Kaelin of the O.J. trial / FRI 7-17-26 / French seafood topping named after another country / Rod whom the A.L. batting title is named after / Google smartphone feature that edits the photographer into the group shot / Savory Chinese dish prepared on a griddle / Marvel antagonist who wears a metal mask / Island nation north of Fiji / Pulitzer-winning author whose only two novels were published 55 years apart / Historical figure known to have acquired and dissected human corpses / Landform commonly seen in a crescent shape on Mars / Disney antagonist who rules the Pride Lands

Constructor: Coz Berlin

Relative difficulty: Easiest Friday I've ever done

THEME: none 

Word of the Day: SAUCE AMERICAINE (59A: French seafood topping named after another country) —

Sauce américaine (pronounced [sos ameʁikɛn]; French for 'American sauce') is a recipe from classic French cookery containing chopped onions, tomatoes, white wine, brandy, salt, cayenne pepper, butter and fish stock. It is sometimes incorrectly referred to as sauce armoricaine (pronounced [sos aʁmɔʁikɛn]), but in fact the sauce was invented by a cook from Sète, Hérault, who had worked in the United States. // Louis Saulnier gives the following recipe: Américaine - Treat as for Lobster Américaine. Pound shells and meat in the mortar and incorporate equal quantity of fish velouté, add butter. // As with many other classic dishes the original recipe has been adapted over time and almost every chef will prepare the sauce in a slightly different way. Modern recipes usually include tarragon and use lobster stock rather than pounded lobster, and often replace cayenne pepper with paprika. (wikipedia)

• • •

You don't see this triple-stack stuff much anymore. Used to be considered quite the feat (by some) back in the day. It's still a feat, but constructing software has made this "feat" far more accessible to the average constructor, so it's no longer quite as impressive-seeming. Since there are so many far more interesting and entertaining grid shapes that don't involve having most of your Downs (the stack crosses) being overfamiliar and/or clunky 3-4-5s, you just don't see 15 stacks like this as often. Ironically, though the stacks look daunting, because there are usually so many opportunities to hack into them via their short crosses, they frequently end up being easier than average. Once you get one element in the stack, the others tend to fall quickly. Today ... well, today. Today. Sigh. smh. Look, I think the grid is of perfectly ordinary and average quality. There's nothing wrong with it. The stacks are clean, their crosses never particularly irksome or off-putting. It's all fairly smooth. A puzzle-shaped puzzle, totally acceptable. But the difficulty level has been lowered to such an extent that it's not even fun, unless perhaps you are new to puzzles—always feels great to take down a late-week puzzle when you're just starting out. But if you're not new to puzzles, dear lord this one is over before it begins. Where's the fun in that? 

How easy was it? So easy that I literally never saw the clues for MADE A CLEAN BREAK, ORDERED A  LA CARTE, or STAND AT THE READY. Or REM or EWER or EWE either, but those are less remarkable. I took one look at 1A: Savory Chinese dish prepared on a griddle and thought "it's a PANCAKE ... an onion PANCAKE of some kind ... just write in PANCAKE." And so I did ("griddle" is a dead giveaway that you're dealing with a PANCAKE). If you write in PANCAKE there at the end of 1A ... well, for me, that was like tipping over the first domino is a long line of dominos—they all just ... fell. I mean, I ran those Downs backwards from the "E" in PANCAKE, 1-2-3-4-5-6-7 ... or 7-6-5-4-3-2-1, I guess, if we're being precise. From there, it was clear the 2nd and 3rd long Downs ended CLEAN BREAK and A LA CARTE, respectively, so I wrote that much in, and more Downs fell, and I saw that the onion in the pancake was a SCALLION, and then all the Downs fell. All but one—a product placement clue written on behalf of Google smartphones.

