Emblem with an Ojibwe name / THU 10-15-26 / Overzealous fan, in modern slang / Bygone org. for the Houston Oilers / Southern California city with a Spanish name / Classic cartoon dog with the catchphrase "You eediot!" / Hipster of times past / Card that's the source for "blue mana" in Magic: The Gathering / Platform for Duck Hunt, in brief / Actor Stephen of "V for Vendetta"

Constructor: McKay Fritz

Relative difficulty: Far Too Easy For a Thursday

THEME: FIRE BLANKS (55A: One way to start a race ... or a hint to understanding seven clues in this puzzle) — the blank spaces in what look like fill-in-the-blank clues must be filled with "fire" in order for the clues to make sense:

Theme answers:

• COMET (9A: ___ ball) [Fireball]
• GUARANTEED (20A: Sure ___) [Surefire]
• LAMBASTED (37A: Put under ___) [Put under fire]
• TRUCE (64A: Cease ___) [Ceasefire]
• DRAGONS (1D: ___ breathers) [Firebreathers]
• MATCHES (11D: ___ starters) [Firestarters]
• HEARTH (46D: ___ place) [Fireplace]

Word of the Day: BREA (34A: Southern California city with a Spanish name) —

 

Brea (/ˈbreɪə/ BRAY-uh; Spanish for 'tar') is a city in northern Orange County, California, United States. The population as of the 2020 census was 47,325. It is 25 miles (40 km) southeast of Los Angeles. Brea is part of the Los Angeles metropolitan area.

The city began as a center of crude oil production and was later propelled by citrus production. It is a significant retail center, including the Carbon Canyon Dam, Carbon Canyon Regional Park, Brea Mall and downtown Brea. The city has an extensive public art program that began in 1975 and has over 140 artworks placed throughout the city. (wikipedia)

• • •

[5D: "Metropolitan Life" author Lebowitz]

I like the idea of turning a crossword convention (in this case, the fill-in-the-blank clue) on its head—usually, the missing word is the answer, but here you have to discover and supply the missing word ("fire"), working backwards from answers that apparently make no sense. So the theme clues function just like normal clues after all (just add "fire"). The array of theme answers, though, was pretty unremarkable. No flashy longer answers—in fact, hardly any longer answers at all: only GUARANTEED and LAMBASTED go longer than 7 letters, and those aren't exactly words to light up a marquee. So the interest, themewise, is *entirely* in the clues, as well as, I suppose, the revealer, which ... is the part of the puzzle that I like least, actually. The phrase FIRE BLANKS means exactly one thing to me, as a standalone phrase, and it relates to male infertility (though the phrase "shoot blanks" may be more common in that respect). 

[thefreedictionary.com]

Yes, a starter pistol does, technically, FIRE BLANKS, but you'd never use that phrase to describe how a race starts. Further, as the clue says, it's "a" race, one, singular. You would never FIRE BLANKS, plural, to start a race. You fire once, right? Who's firing off multiple rounds to start a single race?? Is that a thing? Maybe I don't watch enough racing sports. Since you take "fire" away from the theme clues, why not go with "FIRE AWAY!" as your revealer? That way, my puzzle doesn't end on a weak-sperm note (not one of your more pleasant notes).

The grid overall isn't bad. It's certainly got more zing than yesterday's lifeless thing. I really liked the whole READ LIPS / HOOPLA / LOADS UP / ORNERY section (I love the word "ORNERY"—I must've learned it at a very early age, from my mom, I wonder why...). But once again the puzzle's biggest defect is that it's simply too easy. Once you grasp the whole missing "fire" gimmick—which I did right ... here:

—the puzzle offers no more resistance than a typical Tuesday would offer. I should say that [Sure ___] didn't actually give me the theme, since [Sure] and GUARANTEED seem like synonyms to me, so I didn't notice a missing "fire." No, what gave me the theme was the "G" from GUARANTEED, which completed the theretofore inscrutable DRAGONS, and that's what allowed me to see the missing "Fire" (in 1D: ___ breathers). So I guess it did take a reasonable amount of fuss to get the theme to drop, but "fuss" isn't exactly "difficulty." Thursdays need to have some punch, some pop, some fight, something. This puzzle may have contained SINEW in a literal sense, but figuratively, not really. 

The toughest part for me, besides my initial struggle with DRAGONS, was the four-letter stuff at the middle of the grid, specifically BREA and STAT. The former is a completely unremarkable small city I've never heard of, despite having lived in Southern California for four years. The only way anyone really knows BREA is from the La BREA Tar Pits (located not in BREA, but in Hancock Park) (currently closed for a two-year renovation that started in July). The clue on BREA was completely useless. 34A: Southern California city with a Spanish name? You know what California city has a Spanish name? All of them!! OK, not all, but scores of them, for sure. You could've at least said it was the Spanish name for "tar," or mentioned anything, anything at all, that was BREA-specific. But no. The clue basically tells you "this is a non-place that we're cluing this way only to avoid mentioning the tar pits, even though that's the only thing anyone knows about BREA." Pathetic. The other four-letter problem I had in there was ASAP. I had STAT. I hadn't realized that was a kealoa* until today. I had the "A" in the third position (from STAN) and chose wrong. The weirdness of BREA made that error a little harder to suss out than it would've been otherwise. This is literally the totality of my "struggle" today. Oh, wait, I also "struggled" with SITES (52D: Plots). Any place might be a "site." [Plots] looked like a verb. I needed crosses. They weren't hard to come by.

Bullets:

• 17A: Bygone org. for the Houston Oilers (AFL) — Because the Houston Oilers are themselves "bygone," I interpreted this as [Org. for the bygone Houston Oilers] and so wrote in simply N.F.L., which the Oilers were a part of until 1996 (after which they moved to Tennessee). I forgot the A.F.L. ever existed (perhaps because it ceased to exist before my first birthday).
• 24A: Frighteningly monstrous sorts (OGRES) — why is "Frighteningly" here? [Monstrous sorts] will do. "Frighteningly" adds nothing but bulk to the clue.
• 8D: Emblem with an Ojibwe name (TOTEM) — only recently put together that "Chippewa" and "Ojibwe" are the same thing. I grew up hearing only the former, probably because of Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin. It's where Annie Hall (Diane Keaton) is from in Annie Hall. Also where Jack Dawson (Leonard DiCaprio) is from in Titanic.
• 45D: Tabloid that's one of the 10 highest-circulation papers in the U.S. (NEWSDAY) — weird, I had no idea NEWSDAY was a "tabloid." Perhaps because I know them only for their crossword, which I only ever solved in syndication, in my local paper. I can't say I've ever seen a copy of NEWSDAY in my life. "As of 2025, Newsday is the sixth-largest circulation newspaper in the United States with a print circulation of 67,300" (wikipedia). Man, that number seems so small. RIP print.

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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