Network debut of 1981 / FRI 9-11-26 / ___ Ann (classic Lily Tomlin character) / U.S. senators Warnock and Duckworth, for two / Film composer Silvestri / Chip source, informally / Jazz Age Disney princess / Guard at the gates of Mordor / Blue ___ (coral reef swimmers like Pixar's Dory) / Assessment of something enjoyed ironically

Constructor: Robyn Weintraub

Relative difficulty: Easy

THEME: none 

Word of the Day: ALAN Silvestri (46D: Film composer Silvestri) —

Alan Anthony Silvestri (born March 26, 1950) is an American composer, conductor, orchestrator and music producer of film scores. He has received two Grammy Awards and two Primetime Emmy Awards as well as nominations for two Academy Awards and two Golden Globe Awards.

He has been associated with director Robert Zemeckis since 1984, composing music for nearly all of his feature films, including the Back to the Future film series (1985–1990), Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988), Death Becomes Her (1992), Forrest Gump (1994), Contact (1997), What Lies Beneath (2000), Cast Away (2000), The Polar Express (2004), Beowulf (2007), Flight (2012) and The Walk (2015).

Silvestri also scored many other popular movies, including Predator (1987), The Abyss (1989), Father of the Bride (1991), The Bodyguard (1992), Eraser (1996), The Parent Trap (1998), Practical Magic (1998), Stuart Little (1999), The Mummy Returns (2001), Lilo & Stitch (2002), Van Helsing (2004), the first three Night at the Museum films, G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra (2009), The A-Team (2010), Ready Player One (2018), and five Marvel Cinematic Universe films: Captain America: The First Avenger (2011), The Avengers (2012), Avengers: Infinity War (2018), Avengers: Endgame (2019) and Avengers: Doomsday (2026). (wikipedia)

• • •

[God-tier candy] 

On most days, after I've fed the cats and gotten some water, I come up here to my office, open the puzzle up, and start stumbling along with my solving without (initially) looking down to see who the constructor is. I don't know how I developed this habit, but I've usually had a stab at the NW corner, at least, before I glance down to see who made the damn puzzle. Sometimes I look down with appreciation, sometimes I look down with anger. Well, disappointment, anyway. So it was very funny (to me) today when I worked my way through the SKA-not-RUM and the "oh that kind of 'anchor'" (DESK) and "omg what was that Lily Tomlin character's name!?!?"-ness of the NW and then hit the first whoosh! (OSCAR PARTY), and then, midway through writing in the second whoosh! ("GENIUS IDEA!") I literally thought "Is this Robyn? This feels like Robyn," looked down, and lol, whaddya know! I love that "GENIUS IDEA!" is the answer that gave it away. Sorry to predictably love another RW joint but she's just on another level and you (I) can feel it. Twelve (12) marquee answers, at least eleven of which are good, and at least half a dozen of which are "hell yeah" good. There's such great voice here. Slanginess, colloquialness, but most of it not at all niche or obscure or strangely worded or otherwise irksome. Just stuff you hear all the time but don't necessarily expect to see in a crossword. "GENIUS IDEA!" "THAT DOES IT!" "PLEASE DON'T GO!" SO BAD IT'S GOOD. Even something as simple as "LET ME KNOW" really sings when it's in a clean grid alongside all these other winners. Someone should solve this in GLITTER PEN, because it deserves it (not sure if that would be legible, but who cares: sparkly pen for a sparkly puzzle!)

Though the puzzle played pretty easy overall (those whooshes really did their job, whooshing me from one section to the next), I did spin my wheels and make a mistake or two, here and there. As I said (above, re: SKA, DESK, EDITH), getting off the ground involved a little effort, and then after a lot of whooshing, on the other side of the grid, after correcting GLITTER GUN to GLITTER PEN (had the GLIT- in place, missed the "prose" part of the clue), I hit 43A: Comforts, and off the "SO-" I wrote in .... SOLACES. Then off that "S" (the second one), I looked at 44D: Lavender or lilac and wrote in SHADE. Wrong-wrong combo! That's never good. I was lucky that my wrong answers absolutely ground me to a halt—wouldn't work with any crosses whatsoever—so I pulled myself out of that mess reasonably quickly, starting with the obvious SEEN (54A: How one might feel at a support group meeting), which changed SHADE to SCENT. The "T" from HASN'T eventually killed SOLACES and got me to SOOTHES, and then I was back on track. 

