British glam rock band of the 1970s / WED 6-17-26 / Rival of a Raven / Folkie DiFranco / Disney film set in a fictional Colombian village / Like Tom Cruise as Jack Reacher, some say / Casino maneuvers carried out three times in this puzzle? / Fast-paced scam, such as the shell game / "___ the Day" (Thomas Pynchon's longest novel) / "Just What I Needed" band, with "the" / Geraldo Rivera uncovered his "vaults" on live TV

Constructor: Jonathan Raksin

Relative difficulty: Medium-Challenging

[5D: Disney+ series whose name sounds like a compound conjunction = ANDOR]

THEME: RIFFLE SHUFFLES (43A: Casino maneuvers carried out three times in this puzzle?) — first four letters of theme answers in the top half of the puzzle are "(riffle??) shuffled" into the last four letters of their respective answers to make the theme answers in the bottom half:

Theme answers:

• STONEPIT --> SET POINT (41A: BEFORE (Deck 3): Quarry / 46A: AFTER (Deck 3): Crucial moment in a tennis match)
• CONSOLES --> COOLNESS (20A: BEFORE (Deck 2): PlayStation and Switch / 55A: AFTER (Deck 2): Noted quality of the Fonz)
• GOOFOFFS --> GOOFOFFS (16A: BEFORE (Deck 1): Slackers / 73A: AFTER (Deck 1): Slackers)

Word of the Day: AGAINST the Day (72A: "___ the Day" (Thomas Pynchon's longest novel)) —

 

Against the Day is an epic historical novel by Thomas Pynchon, published on November 21, 2006. The narrative takes place between the 1893 Chicago World's Fair and the time immediately following World War I and features more than a hundred characters spread across the United States, Europe, Mexico, Central Asia, Africa and "one or two places not strictly speaking on the map at all," according to the book jacket blurb written by Pynchon. Like its predecessors, Against the Day is an example of historiographic metafiction or metahistorical romance. At 1,085 pages, it is the longest of Pynchon's novels to date. (wikipedia)

• • •

This was probably closer to a two-and-a-half-star puzzle for me, but I bumped it up for the final "joke" (i.e. the revelation that a shuffled GOOF-OFFS is also GOOF-OFFS). I should probably take that half star back for the duping of "OFF" in OFF-PUT (itself a pretty awkward verb ... or is it an adjectival phrase? Who can tell, when the only terms anyone actually uses for this phenomenon are PUT OFF (v) or OFF-PUTTING (adj.)) (32D: Repelled). But I like the goofy joke well enough to keep the rating where it is. If you're going to break crossword convention (in this case, repeat an answer), there better be a good reason, and today I think there is. Still, the very concept here is kind of a snore. And the revealer is a silly phrase that means nothing to me. I have heard of shuffling, of course, but not riffle-shuffling, which is ... just shuffling? Where the half-deck in one hand merges with the half-deck in the other hand in alternative-card fashion? Casino terminology, as you know, not my thing. A bigger issue, for me: the theme reeks of "a computer program helped me find these words." It's like someone wrote some code that could take a wordlist and determine which of the (8-letter) words in that list could turn into other 8-letter words if you did this. The non-GOOF-OFFS themers are a big shrug to me. I don't want to mentally shuffle longer words to that extent. I also don't really have to, as the theme clues are easy enough that you don't really have to pay attention to the theme. This puzzle feels like it's in some kind of thematic no-man's-land between Wed. and Thu. It's structurally complex ... but not that complex; not such that you really have to think about it. It took me a little longer than usual. I can write some of that off to the oversized grid, but those giant NW and SE corners had something to do with it as well—much harder to get traction in all that white space than it is to get traction in a typical M-Th corner. 

