Rap group with the 1992 #1 hit "Rump Shaker" / SAT 10-31-26 / F in physics / Canadian coin, informally / Opera with the shepherd's song "Io de' sospiri" / Schöningen ___, German mine discoveries that may be up to 300,000 years old / Surgical tool with a namesake medical journal / Count on one's fingers?

Constructor: Erik Agard and Brendan Emmett Quigley

Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium

THEME: none 

Word of the Day: Schöningen SPEARS (46A: Schöningen ___, German mine discoveries that may be up to 300,000 years old) —

The Schöningen spears are a set of ten Palaeolithic wooden weapons that were excavated between 1994 and 1999 from the 'Spear Horizon' in the open-cast lignite mine in Schöningen, Helmstedt district, Germany. The spears are among the oldest hunting weapons yet discovered and were found together with animal bones and stone and bone tools. Being used by the oldest known group of human hunters, they provided unique proof that early human ancestors were much closer to modern humans in both complex social structure and technical ability than thought previously. [...] thermoluminescence dating of heated flints in a deposit beneath that which contained the spears, dates the spears to between 337,000 and 300,000 years old, placing them at the end of the interglacial Marine Isotope Stage (MIS) 9, and recent scholarship has tended to support an MIS 9 date for the spears. However, a 2025 study suggested an even younger age of approximately 200,000 years ago, and manufacture by Neanderthals. The Schöningen spears are the oldest complete wooden weapons and, along with the incomplete British Clacton spear point, among the oldest known worked wooden implements. // The spears were constructed from Norway spruce as well as pine. They are suggested to have been used both as throwing weapons, as well as thrusting spears for personal defense. // To date, hominin remains have not been discovered from the Schöningen Pleistocene deposits and, therefore, the species that crafted and used the wooden weapons and other tools at Schöningen remains uncertain. (wikipedia)

• • •

"I DON'T BITE"—nice way for a Saturday puzzle to open (14A: "No need to worry around me"). Do I trust you, puzzle? I do not. But I appreciate the warmISH welcome (also, "I DON'T BITE" is just a great standalone phrase). Turns out, though, that the puzzle's claims about itself were largely truthful. I waded in with trepidation, the puzzle, seeming to sense that trepidation, said "I DON'T BITE," and then almost immediately thereafter I found out that yes, compared to many other Saturday puzzles I've done, this one was going to be a TOTAL SWEETHEART (3D: That's a good one!). A bright long answer that seems to confirm the claims of an earlier answer? Amazing. So amazing that I only choked on RATES A TEN for a second or two instead of my customary all-puzzle-long (1A: Couldn't get any higher?). You ever EAT A SANDWICH that RATES A TEN? Peak human experience. Oh man I want a 10 sandwich now (it's currently 4:51am, so I'm gonna have to wait). I came shooting out of the NW on the wings of TOTAL SWEETHEART and while things stayed interesting and occasionally challenging throughout, it's true, the puzzle didn't bite. It did playfully nip at me, though, in the middle of the puzzle, but that's just because it was having fun with me—I literally laughed out loud when I realized I was gonna have to spell WRECKX-N-EFFECT for this puzzle (29A: Rap group with the 1992 #1 hit "Rump Shaker"). Straight out of a Gen X spelling bee nightmare, that one. To my enormous pop cultural credit, I made just one mistake on the first pass: WRECKS-N-EFFECT. But the "X"! Of course the "X," there had to be an "X," I knew the spelling got wild somewhere. One thing I love in a puzzle, besides non-biting, is good music. Something to set the mood, get in your head, provide accompaniment for your solving journey. This puzzle gives you options. In one room, you've got your choice of TOSCA or John LENNON. In the main room, however...