After fixing SOLACES / SHADE, everything went fine until the very end—the hardest part of the grid, for me—the far north. Three little answers would not allow me to move from the NW into the N. The real killer was PHDS (20A: U.S. senators Warnock and Duckworth, for two). PALS!? No idea. That "H" in PHDS stayed a mystery because ITCHED (5D: Had a hankering?)? No idea! I ITCHED for several days last week but that's because I got triple-stung by a wasp, not because I had a hankering. The fact that the clue on nearby EARS (7D: Sound wave amplifiers) was also inscrutable to me meant that I was essentially in an "Access Denied" situation vis-a-vis the NE, so I ended up having to come at it from the other side, up from below. Luckily, not that hard. Big "D'oh!" when P-DS ended up being PHDS. Tough (for me), but fair. The "U.S." in the clue does fairly signal that the answer will be an abbr. Fridays should involve at least a little struggle. Not enough struggle to make this anything but "Easy," but still, enough crunch to keep the puzzle from being boring-easy.

Bullets:

• 19A: Singer/actress Carrere (TIA) — a name I associate almost exclusively with Wayne's World (1992) but I just looked her up and she has worked constantly in both film and television for the past three decades. Plus she won two Grammys for Best Hawaiian Music Album (!!). TIA is usually clued as Spanish for "aunt," or via the coffee liqueur TIA Maria, but every five years or so, you get Ms. Carrere (her last name has also appeared in the NYTXW, three times, though her full name, never).

• 31A: Drives for money? (TELETHON) — had me wondering if there was such a thing as a GOLF(A)THON.
• 45A: Fairly low-risk investment (AA BOND) — by far my least favorite thing in the grid. Let us not speak of it again.
• 29D: Trial that an attorney may not remember fondly? (LSAT) — don't really get this. I mean, you're an attorney. It's just a reading comprehension and logic test. You must've done OK.  Isn't the bar the really grueling "trial"?
• 31D: Blue ___ (coral reef swimmers like Pixar's Dory) (TANGS) — I never knew "tang" was a fish until I started seeing TANG clued that way in puzzles (which the NYTXW didn't do until 2024!?). 
• 49A: Guard at the gates of Mordor (ORC) — ENTs are good and Mordor is bad so I went with the other three-letter creature from LOTR. A note for those who are occasionally confused: ENDOR is the forest moon where the Ewoks live (Star Wars); MORDOR is the realm of the dark lord Sauron (Lord of the Rings). Hope this helps.

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

[all proceeds go to WFMU, the best listener-supported radio in the whole dang world]

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

P.S. a little Paul Simon for you today ... just because ❤️

  

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Ground-dwelling game bird of the western U.S. / THU 9-10-26 / Portmanteau for a radical environmentalist / Simulator of coastal phenomena / Oldest sister on "The Brady Bunch" / Annoying knuckling / Evidence of burning rubber

Constructor: Simeon Seigel

Relative difficulty: Easy

THEME: missing-letter puns — clues are words/phrases that are missing letters, which factor into the answers as puns:

Theme answers:

• EYES OF BLUE (17A: Per_w_nkle?) (i.e. "i"s in a word meaning "blue")
• EASE OF OPERATION (34A: Proc_dur_?) (i.e. "e"s in a word meaning "operation")
• PEAS IN A POD (51A: Grou_ of _or_oises?) (i.e. "p"s in a phrase meaning "pod")
• USE IN A PINCH (11D: Min_sc_le q_antity?) (i.e. "u"s in a phrase meaning "pinch")
• SEES IN COURT (25D: Pla_e for a _ase?) (i.e. "c"s in a phrase meaning "court")

Word of the Day: SAGEHEN (46A: Ground-dwelling game bird of the western U.S.) —

The greater sage-grouse (Centrocercus urophasianus), also known as the sagehen, is the largest grouse in North America. Its range is sagebrush country in the western United States and southern Alberta and Saskatchewan, Canada. It was known as simply the sage grouse until the Gunnison sage-grouse was recognized as a separate species in 2000. The Mono Basin population of sage grouse may also be distinct.

