Caddies, in golf slang / THU 7-9-26 / Dinosaur named for a lizard tooth / Rowers' workout machines, informally / Caucasus region / Hit 1977 musical that included Franklin D. Roosevelt as a character / Show that ends in disarray? / Hydrox lookalike / One of the six sluggers on baseball's Murderer's Row / Double-decker checker / Hamilton author of the classic "Mythology: Timeless Tales of Gods and Heroes"

Constructor: Brad Wiegmann and Nat Wiegmann

Relative difficulty: Easy

[2D: "Star Wars" planet where Luke Skywalker rides a tauntaun (HOTH) / 44D: Padmé ___ (mother of Luke and Leia Skywalker (AMIDALA)]

THEME: FORGONE (38A: Renounced ... or a phonetic hint to reading the answers to the starred clues) — FORGONE = "four gone"; theme answers contain four letters (all the same) that must be removed in order for the clues to make sense:

Theme answers:

• STUTTGART (w/ four "T"s gone => SUGAR) (17A: *Honeybunch)
• TELL-ALLS (w/ four "L"s gone => TEAS) (25A: *Afternoon socials)
• BASSISTS (w/ four "S"s gone => BAIT) (49A: *Worms or flies, often)
• APIA, SAMOA (w/ four "A"s gone => PISMO) (60A: *___ Beach, Calif.)

Word of the Day: OSSETIA (42D: Caucasus region) —

Ossetia [...] is an ethnolinguistic region on both sides of the Greater Caucasus Mountains, largely inhabited by the Ossetians. The Ossetian language is part of the Eastern Iranian branch of the family of Indo-European languages. Most countries recognize the Ossetian-speaking area south of the main Caucasus ridge as lying within the borders of Georgia, but it has come under the control of the de facto government of the Russian-backed State of Alania. The northern portion of the region consists of the Republic of North Ossetia–Alania within the Russian Federation. (wikipedia)

• • •

This theme is kind of interesting, even if at its core it's just a bunch of ordinary clues for ordinary short fill. I mean, [Worm or flies often] = BAIT—you might see that in any puzzle and not give it a second look. The opposite of remarkable. But add those four letters (in the case of BAIT, four "S"s) and you've got yourself enough wackery and confusion for a Thursday theme, I guess. I say "I guess" because I'm not quite sure it's enough. Once you suss the theme—not hard to do, since the revealer is easy to uncover—then you really are just dealing with ordinary clue/answers and the only "mystery" is what those extra four letters are going to be and where they're going to go, and that's never hard to figure out, esp. with all four extra letters being the same letter. Plus the rest of the puzzle, the non-theme part, was something like Tuesday-easy. The concept feels Thursday-worthy, but in practice, it provided about as much resistance as a wet paper towel. Still, the wordplay at the core of the puzzle works, and it was kind of fun watching the four- or five-letter answers appear from inside the longer answers. It's got something, this puzzle, even if that something does feel a little slight.

Outside the theme, results are mixed. First of all, as usual, the puzzle is just too easy. I solve by working crosses rather than hopping around, and today this resulted, strangely, in my going coast-to-coast before I'd even really started. I drifted into the middle and once I got there I was like "can I just keep going?" and it turns out yes. All the way:

Corner to corner, nonstop! Across Down Across Down, bam bam bam bam all the way! I got to the bottom, looked back up, thought "well, that was weird," and then continued, knowing that whatever theme trickery awaited me, it probably wasn't going to hold me up for long. That first pass through the grid alone gave me So Much Traction. Without even knowing it, I'd already filled in almost half the revealer! While I liked much of the fill (AS WE SPEAK, IGUANODON, that clue on STRIPTEASE (28D: Show that ends in disarray?)), a little too much of it SWUNG toward crosswordese. A lot of overfamiliar stuff. From EGAD and ASONE and ASP in the SW to ELL and ENTS in the NE ... ATIT APU CEO ETAS ERGS IONA ... the always odious ODEA. And then there's SAPOR, a word I've only ever seen in crosswords (it's adjectival form is SAPID, so, you know, keep your eye out for that ... someday). It's been four years since we've seen SAPOR, which tells you how ungreat a word it is. With those letters? If it were anything like an ordinary word, we'd be seeing it way more often. I wouldn't really mind it if the puzzle weren't already drowning in crosswordy stuff. Also, even though I think it's a fair cross for APIA, SAMOA, I can easily imagine that some solver(s) wrote in SAVOR, which seems like a perfectly reasonable answer for 52D: Taste. That would give you AVIA, SAMOA, but if I'm being very very honest ... you could convince me that AVIA was, in fact, the capital of Samoa. Like, if you just called it that in conversation, I probably wouldn't blink. Of course AVIA is a shoe, not a city, but crosswordese lives in weird heaps and jumbles inside my brain, and I can't always tell one bit from the other when I'm fumbling around in the dark. Would love to know if there were any AVIA / SAVOR victims today. Confess! It's OK, you're pre-forgiven!