[Hope you weren't REKT by this answer (Quite a week for variant spellings of "wreck") (see 3D, here)]

This one had great flow and it stayed fun throughout. There's crosswordese around the edges, here and there, but well below maximum tolerance levels—I got no problem with a stray ORC ÊTES or STAT or TSAR or Slammin' Sammy SNEAD or even a RIATA/TIARA combo as long as the marquee answer are plentiful and lit up like this. You've got the oratorical flair of Jesse with "KEEP HOPE ALIVE" and the cocksure certainty of "IT'S NOT EVEN CLOSE," a host of other solid answers, and really very little in the way of garbage. The clues weren't quite as playful as they were yesterday, but I liked the way this one played a teeny bit better, which may be because yesterday's puzzle was just too easy. This one to me felt like a proper Friday ... so difficulty basically dropped a notch for both the F and Sat puzzles, leaving Saturday as the only late-week puzzle putting up a proper fight. 

Never got stuck anywhere in this puzzle once I got out of the NW. Changing that "S" to an "X" in WRECKX-N-EFFECT was easy, and then ... I dunno, I'm not seeing any sticking points. I wrote in TREASURE CHEST before TREASURE TROVE, but again, that was an easy fix—via the very nicely clued FIVE (33D: Count on one's fingers?). It took me a while to accede to CRAFT, which didn't feel like a very precise answer to 41D: Mastery. You master your CRAFT, but is CRAFT itself "Mastery"? Apparently yes, but my brain doesn't like it. I sure as heck didn't know the German cave SPEARS, but again, the crosses were kind. I know a fellow Upstate NY crossword person who plays CARILLON —or although I may be thinking of the Cornell Chimes, which are not (I'm sternly told) a CARILLON, as a "true carillon has at least 23 bells, and a different playing console" (wikipedia). Anyway, knowing that instrument helped a bunch in the SE. The clue on MAIL threw me (10A: Stamp collector?) but everything around it just sorta filled itself in, and I finished up MAIL (and the whole puzzle) by writing in the "L" in LICORICE without ever even seeing the LICORICE clue. So, in the end, as promised, no biting, TOTAL SWEETHEART.

Bullets:

• 42D: F in physics (FARAD) — woo hoo, remembered this despite having absolutely no memory of what a FARAD actually is. "The farad (symbol: F) is the unit of electrical capacitance, the ability of a body to store an electrical charge, in the International System of Units (SI), equivalent to 1 coulomb per volt (C/V). It is named after the English physicist Michael Faraday (1791–1867)." (wikipedia)
• 39D: Canadian coin, informally (TOONIE) — well it's either gonna be the LOONIE or the TOONIE (the $1 and $2 Canadian coins, respectively). "Two" + "Loonie" = TOONIE. Portmanteau! (which, coincidentally, is the name of their never-minted $3 coin, as well as a small town on Lake Winnipeg)
• 23D: "Boulevard des Capucines" painter (MONET) — I'd like to thank EON for clearing up any possible MONET/MANET confusion here. Did you know there are two MONET paintings with this title? (both from 1873-74).  It's true. And they're really different. I think I prefer the grayish one better, but I'd have to see them in person to really know. "Capucines" = nasturtiums, and not, as I thought, monkeys (those are "capuchins").

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

Signed, Rex (-N-EFFECT) Parker, King of CrossWorld

P.S.

P.P.S. 😎 

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2019 film co-starring Taylor Swift as Bombalurina / FRI 10-30-26 / Hindu god with three eyes / Monitors for accuracy, just because / Cover-up in an old detective film? / Macronutrient group? / Tony-winning actress Stroker / Cordless heaters that you might order cords for? / Result of keeping a lid on too long / Trees whose nuts and leaves are toxic to humans / Classic potluck dish

Constructor: Robyn Weintraub and Rafael Musa

Relative difficulty: Easy

THEME: none 

Word of the Day: mirepoix (30A: Like the ingredients in a French chef's mirepoix) —

A mirepoix (/mɪərˈpwɑː/ meer-PWAH, French: [miʁ.pwa]) is a mixture of diced vegetables cooked with fat (usually butter) for a long time on low heat without colouring or browning. The ingredients are not sautéed or otherwise hard-cooked, because the intention is to sweeten rather than caramelise them. Historically including various meats before settling at its current meaning as a vegetable base, mirepoix is a long-standing part of French cuisine and is the flavour base for a wide variety of dishes, including stocks, soups, stews, and sauces.

