Phrase said indignantly before a citation / FRI 4-10-26 / C-store offering / Helical tools / Chinese gambling game invented during the Northern and Southern dynasties / Like the glass in many a Dale Chihuly sculpture / Anora's husband in "Anora"

Constructor: Erica Hsiung Wojcik

Relative difficulty: Easy to Easy-Medium 

THEME: none 

Word of the Day: FANTAN (39D: Chinese gambling game invented during the Northern and Southern dynasties) —

 

Fan-Tan, or fantan (simplified Chinese: 番摊; traditional Chinese: 番攤; pinyin: fāntān; Jyutping: faan1 taan1; lit. 'repeated divisions') is a gambling game long played in China. It is a game of pure chance.

The game is played by placing two handfuls of small objects on a board and guessing the remaining count when divided by four. After players have cast bets on values of 1 through 4, the dealer or croupier repeatedly removes four objects from the board until only one, two, three or four beans remain, determining the winner.

• • •

Friday! It's back! The sparkle and the whoosh, especially the whoosh. The puzzle shape here, with its interlocking 15s, sent me shooting across the grid time and again until I'd done a kind of reckless, careening circuit. Shot out in two directions coming out of the NW, but chose to follow DRINKING IT ALL IN down the west side, took a hard turn and rocketed over to the east coast with SILENT TREATMENT, before getting BRINGS UP THE REAR (from just the rear letters), and zooming back up to join up with the tail end of "AM I LOSING MY MIND?," filling in the shorter fill as I went. Each of those 15s erupted like an explosion ... light the fuse with a few crosses and then bam, the whole thing just bursts into view. Gave me the kinetic experience I really crave on a Friday. Unlike some recent puzzles, which have started with real duds at 1-Across, this one was a delight (1A: Phrase said indignantly before a citation). No idea at first what kind of "citation" I was dealing with. I imagined someone angrily talking back to a cop who was issuing a speeding ticket: "I WASN'T SPEEDING!" or "WHAT'D I DO WRONG?," something like that. So it was a surprise to find, after I worked the crosses for a bit, that I wasn't even in the ballpark, "citation"-wise. I don't know if "AND I QUOTE..." is always "indignant," but you do say it before you "cite" (as in "quote") someone else's words, usually ones whose literalness you want to emphasize in a "can you believe it?!" kind of way. "AND I QUOTE... 'TURDUCKEN!' AM I LOSING MY MIND!?" That's a whole monologue right there.

The puzzle still probably skewed a little too easy for my tastes, but the cluing got so niche and odd in a few places that I actually had to stop and work things out, so the general easiness didn't feel like insulting easiness. I don't remember a damn thing about Bridget Jones's Diary beyond the fact that RENÉe Zellweger was in it (and I never read the book), so I sure as hell don't know what this "blue soup" thing is supposed to be about. So weird to toss that clue in there. A real ... what do you call those things cops throw in the road to puncture the tires of fleeing fugitives? That's what LEEK was to me. Well, I"m not a fugitive, and LEEK didn't stop me completely, so the metaphor's not great, but LEEK definitely brought me to a very jarring halt for a bit. There were two other similar moments of grinding (if brief) halt in the puzzle. The "L" in LOYD / LAB and the "F" in FANTAN / FISH. Obviously LOYD and FANTAN are the main culprits there, but in both cases, the crosses on their first letters eluded me for a bit. I wanted FANTAN to be FANTAN without really knowing why, so I left that "F" blank and then ... it stayed blank, because whatever elaborate scenario the clue on FISH was imagining, I was not getting (39A: Remove, as from a cluttered container, with "out"). In retrospect, the clue seems fine, reasonably accurate, but mid-solve I was like "what is this what kind of container what is happening?" As you can see (from grid print-out, above), that "F" was the very last letter I wrote in. I abandoned it mid-solve and came back for it at the end. 

As for LOYD / LAB ... I don't follow the WNBA, or any other pro sports leagues besides the MLB (at least not closely), so when I was staring at -OYD, the only "last name" possibility I saw there was BOYD. Thankfully, BAB was not a viable answer at 10A: Place with flasks and alcohol, but I couldn't figure out what was, at least not immediately. I had PUB in that place at first, although I did think, "why would you bring your flask to the PUB?" I also wasn't entirely sure about that "A," since I've never (ever ever ever) heard anyone refer to a "convenience store" as a "C-store" (11D: C-store offering). What a horrible bit of shortening. Who says that? I figured something businessy (like "C suite") or computery (C++?) was going on. The "-TM" made ATM kind of undeniable, though, so I just stared at -OYD / -AB until I had my aha moment with LAB. Nothing else in the puzzle slowed me down much.

Bullets:

• 14A: "___ Atardecer," Bad Bunny song whose name means "Another Sunset" ("OTRO") — kind of a long-winded way of saying [Another (Sp.], but maybe this is more fun. It's certainly more colorful, if a bit long-winded. AGRA (like OTRO, a crosswordese staple) got a similarly ornate clue (24A: Site with a monument that gets around 7 million ticketed visitors a year).
• 29A: Like the glass in many a Dale Chihuly sculpture (FUSED) — no idea. Zero. I think I looked up Dale Chihuly once before for crossword purposes, but clearly I forgot him. Completely. Had --SED and thought "... LASED?" OK, yeah, here we go: Dale Chihuly was my "Word of the Day" back in Nov. '24 (when DALE was actually in the puzzle).
• 35A: Beatles song with the lyric "I tried to telephone / They said you were not home / That's a lie" ("NO REPLY") — not on any of the Beatles albums I've listened to regularly over the years (although now that I'm listening to it, it's Very familiar). It's an early song, from the album Beatles for Sale (1964). It does not appear to have charted anywhere on the globe except the Netherlands, where it hit No. 1 (!?!?!?). "The song was not officially released as a single in the UK" (wikipedia). "NO REPLY" makes me think of a different song entirely—one that actually was released as a single in the U.S.

• 43A: Anora's husband in "Anora" (IVAN) — never saw this clue, which is too bad, as I know (and love) this movie. This is at least the second time Anora has been used in a clue, but still no ANORA in the grid, which is bizarre, as no movie title in movie history was ever more grid-ready. ANORA is one of those answers I expect to see in the grid annnnnny moment now, along with ZOHRAN, MAMDANI, and, of course, OZU (I can dream!). 
• 1D: Pop-punk band named after a video game company, with "The" (ATARIS) — sigh. I have heard of them, but it's hard to like this answer, since it's basically just awkwardly pluralized crosswordese. I guess they covered Don Henley's "Boys of Summer" at some point (??). I thought I knew one of their songs, but it turns out I was confusing them with the Androids:

• 24D: Helical tools (AUGERS) — couldn't get a handle on this, and then when I did, of course I (initially) misspelled it (AUGURS)

[Helical!]

That's all. See you next time.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on BlueSky and Facebook and Letterboxd]
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