One other potentially OFF-PUTting thing about this puzzle is that it is positively drowning in pop culture clues. I can handle a pretty decent amount of movies / music / TV shows in my puzzles, but this puzzle was testing even my patience in this arena. It starts with Tom Cruise. MISCAST? Do people say that? That clue was lost on me, as those Reacher movies held zero appeal for me (1A: Like Tom Cruise as Jack Reacher, some say). They held appeal for someone, though, as the two of them made close to half a billion dollars at the box office, so I guess the MISCASTing wasn't such a problem. After Cruise, we get (deep breath): ANDOR, Paul MESCAL, The CARS, TOTAL Recall, "Werewolves of London" (SOHO), Nick at NITE, SLADE, Booker T & the MGS, The Fonz, ENCANTO, Spielberg's EGOT, Jay LENO, NIA Vardalos, ANI DiFranco, AL CAPONE (clued via Geraldo) and PERU (clued via The Emperor's New Groove). That is Yeeeesh levels of pop culture. I didn't even count the sports clues in there, or the (not exactly 1st-tier) Pynchon. What's odd is that so many of those answers were needlessly pop culturefied. TOTAL, PERU, CARS, NITE, SOHO. Just shift the cluing on those and you have something closer to a reasonable balance. As is, I kept rolling my eyes going "again?" Except with Paul MESCAL, whom I love and who can do no wrong. Put him in every puzzle, I won't mind. 

The difficulty for me today lay in those big corners, where I just had to work harder than usual for traction. Otherwise, the difficulty level felt about normal for a Wednesday. I didn't have any real mistakes, though there was a bunch of stuff I didn't know. I've read a couple late-ish Pynchons (the most recent one, Shadow Ticket, which features a character known as the AL CAPONE of Cheese, and Inherent Vice), and I know the titles of his more famous works (V, Gravity's Rainbow), as well as the novel that One Battle After Another was based on (Vineland), but AGAINST the Day? That one got past me. I also didn't know if the common football score was going to be ONE-ONE or ONE-NIL (52D: Final score of at least 10% of professional soccer matches) (yesterday's World Cup matches were 3-1 (France-Senegal), 4-1 (Norway-Iraq), and 3-0 (Argentina-Algeria)), and I've never used or heard anyone use the phrase DOG IT in my life (59D: Give minimum effort), so that SE corner took some time. Similar problems in the NW, with MISCAST being hard to pin down, and then INTONE being oddly/vaguely clued (and just being an odd word to begin with) (2D: Vocalize), and SCAN IN being needlessly prepositionally awkward ("Digitize" = SCAN, no IN needed) (3D: Digitize, as a document).. No real trouble elsewhere in the grid.

Bullets:

• 19A: Fast-paced scam, such as the shell game (SHORT CON) — this is a fun term. I think I learned it (and LONG CON) from The Grifters. With "CONS" highlighted in CONSOLES, the CON in SHORT CON kind of feels like a dupe, even though it isn't.

• 57A: ___ With Friends (WORDS) — does anyone still play this? This feels very ... aughts. Huh, looks like it's an exceedingly popular mobile game. Or at least it was as of 2017 ("the most popular mobile game in the U.S." as of May 2017) (wikipedia). No one I know plays (or talks about playing it, if they do). I do So Many word games and puzzles every day. This just isn't one of them.
• 25D: Gathering, informally (SESH) — I will never like this awful shortening, though I will say that SESH is much, much more tolerable than UNFORCH, which is a shortening I encountered in a puzzle this past weekend, UNFORCH.
• 62A: Telepathy, e.g. (PSI) — I ... don't really know this term. Are supernatural abilities called "PSI"s? Apparently yes, though it's not a countable noun, i.e. PSI is just the collective term for "parapsychological psychic phenomena or powers"_which are fictional, of course, as the clue for nearby ESP kind of gets at with its scare quotes (71D: "Ability" that's hard to believe, for short).

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

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on BlueSky and Facebook and Letterboxd]
=============================
❤️ Support this blog ❤️: 

• Venmo (@MichaelDavidSharp)]

=============================
📘 My other blog 📘:

• Pop Sensation (vintage paperbacks)