When the mirepoix is not precooked, the constituent vegetables may be cut to a larger size, depending on the overall cooking time for the dish. Usually the vegetable mixture is onions, carrots, and celery (either common 'Pascal' celery or celeriac), with the traditional ratio being 2:1:1—two parts onion, one part carrot, and one part celery.^[1][2] Further cooking, with the addition of tomato purée, creates a darkened brown mixture called pinçage. (wikipedia

• • •

Easy and beautiful with whoosh-whoosh and zoom-zoom galore. Coming out of the NW, however, I was not at all certain that this would be my experience. It's a throwaway corner, true, but it definitely felt thrown away, with overly common and vowely AERO EON and esp. AEIOU all in a tiny amount of space. I'm almost certain I've seen that exact AEIOU clue before, too (2D: Macronutrient group?) (yes ... [Macronutrient grouping?] appeared in 2024). So I had this moment of "What Is Happening!?" but then came the cavalry—a cavalcade of fresh long answer after fresh long answer, with frequently SASsy clues and very little to make you (me) wince the rest of the way. That NW corner ended up feeling like the slow climb up a rollercoaster arc before you're sent careening down the other side, or like a catapult being pulled back before it sends you hurtling through space. I mean, when a guy in a TRENCHCOAT shows up, I know things are about to get good (3D: Cover-up in an old detective film?). That guy is probably gonna be hard to KEEP(S) HONEST; he's probably gonna BEND THE RULES a little, but you hired him for a reason—he gets the job done. He's as comfortable in DONUT SHOPS (47A: "Hole-sale" outlets?) as he is in HOTEL SUITEs as he is on the SEASHORE(S), and somehow always manages to look ruggedly handsome—his fedora doesn't even give him HAT HEAD (40A: Result of keeping a lid on too long). So don't worry—no matter who he HURTS, not matter how many people IN POWER he has to ruffle, he'll find your stolen PAPERS. In fact, he'll probably find them so fast you'll be saying "BACK SO SOON?" (you know, when he drives back to your mansion, where you hired him in the first place) (21A: "Didn't we just say goodbye?"). In short, this was the best hardboiled detective story I've read all year. Also a good puzzle. The longer answers aren't always flashy, but they are smooth and familiar and charming and they were mostly clued in a playfully Friday way. It was over too quickly, but it was very enjoyable.

["All the cops in the DONUT SHOPS say..."]

One other very noticeable, and largely welcome, aspect of this puzzle is how little it leaned on names and popular culture. It's a very accessible puzzle that way, with a wide range of answers and no obvious generational bias—though it does lean a little bit into the contemporary musical environment with a Billie Eilish song and a Wicked song and a much-maligned feline musical remake. I went from "how should I know..." to "omg it's CATS!" pretty quickly there at 1A: 2019 film co-starring Taylor Swift as Bombalurina. Surprised she'd want a role that had both "bomb" and most of "urine" in it, but she's an artist, you never know what era she'll be in next! My greatest pop cultural success today was pulling ALI Stroker's name from ... god knows where (35A: Tony-winning actress Stroker). I think there's a bucket of ALIs in my head and she is one of them. There's an ALY in there too that I sometimes grab by mistake (that ALY is [Gymnast Raisman], btw). So apparently you can in fact build new crosswordese reflexes later in life. I saw "Stroker" and my brain immediately went "That's ALI" and I said "wait, how do you kn-?" and my brain was like "just write it in and keep going. You'll see." And damned if he wasn't right. ALI Stroker won her Tony for her performance in the 2019 revival of Oklahoma!:

Alyson Mackenzie Stroker (born June 16, 1987) is an American actress, author and singer. She is the first actor who uses a wheelchair to appear on a Broadway stage, and also the first to be nominated for and win a Tony Award. Stroker was a finalist on the second season of The Glee Project in 2012 and later appeared as a guest star on Glee in 2013. She played Anna in Deaf West Theatre's 2015 revival of Spring Awakening and won the 2019 Tony Award for Best Featured Actress in a Musical for her performance in Oklahoma!.

