Work parodied by Umberto Eco's "Granita" / SUN 8-16-26 / Member of the N.F.L.'s "Big Blue," in brief / Astonished, informally / Place for a sailor's anchor, informally / Fiber also knowns as viscose / Title that becomes loftier when an E is added / "Diminutive" Greek letter / Dizzying gallery works / Invention originally developed as a yellow dye / Infraction at an arcade

Constructor: Sam Brody

Relative difficulty: Easy

[33D: Ewoks' home moon]

THEME: "Take the Edge Off" — theme clues are words that are missing their "edges" (i.e. their first, or last, or first and last, letters); answers are familiar phrases that act as punny representations of those "edgeless" words:

Theme answers:

• DOCTORS WITHOUT BORDERS (23A: _ATSO_ and _EKYL_) ("Watson" and "Jekyll," both famous fictional "doctors," lack "borders" (i.e. first and last letters))
• NEEDS NO INTRODUCTION (36A: _RAVES) (the word "craves," which (kinda) means "needs," has "no introduction," i.e. no first letter)
• NEVERENDING STORY (56A: SAG_) (the word "saga," which is a kind of "story," never ends—because it lacks its last letter)
• HEADLESS HORSEMAN (79A: _NIGHT) (the word "knight," which is a kind of "horseman," is lacking its first letters, or "head")
• NOT COMPLETELY HONEST (99A: FRAN_) (the word "frank," which means "honest," is not complete)
• UNLIMITED TALK AND TEXTS (116A: _IALO_) (the word "dialog," a term which indicates either "talking" or "texting," has no "limits" (i.e first and last letters))

Word of the Day: Granita (1A: Work parodied by Umberto Eco's "Granita" = LOLITA) —

[man, I have no idea—when you search [Eco granita], mostly what you get is automated crossword answer sites, giving you the answer to this clue. There's hardly anything online about this ... looks like a short story, or a sketch of some time, written in the '50s in Italian but published in English in the '90s ... all the references to it (and there are hardly any) are from, like, somebody's private Tumblr accounts. There are a couple of very brief references to it in the NYT and Guardian—it appears to be a story about one "Umberto Umberto" (playing on the name of LOLITA's protagonist, Humbert Humbert) who develops a thing for geriatric women, whom he calls "Nornettes" (playing on Humbert's term for the young girls he's sexually attracted to, "nymphets"). Anyway, I think it's fair to say that this "work" of Eco's is very obscure—here's the summary from one of those aforementioned Tumblr accounts (it squares with what google's A.I. is trying to tell me): "Umberto Eco wrote a hilarious parody of Lolita that he called Granita. In his version of the story, a young man falls in love with an old lady. It would seem that the sight of her marbled flesh, glimpsed through a window as she removed her stockings, drove him wild with uncontrollable lust. When he runs away with her, he has to travel by bicycle (he doesn’t have a driver’s license yet) and pedals away with “Granita” holding on for dear life. The story appears in Eco’s anthology Misreadings." ]

• • •

I've seen this kind of thing before. A bunch. Basically a reverse cryptic, where the answer is the clue and the clue is the answer. It's a giant shrug from me. Not very clever. Pretty rudimentary stuff, as cryptic clues go. Ugly gibberish for theme clues. OK but unremarkable theme answers. UNLIMITED TALK AND TEXTS is just wrong, though. The pluralized TEXTS, specifically. There are "unlimited talk & text" plans, for sure, but they are most definitely "talk & text" plans, not "talk & texts." It's not just that the theme was dull—it's that it was almost beside the point. I got the first themer without even looking at the clue:

After getting it, I looked up, saw the clue, knew instantly what the conceit was, and decided the only way this solve was going to be anything close to interesting was if I challenged myself not to look at any of the theme clues ever again. And I didn't. And it didn't make a bit of difference. Maybe it added a minute or so to my solve, I don't know, but I did not miss those clues. You can write them yourself once you get the answer. Nothing special about them. The whole thing was fantastically dull. And the fill didn't do much to liven things up. This was just one big 21x21 SLAB of a puzzle; there was some cleverness in the cluing, it turns out (the doctors clue, for instance), but for the most part the puzzle doesn't really have much to recommend it. I'm kind of surprised it was accepted. I PLODded through, but it never once gave me a reason to smile or wonder or struggle or ... anything. It's just there. Taking up space.

["Maybe another drink will take the edge off!"]

Does anything even need explaining, beyond the theme? The clues and answers all felt so straightforward. "Granita" was the only thing in the whole dang puzzle that made me go "huh?," that made me curious, that seemed to be trying to stretch the boundaries of the Totally Ordinary. I did laugh once, but that's only because I tried to give that wrestler guy ONE ARM instead of ONE LEG (100D: Feature of Anthony Robles, a 2011 N.C.A.A. national champion wrestler). Guy's only got one leg and now here I am trying to take his arm away as well? Not cool. Are there one-armed wrestlers? There was a one-handed Major League pitcher once, and a good one (Jim Abbott), so why not? I guess it would be especially hard to grapple with one arm, but wrestling with just the ONE LEG, that also seems impressive. I'm looking around this grid and trying to find anything, literally anything worth remarking on, and fran-ly I'm not having much success. It's all so, so plain. I think two stars might be too generous, but I'm just gonna leave it; perhaps it has virtues I just can't appreciate, for some reason.

Bullets:

• 27A: Astonished, informally (SHOOK) — this was the one moment where the puzzle seemed to be alive and living in the 21st century. This slangy use of SHOOK already seems to be on the wane, but it's at least familiar as a recentish expression. Anything with some life in it was welcome today.
• 53D: London park (HYDE) — this seems like a little NOD AT Dr. Jekyll (or Dr. -EKYL-, I guess).
• 64A: Place for a sailor's anchor, informally (BICEP) — hey, a bit of misdirection! Not a lot of misdirection, but some. Sometimes I think puzzles are trying too hard with the cluing, but hoo boy today is not one of those days. Speaking of sailors, I finally saw The Odyssey today. There was a SCYLLA, as I predicted (see yesterday's puzzle). But no anchor tattoos for Odysseus (that I could see). I think that's strictly a Popeye thing ... although no ... Popeye's anchor tattoo is on his forearm, not his BICEP:

• 118D: Park place? (LOT) — because you park ... your car ... there.
• 49D: Female rapper with a longtime feud with Foxy Brown (LIL KIM) — OK, this probably should've been my "Word of the Day." I know LIL KIM from ... the '90s? Can't say I've seen her name or thought about her for decades. Here is a long and embarrassing description of said feud., which started sometime in ... yep, the '90s. The last relevant incident in this recap happened in 2013, so I don't know what the state of their relationship is now. Nor do I care. There has to be a better, more dignified way to clue LIL KIM. How about this team-up? This was fun:

Sorry I don't have more to say about this puzzle. It's not giving me much to work with. I really hope you enjoyed it more than I did. For those of you who struggle on Sundays, this one should've been pretty doable, at least. Maybe you broke your Sunday speed record? If it made you happy, then as they say (or Sheryl Crow says), it can't be that bad. All it did for me, though, was make me wish I were reading a book, so I'm gonna go do that now. See you next time.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on BlueSky and Facebook and Letterboxd]
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