the answer was four letters.

• 21D: Line running roughly parallel to Interstate 95 (ACELA) — crosswordese to the rescue! The ACELA is a train "line" that runs in the Northeast Corridor between D.C. and Boston.

That's all. See you next time. And best of luck to all my friends and fellow solvers competing at the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament in Stamford, CT today (and tomorrow). I missed the registration announcement back in January and before I knew it, the tourney sold out, so my wife and I won't get the chance to defend our Pairs title this year. So, whoever wins Pairs this year, enjoy it. We're coming for you next year in Philadelphia (the future home of the ever-expanding ACPT)!

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on BlueSky and Facebook and Letterboxd]
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