The greater sage-grouse is a permanent resident in its breeding grounds but may move short distances to lower elevations during winter. It makes use of a complex lek system in mating and nests on the ground under sagebrush or grass patches. It forages on the ground, mainly eating sagebrush but also other plants and insects. Greater sage-grouse do not have a muscular crop and are not able to digest hard seeds like other grouse.

The species is in decline across its range due to habitat loss, and has been recognized as threatened or near threatened by several national and international organizations. (wikipedia)

• • •

Yesterday's puzzle, with its humorless literal explanations of familiar phrases, made me actually wish for puns, so I guess I should be happy today. And I guess I am. A couple of the phrases didn't quite resonate for me—either seemed familiarish but not very evocative of anything (EASE OF OPERATION) or else were not the version of the phrase I'm most familiar with (USE IN A PINCH—I understand the phrase, but "it'll do in a pinch" is the version of the idiom that my brain most readily recognizes. But neither of those answers is wrong, exactly, and the overall theme concept here is clever enough to make for a mildly amusing solving experience. Those letters sound like this, that word or phrase means this, put them together, tada. Not hard, but kind of fun. The A PINCH part of USE IN A PINCH was the only theme-related bit to give me any trouble. I had USE IN ...??? "What means 'minuscule quantity'? SMALL DOSES? Bah." No idea. I also couldn't come up with the second word in WAVE TANK. "WAVE ... simulator!? Come on, brain, what's the word!?" So my progress came to a dead stop at the intersection of USE IN A PINCH and WAVE TANK, but no problem, I just went over to another section and started building off of that. My WAVE TANK highlights an interesting feature of this grid, which is that, with the exception of SYNOPSIS, every single answer over seven letters long in this grid has multiple words: WAVE TANK, TIRE MARK, LOSE HOPE, SLOT INTO, KEEL OVER, MOVIE REEL, AD AGENCY, FESSED UP TO, CLUB FACES; and then of course all the theme stuff. There's also POSE AS and ONE ONE and FOG IN. I don't know that this has any great effect on solving (except my inability to get from word one to word two with WAVE TANK). Maybe it gives the grid a little more bounce? Makes it a little more SASSY? Or maybe it's a meaningless coincidence. It's just statistically weird that (almost) none of your large bank of 8+-letter words is actually a single word.

["I'll give you television / I'll give you EYES OF BLUE..."]

Besides that little WAVE TANK / USE IN A PINCH hiccup, I didn't get held up much today. DAY ONE instead of ONE ONE (which I guess is supposed to represent 1/1, calendar-wise) (27A: New Year's date, concisely). UNWISE before UNWARY (24D: Incautious). Took a bit of work to get POSE AS, since I was looking for a single word (23D: Represent). Also, the SW corner got a little stopped up for me because I couldn't remember the term OUTGAS (specifically the second part of it), and ... ECOTEUR???? Come on, no one says this. This is a term only crosswords could love. If you say ECOTEUR people are going to either say "huh?" or else think you are talking about going on an ECOTOUR, perhaps as an ECOTOURIST (ECOTOURISM being way way way more of a word than ECOTEUR). I watched an episode of "The X-Files" the other day that was all about radical environmentalists in the Pacific Northwest, and they must've said the phrase "environmental terrorist" like a dozen times, but no one said ECOTEUR, I assure you. It's a combination of "eco-" and "saboteur," I guess. Sometimes you have to tell your wordlist "no." Don't let it push you around.