Could've just made this ADDLE and gone with REL (or TEL, or KEL) in the cross, but instead we get this ADD ME garbage (3D: Google smartphone feature that edits the photographer into the group shot). How do you steer *into* ADD ME? Why? Whose tastes or interests are served there? Whatever, it hardly matters, the answer's easy to get, it's just so dispiriting to have the one answer that made me pause At All up there be an ad for Google products. But back to my initial point—from PANCAKE (obvious) I ran the table up there. No hesitations, ADD ME notwithstanding. I should not be able to walk through a third of a Friday puzzle in under a minute. The other two sections took a little more time, but only a little. I actually threw a couple of wrong answers down in the middle section, early, when I had almost nothing to go on. Wrote in SAMPLE for SWATCH (28D: Fabric fragment) and TAHITI for TUVALU (25D: Island nation north of Fiji). But EARTHA and DR. DOOM were easy and Margaret CHO got me to change SAMPLE to SWATCH and then the ANTI-WAR part of ANTI-WAR MOVEMENT because obvious and whoosh, there went the middle: ALMS NEON TOIL, bam bam bam, and all the long Acrosses were done for. I washed back across the grid, changing TAHITI to TUVALU along the way. 

I'm 2/3 down now and I don't think more than a few minutes have gone by. And I am by no means speed-solving at this point—just proceeding methodically, wondering when anything is going to leap out and fight me. Never happened. Once I got SHAMS and SKOR in there, every Down I threw into the lower section came up correct, immediately, effortlessly: REEDY OWNED KEIRA SPENT SICON, all off just their first letters. Like it was Monday. SICON to ACTI to ASIS CAST TUNA and now I've got the front ends of all the long Downs down there. I've never heard of SAUCE AMÉRICAINE, but it didn't stand a chance today. The surrounding fill was too easy, and the AMÉRICAINE part was ultimately inferable, and that was that. 

[my first thought when I saw SAUCE AMÉRICAINE]

If I'd been speed-solving, I think I might've broken 3 today, which is Insane. I can break 3 on a Monday. Rarely, on a Tuesday. On a Friday!?!?! At a very casual pace, taking screenshots along the way, I was done in probably 4 or 5. That should not be. If you struggled today, please don't be insulted. Everyone's different. But I'm genuinely curious where the struggle might've been. Maybe in the proper nouns? If you're young, it's possible KATO Kaelin means nothing to you (consider yourself Blessed). Maybe you've never heard the sultry, purring sounds of EARTHA Kitt (you should fix that). Perhaps Rod CAREW means nothing to you (he was a big deal when I was a baseball card-collecting boy in the '70s). DR. DOOM might be beyond your ken. We all have proper noun / pop culture gaps. But even with those gaps, it seems like the puzzle should've been very easy to handle for just about any regular solver today. Again, I like the stacks today. They are fine. But the only one I really loved, fittingly, was "IS NOTHING SACRED?!" Is the Friday puzzle not sacred? Can we not maintain late-week difficulty in the face of the overwhelming (economic?) pressure to dumb everything down into quick-solve nuggets!? Apparently not. 

Bullets:

• 40A: Historical figure known to have acquired and dissected human corpses (LEONARD DA VINCI) — this makes him sound like a serial killer. "Acquired" doing a lot of mysterious work here.
• 54A: They typically come in sets of four (PAWS) — I like this one, both because it actually made me ... pause (pun originally not intended, but as soon as I heard it, very much intended!), and it made me think of kitties and puppies, which is never a bad thing.

[high five]

• 4D: Pulitzer-winning author whose only two novels were published 55 years apart (LEE) — Stan LEE wrote novels? Actually, this is Harper LEE, author of To Kill a Mockingbird (1960) and Go Set a Watchman (2015). I had LE- and honest to god I Polish author Stanisław LEM for a half-second. He received a lot of honors in his life, but never the Pulitzer (a U.S. award).

• 52A: Something big when all the world's a stage? (CAST) — I got this from the "C," but I'm not sure the phrasing really works here. You could have a movie that roams the globe and still have a modest-sized CAST. I appreciate the attempt to give this puzzle some personality (finally), to make it seem like it was written by a human and not a machine. But the Shakespeare feels a little forced here.

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

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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