Bullets:

• 18A: Aid in evaluating some calls (SLOW MOTION) — "calls" made by referees or umpires
• 9D: They're at least 170 times hotter than Tabasco sauce (GHOST PEPPERS) — the Halloween vibes continue this week...

• 10D: Common fix for a problem? (AUTOCORRECT) — I don't get what the clue is doing. It just seems literal to me, so I don't know why there's a "?" on it. Oh ... LOL OK ... you got me, puzzle. I'm just now realizing that I have been mentally AUTOCORRECTing that clue this whole time. It's not [Common fix for a problem?]—it's [Common fix for a prolbem?], with "problem" misspelled. I finished this puzzle over an hour ago and it's still paying surprise dividends!
• 13D: Grp. of nine, divided in three? (SSN) — XXX-XX-XXXX. Three parts, not three equal parts.
• 27D: Cordless heaters that you might order cords for? (WOOD STOVES) — in case corny humor is not really your thing, here's some cordy humor for you. A "cord" is a unit of volume for stacked wood measuring 4 ft x 8 ft x 4 ft. 

• 48D: Eponym of the company that marketed the first escalator (OTIS) — man that guy really liked to go up and down, didn't he? (longtime solvers know OTIS well as the elevator guy) (actually, Elisha Otis himself (1811-61) was long dead before his eponymous company marketed the first escalator (1899)).

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

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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Totally destroyed, in gamer-speak / THU 10-29-26 / Chat follower / Um, two bases for paint / "In summary ...," in internet shorthand / Drunk, in modern slang / Crocodile in a classic children's book / Fried bites for the Festival of Lights / Modern-day aid for a data job, maybe / Ape-man's introduction

Constructor: Sam Ezersky

Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium

THEME: filler — familiar phrases are clued (and punctuated, with visible commas) as if the opening words were filler:

Theme answers:

• LIKE, OIL AND WATER (17A: Um, two bases for paint)
• I MEAN, BUSINESS (24A: An, uh, expensive air passenger class)
• WELL, CONNECTED (43A: Another way to say, er, "online")
• YOU KNOW, THE DRILL (55A: It's ... (what am I trying to say?) ... it's what my dentist uses)

Word of the Day: filler (see ... all the theme answers) —

In linguistics, a filler, filled pause, hesitation marker or planner is a sound or word that participants in a conversation use to signal that they are pausing to think but are not finished speaking. These are not to be confused with placeholder names, such as thingamajig. Fillers fall into the category of formulaic language, and different languages have different characteristic filler sounds. [...] Every conversation involves turn-taking, and speakers need to signal whether they are yielding the turn or want to keep going. Pauses are common in both cases, but to avoid confusion, speakers wanting to continue commonly use fillers, such as um, er, or uh. // Beyond conveying "I still want to talk", fillers can also convey more: whether the speaker is just trying to find the right word or is struggling to formulate his/her thought at a deeper level. "Uh" is more common in the former, and "um" in the latter. However fillers are often more complex, conveying many nuances of meaning and doing so through subtle variation, both prosodic and phonetic, such that many fillers are sound combinations, rather than words. [...] In American English, the most common filler sounds are uh /ʌ/, ah /ɑː/, and um /ʌm/. In British English, the equivalents are er /ɜː/ and erm /ɜːm/. Among younger speakers, the fillers "like", "you know", "I mean", "okay", "so", "actually", "basically", and "right?" are among the more prevalent. (wikipedia)