Bullets:

• 10A: Shell in the water (HULL) — I thought the "shell" was a whole boat ... like a "racing shell." I guess the idea here is that the HULL is the ship's "shell?" The HULL is the "frame or body of a ship," so ... "Shell," OK. 
• 41A: Abstract (SYNOPSIS) — this clue was troublesomely vague. Really wanted the adjectival meaning of "Abstract" here, but instead we get the noun: "a statement summarizing the important points of a text."
• 57A: Leaves for drinks (TEAS) — this just looks like a theme idea that didn't get used. [Un_es_ed?] = GREEN TEAS. Something like that.
• 45A: Bad spelling, perhaps (CURSE) — if there was one thing that was kind of tiresome about the cluing today, it was the repeated reliance on these old, worn-out misdirection chestnuts. "Bad spell" (or some other "spell" fakeout) meant to evoke either the spelling of a word, or, in other contexts, a period of time—a well-worn way of coming at HEX or CURSE or the like. The idea that you search for ORE "in vein," same thing (3D: Something you might search for in vein?)—pun as old as time. And in case you were looking for more of the Misdirection's Greatest Hits, we've also got one of the all-timers: "pitching" related to advertising (36D: Pitching staff? = AD AGENCY). Looks like baseball, actually about ADMEN. Ad infinitum. For as long as I've been solving.
• 13D: Pipe organ? (LUNG) — this is much more clever and original wordplay than anything I mentioned in the last bullet point. The "pipe" here is your trachea (or "windpipe"), and the "organ" that moves air through that "pipe" when you breathe is your LUNG (LUNGS, plural, if you're lucky). I also like that the clue here is (on a literal level) musical, considering that "pipes" is a term for a person's singing voice. Anatomical and musical resonance. Nice.

• 52D: Remote power source (AAA) — mild trickery. Seems like "remote" might mean "far away" but it's short for "remote control," which often takes AAA batteries (mine take AA, I think, but that's neither here nor there). 
• 32D: Rotating feature at the cinema (MOVIE REEL) — not most cinemas, not any more. Most movies are now projected digitally. Some rep theaters show movies primarily or exclusively on film, which requires film reels, but that's certainly no longer the standard: "virtually all global movie theaters have converted their screens to digital cinemas" (wikipedia).
• 53D: Completely savage (PAN) — another part-of-speech misdirection. Did not expect "savage" to be a verb.

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

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

P.S. Alice Jane Morgan (a resident of Ann Arbor—Go Blue!) interviewed me recently for her newsletter, "Act III with Alice," which is all about "midlife reinvention." I haven't "reinvented" anything about myself in decades, lol, but I am, roughly, in the "midlife" stage of my life, so it's not a terrible fit. Anyway, the interview came out nice. You can read it here.  

Also:

[all proceeds go to WFMU, the best listener-supported radio in the whole dang world]

[Follow Rex Parker on BlueSky and Facebook and Letterboxd]
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"OK," in modern slang / WED 9-9-26 / Character in "Monsters, Inc." / Equatorial ocean area notorious for lack of winds / Top starter / Creature of Egyptian myth / Bosun's whistled call signaling a shift change / Flattened against the masts in a changing wind / Part of many a shallow-water ecosystem / Plow puller of old / Jailed New York crime boss / Sicilian smoker / Old-timey "Listen!" / Roman theaters / Fiddler-emperor, legend has it

Constructor: Dario Salvucci

Relative difficulty: Medium

[15A: Ewok's home = ENDOR]

THEME: AT SEA (41A: Completely lost ... or where the now-idiomatic answer to each italicized clue has a literal meaning) — now-idiomatic expressions that (apparently) originated AT SEA:

Theme answers:

• LOOSE CANNON (18A: Unsecured artillery that can slide across the deck)
• THE DOLDRUMS (64A: Equatorial ocean area notorious for lack of winds)
• TOE THE LINE (3D: Stand barefoot in formation along seams of deck planks)
• TIDE OVER (21D: Drift with the natural flow of currents)
• PIPE DOWN (27D: Bosun's whistled call signaling a shift change)
• TAKEN ABACK (32D: Flattened against the masts in a changing wind)

Word of the Day: THE DOLDRUMS (64A) —

[from The Phantom Tollbooth, illus. Jules Feiffer]

noun

(used with a plural verb)

1. a state of inactivity or stagnation, as in business or art.

   August is a time of doldrums for many enterprises.

2. the doldrums,

   1. a belt of calms and light baffling winds north of the equator between the northern and southern trade winds in the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.

   2. the weather prevailing in this area.

3. a dull, listless, depressed mood; low spirits. (dictionary.com)

2. 
   

