Poles tossed in a highland competition / WED 4-29-26 / Rinse with water, as grain in the brewing process / Guofeng, successor to Mao Zedong / Coastal resort city in southern California / Shoe with a "kitten" variety / Swabbie's tool / "Wall Street," for the U.S. financial industry

Constructor: Joseph Gangi

Relative difficulty: Medium

THEME: "internet company" puns — words starting with "COM" are imagined as descriptions of internet companies (you have to mentally supply the DOT before the "COM" ... until the end, when the puzzle limply hands it to you (58D: Preceder of the answer to each of this puzzle's starred clues)

Theme answers:

• COM BUST (1A: *Failed internet company)
• COM PROMISE (25A: *Assurance from an internet company)
• COM POSER (31A: *Puzzling question from an internet company)
• COM PRESS (39A: *Exposure for an internet company?)
• COM PARABLE (46A: *Illustrative story from an internet company)
• COM POST (62A: *Blog message from an internet company)

Word of the Day: SPARGE (8A: Rinse with water, as grain in the brewing process) —

Sparging in brewing is the process of rinsing grain with hot water to extract fermentable sugars after the initial mash. This critical step allows brewers to maximize sugar extraction efficiency, typically recovering 75-85% of available sugars from malted grains. Understanding proper sparging techniques is essential for both home brewers and commercial operations to achieve consistent beer quality and optimal yields. (beersnobwrites DOT COM!)

• • •

I have to say, I don't understand what DOT is doing in this puzzle? By the time I got down to that corner—in fact, from the moment I got the first themer—I understood that the COMs were DOTCOMs. I didn't really think about the fact that the DOT was missing. I didn't even think there was going to be a revealer at all, so transparent was the gimmick. You break COM- words into two parts so that the COM stands on its own, and that phrase describes your hypothetical "internet company." The end. When I hit DOT, what I felt was not "OH, COOL, an interesting answer to make it all make sense!" It was more like ".... oh, I guess COMs are preceded by DOTs ... huh." It's possibly the Most Anticlimactic Revealer of All Time. For a brief moment, I thought maybe the stars (*) at the start of each theme clue were supposed to be little DOTs, and so the "DOT" was there all along ... but that's impossible, since the DOT clue specifically refers to those stars as (surprise!) "stars" ("starred clues," technically). So ... DOT then. DOT. I guess this puzzle ends ... on the DOT! That's ... something. In my mind, it's something. A thing I have contrived to make DOT enjoyable. Otherwise, this puzzle is a bunch of repetitive dadjoke "com" puns, and I appreciate that this will be ample entertainment for some folks. Wasn't quite enough for me.

I appreciate that the clues were tightened up a bit, difficulty-wise, given how much it was giving away on the thematic end (i.e. after you get the first couple of "COM-" answers, you can just plunk down COM down four more times without thinking). Answers like TOURNAMENT (29D: Where seeds might be placed) and PATIENCE (17A: Trait for a good waiter?) had tricky clues, and then there were fancyish words like METONYM and obscure words like SPARGE, so the puzzle stayed fairly interesting even if you (like me) thought the theme was just so-so. There are some less than lovely moments, though. That SPARGE / SOPOR cross is yeesh—niche word + word I only ever see in xwords. Then there's crosswordese couple ZAC and ONO holding hands, a PREOP and an OPED, the second "I DO CARE" in the last four days (weird to have an answer debut on Sunday and reappear already by Wednesday (I hope we're done with IDOCAREs for a while). I don't really know the phrase PHOTO DUMPS—I guess it's just the place where you dump all your photos. My phone is my photo dump. It's extremely uncurated. Not sure why anyone would want to make their "uncurated" photos accessible to the world, but there's lots of things about this world I don't get. It's fine. Oh, now that I think of it ... I guess I have seen social media posts where people appear to have just "dumped" all their photos, from a vacation or an event, into one place for others to leaf through. I do like the term, even though I think curation is your (and everybody's) friend. The internet is already full of gunk. A little ... judicious culling of the clutter would be nice.

Bullets:

• 29A: Lightly strike, as a windowpane (TAP AT) — wrote this right in, then pulled the "T" when realized "hmm, it could be RAP AT" (the way the narrator hears something "rapping at his chamber door" in "The Raven")

• 18A: Ingredient in shepherd's pie (POTATO) — me: "Peas ... PEEEAS!"
• 12D: Visit (GO TO SEE) — I'd like this answer a hell of a lot better if it had a "D" on the end.
• 53D: Control center? (TEE) — a "letteral" clue—the TEE here is the letter "T" (which sits at the "center" of the word "Control"
• 39D: Poles tossed in a Highland competition (CABERS) — spelling challenge for me, as I always want CABORS (the fact that I can unironically say "always" re: CABERS tells you how many damned puzzles I do, it's unnatural). CABER is one of those five-letter words where, when you know it, you can't unknow it, and so if you're playing Wordle or Quordle it will get in your head — you know (probably!?) that that is never going to be the correct answer, but you can't be sure. It's doubly a problem if (like me) you couldn't spell it correctly even if it was the answer.
• 6D: Recipient of many dad jokes (SON) — is the person who is forced to hear the "joke" the "recipient." Do I "receive" a comedian's jokes? If he's not sending them through the mail ... I dunno ... 
• 48A: What a track athlete may do three times in one attempt (JUMP) — if this clue seems slightly confusing to you, it's because it's referring to the specific event the triple jump without directly referring to it.

• 50A: Just (MERE) — this is what I mean about the puzzle tightening up the difficulty a little. The clue isn't hard, just ... extremely ambiguous. "Just" means an awful lot of things, and since the answer today ran through CAR (which I had as CAB) and CABERS (which, as we've established, I had as CABORS), I got more bogged down here than anywhere else in the puzzle (as you can see from my finished grid image, above, the "E" at CABERS / MERE was my last letter).
• 51A: ___ Guofeng, successor to Mao Zedong (HUA) — the only answer in the grid (besides SPARGE) that I wasn't familiar with. Thank god for crosses.
• 60A: Shoe with a "kitten" variety (STILETTO) — I would've had kitten heels and STILETTOs as entirely different animals but this is because I do not wear women's shoes (or pay very close attention to them). The "kitten" heels are a more practical height (< 2 in.) than typical STILETTOs
• 15D: Coastal resort city in southern California (DEL MAR) — I think there's a racetrack there. Yeah, a pretty famous one. I ate lunch in DEL MAR once, after an L.A. Crossword Tournament at Loyola Marymount University back around 2010. I think constructors Andrea Carla Michaels and Doug Peterson were there. That is my exciting DEL MAR story. Oh wait, no—that was probably Marina del Rey, not DEL MAR. Never mind...

That's all. See you next time!

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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