Member of the World Cup's "Tartan Army" fan base / FRI 8-7-2026 / Website associated with the domain www.news.com / "It's ___ or nothin'!" (classic kids' commercial slogan)

Constructor: Jesse Cohn

Relative difficulty: to judge this puzzle on difficulty is to imply there was anything about it that was difficult, which there wasn't

Word of the Day: LEFT TURNS [No-nos at some highway intersections] —

A Michigan left or P-turn is an at-grade intersection design that replaces each left (farside) turn at an intersection between a (major) divided roadway and a secondary (minor) roadway with the combination of a right (nearside) turn followed by a U-turn, or a U-turn followed by a right (nearside) turn, depending on the situation. It is in use in numerous countries.

This intersection design was given the name "Michigan left" due to its frequent use along roads and highways in the U.S. state of Michigan since the late 1960s. In other contexts, the intersection is called a median U‑turn crossover or median U‑turn, or restricted crossing U-turn (RCUT). The design is also sometimes referred to as a boulevard left, a boulevard turnaround, an indirect left turn, a Michigan loon, a J‑turn, P‑turn or a "ThrU Turn" intersection. (Wikipedia, on one potential way to deal with no left turns)

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Hey hi howdy hello, Christopher Adams here, thankfully solving this puzzle on the ground when flight delays had me thinking I'd be blogging this six or seven miles above the surface of the earth. Honestly, delays are the real [Flight nuisance], not a GATE CHANGE, especially now that you can get notifications about said gate changes immediately when they happen, rather than schlepping all the way down to your gate only to find out that it's now a flight to an entirely different location you do not want to visit, and you have to walk twenty minutes back to a gate that always seems to be close to where you just walked from. Granted, you can also get flight delay email notifications, but you can't do anything about those except perhaps sigh and decide to spend another hour or two inside the airport lounge (which I did).

Anyway, I wish this puzzle was as lofty as my flight was; instead, I'm a certified BOOER [Vocal critic] of this puzzle. The grid is pretty defensive from the start—you can kinda see how it's almost broken up into nine smaller sections in a 3x3 grid, just with the first two and last two combined—and there's really not a lot of long entries, and no effort to make them interesting at all (either by themselves, or with interesting clues). Like, MUSIC PRODUCTION; that's a thing, but it's not an interesting use of fifteen letters; the clue at least tries to save it by giving some misdirection to athletics, but it's a minimal, half-hearted attempt that's easily seen through.

Though at least it tried to do something, which is more than I can say for most of the entries here, which are just straightforward and don't offer much resistance; even worse, they mostly don't give me a reason to care, either. A BITE TO EAT clued as [What someone might get quickly around lunchtime]—yup, that's straightforward, but not interesting. I don't know how I feel about this being a long entry starting with A (though my gut says more legit than not), but I do know I like it more than CAT'S OUT OF THE BAG, which feels like it's missing the "the" out front to me.

[Fields Medal winner Terence] TAO, here on 3Blue1Brown; part two of this is linked in the description, and this earlier talk also covers the same general ideas

I don't really have much more to say about this one, other than to note that in addition to a lot of the long entries not being interesting, they also specifically stood out to me as "things that seem to get suggested by your crossword construction program all the time because they have nice letters"; the most notable of these were I HAD NO IDEA and ARE WE A THING (which I thought might've been ...AN ITEM, ...A PAIR, other related things that may or may not have had the right letter count, but definitely had the same idea). This may very well be just me on this point, and so perhaps that's why I disliked it even more than I might've otherwise.

Olio:

• BORSCHT [One dish commonly in the 12 dish Sviata Vecheria, a traditional Ukrainian Christmas dinner] — Not hard (name a Ukrainian dish), especially if you already have the B in place, but unlike many other clues in this puzzle, it's interesting and lets you learn something new. More of this, please!
• SCOT [Member of the World Cup's "Tartan Army" fan base] — As Scots were to Boston bars, so I might have been to the airport lounges today. Also, sports! More of this, please!
• FABERGE EGG [Bejeweled target of a heist in "Ocean's Twelve"] — "Bejeweled" absolutely nerfs this clue, but still a fun movie in my opinion, especially with Julia Roberts as Tess Ocean, pretending to be Julia Roberts. When it comes to silly things like that in movies: more of this, please!
• BIG AL [Elephant mascot of the Alabama Crimson Tide] — Auburn's gonna win the football game! More of this, please!

Yours truly, Christopher Adams, Court Jester of CrossWorld

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