• • •

Well I definitely was AT SEA for much of this puzzle. I could not figure out what the (long, descriptive) clues were doing. I thought maybe they were trying to be funny—taking a familiar phrase and imagining it as literal (see LOOSE CANNON); but no, turns out the joke (or, non-joke) is on me, as the clues were doing precisely the opposite—they explain the literal meaning behind the idiomatic phrase. Combine the fact that I don't really have any interest in things nautical with a cluing concept that's didactic and completely humorless (by design), and the result is me not having that great of a time. I am impressed that there are this many such phrases, and that they fit in the grid in any kind of symmetrical order, and I'm impressed with how many are crammed in here. But the experience of solving was disorienting. I felt off. Faintly seasick. The theme never clicked for me, largely because I did not fully read the (long, descriptive) part of the revealer clue that followed [Completely lost], and even if I had, I don't know how much help it would've been.  Boring clues, vaguely sea-related—that's what I got. The phrases themselves were interesting, for sure—they make for really good fill, mostly. But the way the theme was executed, this was too much like being lectured to ("did you know...?") and not enough like being entertained.

Perhaps because of the theme density, the fill gets kind of ugly in places, notably the ODEA / REDD / EKED patch, but mostly it holds up. I had real trouble right out of the gate in the NW. Missed on 1A: "OK," in modern slang ("BET") (I had "DEF"), I had no idea what was meant by 17A: Top starter (ACE) ("oh, baseball") (I was looking for a word or prefix that could precede "Top," I think), and 1D: Has a happy face (BEAMS) had me thinking only GRINS. Total wipeout. Something similar happened in the SW, where I absolutely could not get THE DOLDRUMS from the clue ("THE ... COLD RUMS??"), and so had trouble with much of the surrounding fill. Thought 52A: Part of many a shallow-water ecosystem (REEF) was a REED. Couldn't get COMMA from just the "A" or HOIST from just the "T", so had to go into the far SW corner with no help from crosses to try to work it out, and the first thing I did was write in SCAR at 57D: Bite reminder, maybe (ITCH). So, not a dog bite, but a bug bite. Very last square was the "D" in DMS / DOLDRUMS. I wanted IMS before DMS (65D: Personally contacts online, for short) but that gave me the THE IOL DRUMS, which is intriguingly close to THE OIL DRUMS, but ... whatever, the "D" is what worked. It's weird—I know what THE DOLDRUMS are, and I knew they originally had to do with places of dead calm at sea, but I just couldn't see the phrase today at all. I learned the term young, from The Phantom Tollbooth. But it just wouldn't rise to the surface today, not as clued. Couldn't parse it. 

Bullets:

• 24A: Creature of Egyptian myth (SPHINX) — this probably should've been easy, but I think of the SPHINX as a statue, not an actual "creature of myth," so my brain couldn't get past, like, SCARAB beetle.
• 35A: Plow puller of old (MULE) — I wrote in OXEN. Which is plural. Whereas the clue is singular. Sigh. 
• 54A: Music genre for some yoga classes (NEW AGE) — I always appreciated the classes where they played real music (actual rock/pop/jazz/blues/country songs one might now). Or better yet, no music. There's something too ... on-the-nose about NEW AGE music in yoga class. Like the music's trying too hard to convince me something cosmic is happening.

• 68A: Character in "Monsters, Inc." (COMMA) — in case it wasn't entirely clear, "Character" is referring to the literal COMMA that is literally in the title, Monsters, Inc.
• 11D: "Sofa, so good" and such (PUNS) — is that a pun? Who says "So-FAH"? "Sofa so good" is something I might non-punnily say when I hit the couch after a long day at work and I no longer feel like using energy to form complete sentences.
• 55D: Jailed New York crime boss (GOTTI) — "Jailed?" More like "Dead for 24 years." But sure, before that, "jailed" I think it's safe to say his general fame is fading, but his crossword fame isn't. That's what happens when your name has such strong grid usefulness. Five letters, four of them common, terminal "I"—that guy's not going anywhere (28 NYTXW appearances, 27 of them following his death in 2002).

