"Why, why, why?!" / SUN 5-3-2026 / Org. for J. Robert Oppenheimer / World Golf Hall-of-Famer Mark / Chewy chocolate candy brand / German actress Berger with a career spanning eight decades

Constructor: Mark Diehl

Relative difficulty: not hard, especially if you've seen all the terrible fill before and recognize the cluing angles from older puzzles



THEME: "What Are The Odds?" — some entries spell out words / phrases with their odd letters, and those are then used to clue nearby entries

Theme answers:

• [Moisture barrier supplies] for PLASTIC SHEETS, odd letters spell out PATCHES, which is used as the clue for GIVES A DARN
• [A hard job] for NO EASY TASK --> NESTS --> STICKY PADS
• [Fictional diary writer] for BRIDGET JONES --> BIG TOE --> LOW DIGIT
• ["One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" author] for KEN KESEY --> KNEE --> CHILD SUPPORT
• [Conan and others] for BARBARIANS --> BRAIN --> THINKPIECE
• [Client's sales agent, in brief] for ACCOUNT REP --> ACUTE --> NOT QUITE RIGHT

Word of the Day: SENTA (German actress Berger with a career spanning eight decades) —

Senta Verhoeven (née Berger; born 13 May 1941) is an Austrian-German actress. She received many award nominations for her acting in theatre, film, and television; her awards include three Bambi Awards, two Romys, an Adolf Grimme Award, both a Deutscher Fernsehpreis and a Bayerischer Fernsehpreis, and a Goldene Kamera. [I briefly got excited when I saw Wikipedia listed her father-in-law as Paul Verhoeven, but it's not the "RoboCop" director, just another dude that happens to share his name.]

• • •

Hard to tell where to begin with this blog; so many things I could complain about, and a much smaller, non-positive number of things that I enjoyed. Christopher Adams here, filling in for Rex, and really hoping that the wish from past me for a good Sunday was actually fulfilled. Instead, we get this puzzle, which, I honestly cannot say if any part of this proves that this puzzle wasn't made twenty years ago—so much of this gives off that vibe, and the solving experience sure felt like the slog of picking a random archived puzzle from back then. 

Maybe the closest we get to a modern thing in this puzzle is BROCODE, which isn't great and feels pretty dated and icky as is. I'm not counting the clue for WINONA as a modern thing from a constructing viewpoint, btw; you could easily imagine that entry put in a puzzle that's older than I am, with that clue being an edit to try to make it feel more modern. Even if that's the case, attempt failed—so, so much terrible fill that I will inevitably miss some in the following list: OKED, HOR, OSE, INRE, PHYS, TENHUT, AEC, TASS, RET,  SENTA, IS AT, PARI, CIRC, THE RAP (as far as I'm concerned, this is essentially a six letter fill in the blank clue even if not formatted as such). Plus clue/entry pairs that felt like Eugene T. Maleska was back in the land of the living: ERIN, ELIA, TAU, KEEN (especially bad, and especially when juxtaposed with the "how do you do fellow kids" feeling from ROFL—which, now that I think about it, might beat BROCODE for the newest thing in this puzzle, but also feels old and outdated).

[a clip from "Bridget Jones", mostly chosen because at 0:22, there's a brief cameo of Mark Goodliffe, of "Cracking the Cryptic" fame, and if you're interested in sudoku, I make those too]

But this is all to bury my biggest problem with this puzzle, which is that the words/phrases spelled out by the odd letters are being used as clues, when they fit much better as answers. In a way, I'm reminded of those old-timey themes (that you don't see much these days, for a good reason) where all the theme clues are [Spot] or something equally dull and boring, and the entries in the grid aren't really answers, but clues, and everything feels backwards. Same feeling here—[Gives a darn?] would be an excellent clue for the answer PATCHES, but that works because you're putting the slippery, fun part in the clue, and alerting the solver that something tricky is afoot with the question mark; on the other hand, having [Patches?] as a clue for GIVES A DARN as an answer does not work as well, and similar for the rest of the theme entries.

Olio:

• ACC [Stanford and Cal joined it in 2024] — actually, this might be the worst clue/entry in the puzzle, if only because it reminded me of the travesty that college sports is right now; I cannot wait for the Big Ten to become so big that it naturally splits into a Midwestern and Pacific division, and then back into the old Big Ten and the Pacific (pick a number), as it should be.
• TCU [The Horned Frogs of Ft. Worth] — there are much better ways to signal "abbreviation" than writing Fort Worth like that (and, imo, this clue does not need an abbreviation signal in the clue, given that the abbreviation is way, way more common than the full, unabbreviated name).
• TOOTIN ["Yer darn ___!"] — I didn't actually dislike this entry by itself, but putting this right next to GIVES A DARN was certainly a choice.
• KEN KESEY ["One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" author] — The movie based on this book is one of the many Oscar Best Picture winners with six words in its title, but that's not the most words in the title of a Best Picture winner. In fact, there's two with more than six words in their title; can you name them?
• CHOCTAW [One of the so-called Five Civilized Tribes] — There is an essay to be written about how awful the word "civilized" is here; I'm not going to write it, but I will say that it says a lot about the editing process for using a very controversial term that inherently frames things with a white superiority complex, and that is very much not used by the tribe in question because of how problematic the terminology is (and it's not like info about this being controversial is hard to find or anything).

Yours truly, Christopher Adams, Court Jester of CrossWorld

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