The one ????? today was OSSETIA. Talk about a no-hoper. I had -SSETIA and still wasn't sure how to finish it off. The Times used it once back in 1956, and then once again in the mid '90s, and then I guess it's in constructors' wordlists now. A real "my software said it's real!" kind of answer. Of course, OSSETIA is located precisely in that part of the world where my geographical knowledge (only semi-reliable on a good day) is the absolute worst. That Europe-Asia blur. Near the western Stans. Just a mental-map dead zone for me. Doesn't help that OSSETIA is not a country but a region, one that straddles countries and is divided into a North and South. North OSSETIA is in Russia and South OSSETIA is in Georgia ... but South OSSETIA has now apparently been annexed by Russia, or is essentially under Russian control, so who the hell knows? All I know is that answer stood out like a fly in my cereal—the one thing I didn't know today, and I really didn't know it. Extreme not-knowing. Random letters. Between AVIA I mean APIA, SAMOA and OSSETIA, a real geographical adventure today.

[62A: Hit 1977 musical that included Franklin D. Roosevelt as a character]

Bullets:

• 19A: Group of spellers? (COVEN) — "spellers?" = ones who cast spells. It's a (very) old pun.
• 21A: Back-to-basics regimen (PALEO DIET) — does this clue work for the PALEO DIET industry? Big Paleo? "Back-to-basics" is ... questionable. What is "basics?" This is PR, not science. Avoiding heavily processed food is a good idea, sure, but this idea that you can (or should) eat like Paleolithic Man seems dubious at best:

The diet avoids food processing and typically includes vegetables, fruits, nuts, roots, and meat and excludes dairy products, grains, sugar, legumes, processed oils, salt, alcohol, and coffee.^[Historians can trace the ideas behind the diet to "primitive" diets advocated in the 19th century. In the 1970s, Walter L. Voegtlin popularized a meat-centric "Stone Age" diet; in the 21st century, the best-selling books of Loren Cordain popularized the "Paleo diet". As of 2019 the Paleolithic diet industry was worth approximately US$500 million.

In the 21st century, the sequencing of the human genome and DNA analysis of the remains of anatomically modern humans have found evidence that humans evolved rapidly in response to changing diet. This evidence undermines a core premise of the Paleolithic diet—that human digestion has remained essentially unchanged over time. Paleoanthropological evidence has indicated that prehistoric humans ate plant-heavy diets that regularly included grains and other starchy vegetables, in contrast to the claims made by proponents of the Paleolithic diet. (wikipedia)

• 26A: Caddies, in golf slang (LOOPERS) — golf slang, BRODATEs, and PALEO DIET—puzzle's trying real hard to flex its manliness. I weirdly knew LOOPERS from ... some dimly remembered James Ellroy novel? One of his early ones? I'm reading online that Ellroy himself was a golf caddy for years, so the connection makes sense, even if I can't remember what exactly I read. I just remember thinking LOOPERS was pretty cool, as golf slang goes.

• 33A: Scare off (DETER) — for some reason, this was the second-hardest thing in the puzzle for me to get (after OSSETIA, lol). I had -TER and no idea what to do with it. In my mind, there's some kind of intensity gap between "scaring" and merely "deterring." 
• 24D: Hydrox lookalike (OREO) — I like that the clue gets the timeline right here. Hydrox preceded OREO by five years or so.

Oreo was created in 1912 as an imitation of Hydrox, but eventually surpassed it in popularity. This resulted in the Hydrox cookies being perceived by many as an imitation of Oreo, despite the opposite being the case. Compared to Oreos, Hydrox cookies have a less sweet filling and a crunchier cookie shell that is less soggy when dipped in milk. (wikipedia)

• 32D: Long time follower? (AGO) — in the common phrase "a long time AGO" (in a galaxy far, far away) (double Star Wars day today! that happens once in a blue moon ... therefore, the double Star Wars clue phenomenon will be known henceforth as a Blue Endor)

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

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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