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

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[all proceeds go to WFMU, the best listener-supported radio in the whole dang world]

[Follow Rex Parker on BlueSky and Facebook and Letterboxd]
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Prized gem in Chinese culture / TUE 9-8-26 / Energy-carrying chemical found in all living things, in brief / French cosmetics company founded in 1909 / Hawaiian bird with a reduplicative name / Acidic ingredient in Guacamole / 2014 nonfiction best seller subtitled "A Brief History of Humankind"

Constructor: Sunny Maharjan

Relative difficulty: easiest Tuesday I've ever done? possibly

THEME: WALGREENS (37A: CVS rival ... or a phonetic hint to the answers on the this puzzle's perimeter) — answers along the perimeter (or "walls") are all shades of "green":

The "Wall" of "Greens":

• JADE (1A: Prized gem in Chinese culture)
• PINE (5A: Long (for))
• SAGE (9A: Wise one)
• EMERALD (12D: May birthstone)
• FOREST (52D: Not see the ___ for the trees)
• MINT (70A: Money maker)
• LIME (69A: Acidic ingredient in Guacamole)
• MOSS (68A: Stuff growing on a tree trunk)
• SEA FOAM (40D: Froth seen at the beach)
• JUNGLE (1D: Jaguar's home)

Word of the Day: ATP (53A: Energy-carrying chemical found in all living things, in brief) —

Adenosine triphosphate (ATP) is a nucleoside triphosphate that provides free energy of approximately 58 kJ/mol (0.6 eV) to drive and support many processes in living cells, such as muscle contraction, nerve impulse propagation, and chemical synthesis. Found in all known forms of life, it is often referred to as the "molecular unit of currency" for intracellular energy transfer.

When consumed in a metabolic process, ATP converts either to adenosine diphosphate (ADP) or to adenosine monophosphate (AMP). Other processes, such as oxidative phosphorylation or substrate-level phosphorylation, regenerate ATP. ATP is also a precursor to DNA and RNA, and is used as a coenzyme. Daily, an average adult human recycles through synthesis and hydrolysis around 50 kilograms of ATP (about 100 moles).

From the perspective of biochemistry, ATP is classified as a nucleoside triphosphate, which indicates that it consists of three components: a nitrogenous base (adenine), the sugar ribose, and the triphosphate. (wikipedia)

• • •

Conceptually, this is fine. The whole perimeter-answer conceit is an old one (here's a much more elaborate one from Liz Gorski in 2013, for example), but apparently there's still more juice in it. A little, anyway. The problem with a puzzle like this, and this puzzle in particular, is that none of those themers are noteworthy or unusual. They have no theme pop or sizzle. They are just regular answers, clued exceedingly regularly, and most of them just four letters long. Outside the theme, there's nothing to make up for this lack of longer answers—well, two rather ordinary 8s (PEDESTAL, ENSHRINE), but nothing to give the grid some life or make the solve at all entertaining. No attempt has been made to do anything interesting with the theme clues. All of them—plain as a paper plate. And why are only three of the themers clued as non-green things (MINT as building; SAGE as wise one; PINE as long (for))??? Might've been (much) better if all those clues had tried to move away from green, so at least ... I don't know, maybe there's been some kind of aha with the revealer? The editors really let this puzzle down, I think. It's hard to care about a theme that looks like corporate sponsorship (in this case, an ad for WALGREENS), but I do think this puzzle might've been executed in a way that was at least a little more thoughtful and clever. The relatively straightforwardness of it all—and the fact that the themers are all disguised as plain answers (I solved the whole thing without even noticing that WALGREENS was a revealer)—meant that this was the easiest Tuesday I've ever solved. Twice as easy as yesterday's puzzle. I hesitated not once. Ever. Oh, I kinda hesitated over how to spell "ARGH!," and I misread 56A: Pompadour or pigtails as [Pompadour of pigtails], and that definitely made me pause in wonder for a second, but otherwise, I looked at clue and wrote in answer, over and over and over, non-stop. ATP is the only thing that would've tripped me, but that "P" was the very last thing I filled, and I knew SAPIENS (42D: 2014 nonfiction best seller subtitled "A Brief History of Humankind"). IN SUM: Very easy, disappointingly dull.

