Plant used to mimic smoking, maybe / WED 6-17-26 / Newspaper story about a violent act in an "olde timey" store of a wrong spelling / Two fav sodas married / NYT should write one about their favorite time zone / Psyducks Mom, alternative spelling / Your armpits / Squishy fidgets with #34 down / What N899TJ does through the sky

Constructor: Trina Mate

Relative difficulty: Impossible

THEME: JUNE SEVENTEENTH (19A: The best day ever!) — some guy's birthday (!?!?)

Word of the Day: STABINAOTSHOOPE (31A: Newspaper story about a violent act in an "olde timey" store of a wrong spelling) —

Stabina Otshoope is the lead singer of the Dutch pop music group Bedankdedankdank (BDK). She was notorious for her stage-diving, as well as her habit of punctuating her concerts with long discursions on various non-musical topics, like the history of philosophy or Taiwanese cooking. After declaring her retirement from music in a surprise announcement on the children's television show Timmy Trundlebear's Good-Time Jambaroo, Otshoope was tragically killed the very next day, stabbed by a deranged fan while in a second-hand shop shopping for vintage ashtrays. She was 98.

• • •

I'm not really sure why I'm bothering to write about this puzzle at all, since it breaks all established crossword conventions, including the very important convention that the puzzle make sense. Any kind of sense. There are unchecked squares and two-letter answers ... there's no rotational symmetry, or any kind of symmetry, to the grid ... and half the answers are either complete obscurities (how am I supposed to know the constructor's favorite apps, or their children's names, or who the Alkaline Trio is!?) or manifestly made-up baloney. REEP!? ALROCK !?? BAINAC!!!?  (28A: _r___i__ (what you might be described as)). You might have to be a BAINAC to solve this puzzle—I doubt being an actual brainiac would help you at all. Worse, in my version. the clues weren't even numbered correctly (see grid). So while the numbers work perfectly fine for the Downs, yeesh, good luck. You can see all the "?"s I had to write into the grid. But maybe not knowing those squares is for the best. I mean, maybe I'm better off not actually having to confront the apparently correct answer "OH, POOPER!" ([Dagnabbit!]). I hope this puzzle's dedicatee loves their wife, because this is a puzzle only a loved one could love. "Happy birthday, here's a crossword-shaped pile of garbage!" If you can smile through this .... well that's true love right there.

I did enjoy two things about this puzzle. "Enjoy" might be a strong term, but I'm gonna stick with it. First, DR. COKER (10A: Two fav sodas married). I thought maybe DR. COKER was the family podiatrist, so I was happy to find out it was an imaginary hybrid soda instead. I guess I should take the "." out of DR COKER if I want to represent the name accurately. Wikipedia tells me that: "Although it shares some similarities with cola, in 1966, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has determined that Dr Pepper is not classified as a cola, root beer, or fruit-flavored soft drink. Instead, it is generally described as belonging to a distinct category often referred to as "pepper soda", named after the brand itself." Well what are you gonna do now, FDA? What are you gonna do with DR COKER? Create a new category? The pepper cola!? Checkmate, FDA. Your "categories" cannot contain the taste sensation that is DR COKER. I really want a DR COKER right now. Sadly, there is no Theoretical Soda Shop on my block, so I'm going to have to go hunt for the grungiest Dr Pepper variant I can find and just use my imagination. 

[nothing could induce me to sample this level of abomination]

The other answer I enjoyed was CST ODE ([NYT should write one about their favorite time zone]). This answer takes two tired pieces of crosswordese and marries them into one unholy but very entertaining union. "If you like CST so much, why don't you write an ODE about it!?" Good suggestion. Someone should do that.

I can't give any more energy to this unsightly disaster. ODORLESS, it isn't. But if this puzzle was for you (and I mean literally, specifically for you), then I can see how maybe, maybe, you might have some kind of affection for it.

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)