• • •

I'd file this under "Conceptually Interesting" as well as "Formally Innovative" (for once, I actually like the addition of extra crap—here, the commas—to the grid), but only one of these themers really landed for me: the last one ("YOU KNOW, THE DRILL"). It's the only one that made me laugh, and the only one where the clue was really able to create a plausible context where I could hear someone saying it, as punctuated. "LIKE, OIL AND WATER" gets close, but "I MEAN, BUSINESS" and "WELL, CONNECTED" don't really pass the ear test. Beyond that, I don't have much to say about the theme—bold idea, but only semi-successful execution. One other thing: it's a very minor stylistic issue, but I don't understand why the theme clues aren't offered in quotation marks, since the answers—the whole concept—is based on a phenomenon of speech. Like, you're representing how people might say these words. They're imagined quotations. Somehow feels like the clues should be quotes. But now I'm noticing that the clues aren't exactly equivalents of the answer phrases, but regular clues with an added filler word (or phrase). Without the filler words, the clues are just ... clues, e.g. [Another way to say "online"] is CONNECTED. But another way to say "er, online" is "WELL, CONNECTED." The filler word is also aptly placed in the first theme clue: 17A: Um, two bases for paint—the answer is just an equivalent of "um" and then literally two bases for paint. I don't know why the "Uh" in 24A: An, uh, expensive air passenger class isn't at the front of the clue, since "I MEAN" is at the front of the answer, but I guess they just wanted to vary the filler placement in the clues. I'm realizing now that the reason the last themer felt like the best themer is because the clue felt most like a human being talking, particularly because of the first-person pronouns (55A: It's ... (what am I trying to say?) ... it's what my dentist uses). The others are just dryish clues with filler thrown in—human voice, not achieved. Annnnyway, this almost half-worked for me. E for effort, at any rate.

F, though, I'm afraid, for the desperate attempt to sound like one of the cool kids. Which is to say, the puzzle is trying way too hard with the slang (some of which already feels dated to me). REKT and TURNT??? I'll give you TL;DR (53D: "In summary ...," in internet shorthand); it's got legs and has currency beyond any one particular niche group or generation, but REKT (3D: Totally destroyed, in gamer-speak) and TURNT felt cringe. Even cringer, but for a different reason, was EX-DA, oof and ugh, what crossword graveyard did you exhume that from? Hmm, looks like a crossword graveyard from 2017 (the only other appearance of this "word"). That time, it appeared on a Saturday, where I'd be much more likely to give it leeway. Did I give it leeway? Hang on. . . wow, I didn't comment on it at all, perhaps because there was so much else to be mad about (OSTERIA, ON THE UP, a 2005 film called BEE SEASON that no one saw, etc.). So this is EXDA II, the Re-EXDA-fication! It's bad, please stop. Also bad (as in GAH, ick, no, stop): not one but two A.I. answers: A.I. TOOL (which is acceptable only if you're using it as a term for enthusiastic A.I. boosters) (39A: Modern-day aid for a data job, maybe) and GPT, which is the word debut of the year, and which looks silly without the Chat in front of it (32D: Chat follower). The Chat is in fact welded to the GPT in the name of the product. GPTs are standalone entities (I just unwillingly learned) ("Generative pre-trained transformers"), but as clued, GPT is ridiculous (if easy). If you wanted to kill GPT and A.I. TOOL and bury them both in the same hole with EXDA, that would be fine with me. Hide the bodies, go ahead, I won't tell.

The one other fill annoyance was the onslaught of ONs. Four of them, three in quick succession (all at the fronts of answers), three of them crossing, two of those crossing at the ON itself (ONTO crossing ON THE SCENE crossing ON IT ... plus USE ON = four). No real trouble with the puzzle overall today, outside of trying to parse the themers. I think the far SW was maybe the hardest for me. If I knew about LYLE the Crocodile, I totally forgot, so I was like "uh ... LYNN? Is LYNN the crocodile? LYRA?" I also didn't know the C.F.L. team in Edmonton—luckily that "E" cross at LYLE/ELKS was eventually totally inferable. Beyond that ... well, I wrote in OREO for ORCA, but that was an extremely delightful mistake, and a completely unexpected kealoa* (18D: It's all black and white). 