The clues don't even seem to be trying today. In any way. It's like *they're* bored. Nine (9!?!?) fill-in-the-blank answers??? What are we doing here? Is there even a single "?" clue? I'm usually not begging for those, but when the puzzle is giving you *nothing*, you miss even the bad attempts at trickiness. Show me one clever or even playfully written clue in this puzzle! It's kind of scary, actually. This is the first puzzle I've solved where I think a bot could've written these clues. They all look like stock clues from prior puzzles. Every. Last. One of them. The fill quality is OK, but only OK, and occasionally runs toward the unfortunate and olden (IDES, NENE, NIN ... ETCH-A!? Oof, put that thing in the Terrible Partial Hall of Fame) (fifth appearance all time for ETCH-A—the first few times, the puzzles at least seemed to be tricky or late-week puzzles, where you could maybe excuse a clanker like that, but the last two appearances, have been on Monday and Tuesday—there's really no excuse for an early-week grid to have something that bad in it). It's hard to talk about the fill I really liked in this puzzle because it's all rather plain. PEDESTAL and ENSHRINE are the clear highlights, both for being the longest answers, and for not just being symmetrical, but seeming like a real pair—they're both about elevating and honoring. A nice accidental pairing that has at least as much coherence and thematic oomph as the putative theme of this puzzle does.

Bullets:

• 18A: Actress Judi with an Oscar and a Tony (DENCH) — Have you watched Tea with Judi DENCH!? I haven't, but I have seen clips from the show on Instagram and every single one with Ian McKellen is charming, moving, hilarious. Those two are close friends and you can tell. Here's a clip of Dench showing McKellen her actual Oscar:

• 42D: 2014 nonfiction best seller subtitled "A Brief History of Humankind" (SAPIENS) — I got tripped up on this exact clue some years ago, as I'd never heard of the book. I have now heard of the book, so ... no more tripping. I wish I had more interesting things to say about the fill in this puzzle but it is Truly Giving Me Nothing.
• 25D: "This one's on me!" ("MY TREAT!") — this puzzle was not a treat, but I have to give credit to this answer, which stands proudly between PEDESTAL and ENSHRINE, desperately trying to liven up the party. Nice try, buddy. Maybe next time.

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

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[all proceeds go to WFMU, the best listener-supported radio in the whole dang world]

[Follow Rex Parker on BlueSky and Facebook and Letterboxd]
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Handbag fashion label from Madrid / MON 9-7-26 / Grammy-winning pianist with the Elektric Band / Playful knock on the noggin / Uplifting tunes? / Robes tied with obis / Dive offering slices / Kiss, symbolically / Dominate, in sports slang / Ukrainian seaport, in an older spelling

Constructor: Jeff Chen and Stephan Prock

Relative difficulty: Challenging (solved Downs-only)

THEME: ELEVATOR MUSIC (15D: Uplifting tunes? ... or a hint to the circled squares) — music genres "hidden" inside theme answers (in circled squares) go both up and down ... like an elevator:

Theme answers:

• ALL ATINGLE (3D: Electric with excitement) (Latin (going down...))
• CHICK COREA (29D: Grammy-winning pianist with the Elektric Band) (Rock (going up...))
• ERRAND BOYS (7D: Some gofers) (R&B (going down...))
• PIZZA JOINT (32D: Dive offering slices) (Jazz (going up...))

Word of the Day: CHICK COREA (29D) —

Armando Anthony "Chick" Corea (June 12, 1941 – February 9, 2021) was an American jazz pianist, composer, bandleader, and occasional percussionist. His compositions "Spain", "500 Miles High", "La Fiesta", "Armando's Rhumba", and "Windows" are considered jazz standards.

As a member of the Miles Davis band in the late 1960s, Corea participated in the birth of jazz fusion. In the 1970s he formed Return to Forever. Along with McCoy Tyner, Herbie Hancock and Keith Jarrett, Corea is considered one of the foremost pianists of the post-John Coltrane era.

