"Santa Claus in Camp" artist, 1863 / SAT 7-25-26 / One of a nursery rhyme quintet / Unprofessional letters? / 1980s Chrysler innovation / The so-called "hurricane bird" / Second person seen in "Hamlet" / Ambient sound said to be more soothing than its "white" counterpart / Emmy winner Ann of "The Handmaid's Tale" / Waft fragrant smoke around / Co-founder of the A.C.L.U.'s Women's Rights Project, familiarly / Actor/playwright Davis who wrote "Purlie Victorious"

Constructor: Katie Hoody

Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium

THEME: none 

Word of the Day: PINK NOISE (33D: Ambient sound said to be more soothing than its "white" counterpart) —

[sleepfoundation.org] 

Pink noise, 1/f noise, fractional noise or fractal noise is a signal or process with a frequency spectrum such that the power spectral density (power per frequency interval) is inversely proportional to the frequency of the signal. In pink noise, each octave interval (halving or doubling in frequency) carries an equal amount of noise energy.

Pink noise sounds like a waterfall. It is often used to tune loudspeaker systems in professional audio. Pink noise is one of the most commonly observed signals in biological systems.

The name arises from the pink appearance of visible light with this power spectrum. This is in contrast with white noise that has equal intensity per frequency interval. [...]

• • •

[1A: Fashionable spots?]

The themelesses were good again this week. Very good. One of the best late-week 1-2 punches I've seen recently. What I loved about this one was that it felt like a Friday—wide-open grid, lots of flow, marquee answers slashing this way and that—but with the cluing clearly tightened up a notch or two. Every single clue seemed to be trying to mislead me at least slightly. Well, not most of the proper nouns—they seemed to be there to give me mild traction. But the ordinary words and phrases hardly ever seemed to have a straightforward clue. This is my ideal Saturday, actually. It's a Friday+. A simple difficulty augmentation, that's all I want. All the other fun stuff that a good Friday offers should stay the same. Could this puzzle have been harder? Yes. Should it have been? Maybe, but as with yesterday, I thought the puzzle at least cleared the minimal difficulty standards for its day of the week. The only things I outright didn't know were PINK NOISE (33D: Ambient sound said to be more soothing than its "white counterpart") and DOWD (21A: Emmy winner Ann of "The Handmaid's Tale"); the clue helped me infer the former while the crosses took care of the latter. So the difficulty today came entirely from cluing—which is, generally, as it should be. Today, we get two big bursts of colloquial goodness, right across the middle. The first one sent me shooting out of the NW corner and clear across the grid:

The second ("I'M IN THE SAME BOAT") was slower to arrive, but only because I actually didn't look at the clue until I had most of the crosses locked into place. The answer was no less delightful for coming into view more slowly. The rest of the longer fill was strong, or at least solid, but the real joy today came from hacking my way through all the slightly tricky clues. The ones on POLKA DOTS (1A: Fashionable spots?) and GARAGE SALE (17A: What might provide you an opportunity to walk in someone else's shoes?) are obviously trying to mislead you (that's what the "?" on the end of the clues is trying to tell you), but it was the ambiguously-worded clues that were really fun today. [Coach's lack, often] ends up having nothing to do with a coach (human) but instead refers to passenger status on an airplane. The [Second person seen in "Hamlet"] is not a character but pronoun category (THOU). You don't "check a box" by putting a check in a box (as on a survey) but by literally checking (with your eyes) the mailbox (40D: One might check a box for it = MAIL). Etc. Etc. Sometimes I was braced for trickiness that never came, which is another way that a Saturday puzzle can push me off-balance. Like, I thought the "sisters" in 52D: What some sisters become were nuns, but they were just ... sisters (AUNTS). And [Predigital recording devices] had me first thinking of fingers and toes (that kind of "digital"), and then had me wondering what meaning of "recording" I wasn't considering. But no, you record (or "write things down") with PENS, a technology that precedes modern digital (electronic) recording of any kind. Sometimes I saw right through this trickery (the other meaning of "shingles" (and "nails") in the ITCH clue, the other meaning of "lab" in the PET clue). But whether the misdirects were hard or easy, they were entertaining. The puzzle seemed to be trying to give me a good time, and I appreciated it.

I often feel guilty when some obvious bit of crosswordese or other sort of short gimme is the first thing I'm able to get. Like, the NW was crushing me and would've kept crushing me had the combined forces of LEROY, KCAR, OSSIE, and SELA not eventually, finally, given me enough assistance to get over the hump. I was coming up blank on everything else up there, esp. the long stuff. So the crosswordy names were conspicuous up front because I desperately needed them, but after that, I was able to ride the momentum of "THAT DOESN'T COUNT" and didn't feel as dependent on the old standbys—plus, there were just fewer of them. ANYA and ABBA and ROTH and RUBIO were the only remaining name gimmes (could've done without that last one, but we'll let that one go for now). NAST was maybe the crosswordesiest name in the grid today, the one that is most likely to provide traction to veteran solvers like me while simultaneously baffling many others (64A: "Santa Claus in Camp" artist, 1863). Thomas NAST might be considered the official cartoonist of crosswords, in that he has been a grid staple for ages and I rarely see him discussed outside crosswords. He's famous for popularizing the Democratic donkey and the Republican elephant as political symbols, and for lampooning the 19c. Democratic political machine of Tammany Hall and "Boss" Tweed (a notoriously corrupt politician). NAST is also credited with the first depiction of the modern Santa Claus (I think "Santa Claus in Camp" might in fact be that depiction). Because I knew this, I was able to get NAST simply from the fact that the answer was four letters. Again, it felt slightly like cheating to know this stuff I probably wouldn't know if I hadn't been solving (and writing about) crosswords for decades. But oh well, what good is experience if you can't benefit from it, I suppose. 

Bullets:

• 18A: Group with the hits "Honey, Honey" and "Money, Money, Money" (ABBA) — this answer was ... a gimme.

• 1D: One of a nursery rhyme quintet (PIGGY) — never thought of the toe-counting game as a "nursery rhyme," but I suppose it qualifies. Also, we have ten piggies ... but I guess the song only covers five of them, so the clue is technically fine.
• 61A: The so-called "hurricane bird," because of its reputation for seeking shelter from storms at the last possible moment (IBIS) — yes, if you are going to give me IBIS for the umpteenth time, make it interesting—write a novel-length clue about it, why not!? When I thought TESTY was TENSE (50D: Easily set off), I thought the "hurricane bird" was a TERN.
• 55D: Pool set? (GENE) — you know the phrase "gene pool"? Well then you probably understand this clue, moving on ...
• 29D: Where an annoying person might be told to go? (AWAY) — I don't know who's responsible for this clue, but it made me laugh, so thanks. Extremely anticlimactic. It works.
• 19A: Something won by successful Olympians (GLORY) — so yeah, no, not MEDAL
• 66A: Like koalas, in Australia (GREY) — maybe my favorite misdirect of all. The qualifier "in Australia" seems so bizarre, since koalas are native exclusively to Australia. So my first thought was "uh ... HOME?" Then I got GREY, mostly from crosses, and thought "wait ... aren't they GREY everywhere? What does Australia have to do with it?" Then I remembered that GREY is actually spelled GRAY in the U.S. It's only spelled GREY in Britain and Commonwealth countries ... like Australia. It's a spelling clue! Bah! But also wow. Good one.

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

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on BlueSky and Facebook and Letterboxd]
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