Bullets:

• 26D: Classic card game with a geographical name (BOSTON) — no idea. Zero. Probably should've been my Word of the Day: 

Bostogné, Boston or Boston Whist is an 18th-century trick-taking card game played throughout the Western world apart from Britain, forming an evolutionary link between Hombre and Solo Whist. Apparently named after a key location in the American War of Independence, it is probably a French game which was devised in France in the 1770s, combining the 52-card pack and logical ranking system of partnership Whist with a range of solo and alliance bids borrowed from Quadrille. Other lines of descent and hybridization produced the games of Twenty-five, Préférence and Skat. Its most common form is known as Boston de Fontainebleau or French Boston. (wikipedia)

• 21A: Number that Jerry Rice wore for his entire N.F.L. career (EIGHTY) — hey you know what other number starts with "E" and is six letters long? Because that's what I wrote in.

[wrong guy]

• 25D: She has a lot of young followers (MOTHER DUCK) — lovely answer, much better than whatever social media-related crap the clue leads you to expect
• 30A: "Wow, that can't be right!" ("GOSH, NO!") — absolutely nothing about this clue suggests "GOSH!" Nothing prepares you for "GOSH!" I was unprepared for "GOSH." "Wow" doesn't really cut it, and the clue phrase and answer phrase really don't match. The first sounds like you're looking at suspect data, and the latter sounds like you are denying you ate the cookies in a 1960s TV show.

[48D: Crocodile in a classic children's book]

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

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

*kealoa = a pair of words (normally short, common answers) that can be clued identically and that share at least one letter in common (in the same position). These are answers you can't just fill in quickly because two or more answers are viable, Even With One or More Letters In Place. From the classic [Mauna ___] KEA/LOA conundrum. See also, e.g. [Heaps] => ATON or ALOT, ["Git!"] => "SHOO" or "SCAT," etc.  

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Old-timey "Darn!" / WED 10-28-26 / Shuffling dance move popular in the 1990s / Group of antlered deer, humorously / Isolate, in corporate-speak / "Stop," as said to someone filling a cup / Pokémon critter with a yellow snout and short, pointed ears / Member of the genus Pongo, informally

Constructor: Daniel Grinberg

Relative difficulty: Easy

[36D: Jedi of "Star Wars: The Last Jedi" (REY)]

THEME: SCARE QUOTES (66A: Indicators of irony ... or a way to describe the answers to 18-, 24-, 40-/44- and 54-Across?) — quotes from scary movies:

Theme answers:

• "HERE'S JOHNNY!" (18A: Jack Torrance, in "The Shining")

• "IT'S ALIVE! IT'S ALIVE!" (24A: Dr. Frankenstein, in 1931's "Frankenstein")

• "BE AFRAID, BE / VERY AFRAID" (40A: With 44-Across, Veronica Quaife, in "The Fly")

• "I WANT TO PLAY A GAME" (54A: Jigsaw, in "Saw")

Word of the Day: The RUNNING MAN (12D: Shuffling dance move popular in the 1990s) —

The running man is a street dance, consisting of "shuffling" and sliding steps, imitating a stationary runner. The dancer takes steps forward, then slides the foot placed in front backwards almost immediately, while moving their fists forwards and back horizontally in front of them. [...]

Notable practitioners of the dance were MC Hammer, Janet Jackson, Five Star, Selena, Milli Vanilli, and Vanilla Ice during their live concert shows and in music videos. According to Janet, Paula Abdul learned and then taught her the dance. Abdul also choreographed the 1987 film The Running Man. Jackson further popularized the dance, when she performed it in her 1989 music video "Rhythm Nation".