Corea continued to collaborate frequently while exploring different musical styles throughout the 1980s and 1990s. He won 29 Grammy Awards and has been nominated for the award 79 times. (wikipedia)

• • •

The music goes up. The music goes down. It makes a kind of sense. But you don't turn upside-down when you ride the elevator down. The whole idea of inversion doesn't quite seem to fit the metaphor, somehow. But I guess if you just think of the phrase "going up," or "going down," then sure, it works. The music genres are an arbitrary set, but they are all major. The genres all break across both parts of two-word answers. It's all very competent. I don't know why it didn't do more for me. Maybe it's the fact that outside of the themers, the fill was only so-so. Or the fact I've never ever heard of a LOEWE handbag (I had PRADA there for a while, even though I was pretty sure PRADA was Italian, not Spanish ... not that LOEWE sounds all that Spanish to my ears). Maybe it's the slight datedness of ALL ATINGLE and the extreme datedness of ERRAND BOYS. And maybe it's (also?) because the puzzle seems wildly misplaced on a Monday. This feels much more like a Tuesday or even a Wednesday concept. Granted, solving it Downs-only made it much harder than it would've been otherwise. It's often harder Downs-only, but when the themers are themselves Downs, then it's even harder. Easy to infer long theme answers by crossing them with shorter stuff—much harder to get longer theme answers with absolutely no help from crosses. And the clues on the themers were, in most cases, very little help. That clue on CHICK COREA, yeesh. I know who he is ,but "the Elektric Band" did nothing to help me down the number of famous pianists I know. I think this is a pretty good puzzle, but I also think I probably would've been more warmly disposed toward it if I'd solved it on a Tuesday or Wednesday (with appropriately toughened clues, if that were required). 

EVADE and FERNS had me completely wrecked in the NW to start (1D: Deftly avoid = ELUDE; 2D: Plants with tendrils = VINES). I got all the shorter Downs across the upper middle, but it didn't help me much. Then there was the LOEWE I didn't know, so that made traction bad there. I wasn't able to infer a single Across answer until I was way on the other side of the grid—with DIM, ARIA, and SETH in place, I looked at the last themer (32D: Dive offering slices) and figured it probably started with PIZZA. Wrote that in, noticed that all the crosses worked, then noticed that the circled letters were "ZZA-" and figured the next one had to be "J"—so, JOINT. PIZZA JOINT. At that point, I could see that either music *or* NBA teams were going to be going backwards inside the themers. Or so I thought. Ugh. I wanted ERRAND BOYS but of course "BDNAR" is not a thing, so I rejected it. It took me way too long to realize that "BDNAR" was actually RANDB, i.e. R&B, the music genre, and so a. I was dealing with music genres, not NBA teams, and b. those music genres were only going backward some (half) of the time. Actually, the second themer I got was CHICK COREA, entirely because the SW corner was so easy that I was able to infer the -REA part, making the pianist suddenly obvious. ALL ATINGLE was the last thing I got and by far the hardest. Even once I'd figured out / guessed LATIN was the music genre, I stared at "--LATIN---" for a while, wondering what word that could possibly make. Answer: two words! 

Bullets:

• 65D: Kisses, symbolically (XES) — wrote in XXX and wondered where in the world ODEXSA might be.
• 60D: One of 26 in a marathon (MILE) — isn't it 26.2? Yes. Yes it is. I see people with boastful 26.2 stickers on their cars, that's how I know. Actually, I think I just know it. And actually, technically, it's not 26.2 miles, it's...

[Not sure why "Miles" is capitalized, or why it's not pluralized. Search engine results! They've come so far ...]

• 12D: Divisions in a tennis match (SETS) — I don't have much else to say about this puzzle, plus there is some horrible ongoing organized shout-chanting going on somewhere in my neighborhood, as well as fireworks (???) so I think I'm going to go watch the U.S. Open now, if only to put something else in my earhole. Since when did Labor Day become a fireworks holiday!? 

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

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

 

[Follow Rex Parker on BlueSky and Facebook and Letterboxd]
=============================
❤️ Support this blog ❤️: 

• Venmo (@MichaelDavidSharp)]

=============================
✏️Upcoming Crossword Events✏️:

• NEW! Words Are For Crossing—a WFMU Crossword Meet-Up (Jersey City, NJ, Thur., Sep. 17, 2026)
• Midwest Crossword Tournament (Chicago, IL, Sat., Oct. 3, 2026)

=============================
📘 My other blog 📘:

• Pop Sensation (vintage paperbacks)

Read more...