• • •

I've only seen two of these movies (The Shining, Frankenstein), but all four quotes are familiar to me, even if I could've quite get the phrasing on the last one right at first—I kept wanting it to be an invitation, something like "WANT TO PLAY A GAME?" or "WANNA PLAY A GAME?" I think I was getting Jigsaw confused with the computer in War Games:

This reimagining of SCARE QUOTES is kind of cute, and the puzzle lands in an appropriate place—at the end of Spooky Season, in the week leading up to Halloween. So I think that thematically things are fine. But the fill. If anything was scary, it was the fill. Jump scare after jump scare. Sincerely, I was startled by how stale the fill was. In the NW corner alone, AREOLA BAHAI ELS RAJ and especially NERTS (oof) made for a very grim beginning. I took a screenshot, thinking that was going to be as bad as it got, but then the stale, crosswordesey fill just kept on going. On and on and on and on. I know that when the theme is dense and you run a lot of themers very close to each other, filling a puzzle cleanly can be a challenge, but yikes:

When I got to LEOI, I shouted (internally) "You've got to be kidding me." Uncle! Have mercy! I give! OLES LANAI ERNST OBVI OCHRE (you can see me pull up there, not knowing which OCH(ER/RE) it's gonna be), and then, after all that, LEOI!? The crosswordesiest answer of all? Brutal. Software is supposed to make it much easier to keep fill clean. I don't know what happened here, except that any enjoyment I might've had from the cute-ish theme was ruined by the pummeling I took from the dramatically subpar fill. It goes on: ABCTV IOTA INCA SOL OMNI ONIT ORANG ABRA. Things are somewhat better in the bottom half of the grid, though MEESE ... look, I appreciate the attempt to make the answer something fresh (60D: Group of antlered deer, humorously), but you and I both know, that's still Reagan's Attorney General, just as ABRA is still a partial magician's phrase, Pokémon be damned. (MOOSES!—now that's "humorous"). And then to top it all off, when we finally do get to non-theme answers that are longer than 6 letters (there are only two of them), well, one of them is fine—I'm always happy when the puzzle breaks into a silly dance (RUNNING MAN), but I that other long answer really EATS A SANDWICH (LANDS A DEAL). The theme was cute, but the fill really hurt. Palpably. From square one. Compare yesterday's puzzle—a superior Halloween-ish theme plus a grid full of interesting longer answers (though I sympathized with the people who didn't know KOOKABURRAS—or ANKE Huber or Olivia MUNN or LORI Greiner. Some brutal crosses in there).

Bullets:

• 22A: Top choices? (BRAS) — I think of "tops" as things you wear on the outside, but I can't deny that BRAS are the "top" part of a woman's underwear (or a bikini), so I suppose this works. Not the most scintillating wordplay I've ever seen, but it slowed me down a little, so mission accomplished, question mark clue! (with an assist from ambiguous OCHRE)
• 53A: "Stop," as said to someone filling a cup ("WHEN") — this, I like. Gives an otherwise pedestrian word a little personality, a lively, colloquial context. Thumbs up.
• 55D: "Knock my socks off!" ("WOW ME!") — I like this as well. Hard to find short fill that's not only tolerable but vibrant.
• 4D: One chasing the big bucks? (DOE) — do they do this? Do DOEs chase bucks? I'm no deer expert, but somehow this "chasing" thing doesn't sound right. The pun here isn't inspired enough for me to go along with the implausible representation of animal behavior.
• 31D: Popular band that had a 40-year gap (1981-2021) between its last two studio albums (ABBA) — initially went with Crossworld's other popular four-letter band that starts with "A"—AC/DC. Here's a little late AC/DC (2020!) for your Halloween season:

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

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on BlueSky and Letterboxd]
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• Venmo (@MichaelDavidSharp)]

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✏️Upcoming Crossword Tournaments✏️:

• American Crossword Puzzle Tournament (Philadelphia, PA, April 30-May 2, 2027)

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📘 My other blog 📘:

• Pop Sensation (vintage paperbacks)

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