With even stronger reasoning, in law / SAT 7-18-26 / Titular animated dog of children's TV / Nairobi-based collection of NGOs / Bygone recorders / Figures listed on Zocdoc, for short / Cosmetic additive that comes from the Southwest / Smartphone feature that debuted worldwide in 2011 / Song whose titular subject has a "dark brown voice" / Retailer with mountains in its logo / Instrument that's held at about a 45-degree angle from the player's body

Constructor: Ryan Judge

Relative difficulty: Easy 

[33D: Actor who plays the title role on TV's "Andor"]

THEME: none 

Word of the Day: Moe Berg (59A: W.W. II-era occupation for baseball's Moe Berg, following his playing career = SPY) —

Morris Berg (May 3, 1902 – May 29, 1972) was an American professional baseball catcher and coach in Major League Baseball who later served as a spy for the Office of Strategic Services during World War II. He played 15 seasons in the major leagues, almost entirely for four American League teams, though he was never more than an average player and was better known for being "the brainiest guy in baseball." Casey Stengel once described Berg as "the strangest man ever to play baseball."

Berg was a graduate of Princeton University and Columbia Law School, spoke several languages, and regularly read ten newspapers a day. His reputation as an intellectual was fueled by his successful appearances as a contestant on the radio quiz show Information Please, in which he answered questions about the etymology of words and names from Greek and Latin, historical events in Europe and the Far East, and ongoing international conferences.

As a spy working for the government of the United States, Berg traveled to Yugoslavia to gather intelligence on resistance groups which the U.S. government was considering supporting. He was sent on a mission to Italy, where he interviewed various physicists concerning the German nuclear weapons program. After the war, Berg was occasionally employed by the Central Intelligence Agency, successor to the Office of Strategic Services. (wikipedia)

• • •

[20D: Gustav Klimt masterpiece]

Hey, my Friday puzzle! A day late, but still, better late than never. This one had the flow and the oomph and the zing, as well as the lowkey fighting spirit, that yesterday's puzzle lacked. Give me a grid with all-over flow like this over a series of 15-stacks Any Day. More challenge, more fun today. Not really a Saturday-level challenge, but enough resistance to make it interesting, at least. You only get a couple of answers 10+-letters long (two 13s, to be exact, both great), but you do a get a host of 7-8-9s, which keep things crackling throughout, and while there's plenty of short fill to help you get traction, you never feel like you're drowning in it (which is how I felt yesterday when practically everything besides the puzzle's nine 15s was short filler). Today's puzzle is a little too pop-culturey for my tastes, but there was nothing obscure, to my mind, nothing that I hadn't picked up from either paying attention to the world generally or solving crosswords, specifically (everything I know about Elio and Andor, for instance, I learned from (writing about) crosswords). The puzzle covers a wide range of topics and moves from formal (A FORTIORI) to informal ("I JUST WORK HERE"). Fresh and surprising. Just what I like in a late-week puzzle. 

[7D: Results of one's labors, so to speak]

It wasn't a long journey today, from start to finish, but it was ... a journey. Please, come along with me, won't you, as I retrace my eventful and occasionally hilarious path to puzzle completion. Let's start in the NW corner, where we usually start, and where I made my first and possibly only outright mistake. And what a mistake it was. A gift from the gods! How often are mistakes gifts? Well, OOXTEPLERNON (the god of short bad fill, hallowed be his name) was uncharacteristically playful and generous today. He offered me a regrettable French possessive as my opening toehold (14D: "Bonjour, ___ amis!" = MES). Not an auspicious beginning, but what followed was ... epic. Historic. I was so proud that I remembered the [Nairobi-based collection of NGOs] (OXFAM). That "X" gave me "EXCUSE ME" (2D: "Um ... what?!") and so I was off and running ... or so I thought. My next move, however ... fatal. Silent, but deadly, you might say. You see, I crossed the "E" in MES not with SCORE (the correct answer) but with SCALE (17A: Conductor's reference). In retrospect, SCORE is soooo much better, but my brain was like "music, five letters, ends in "E" ... [pictures sheet music ... a progression of notes] ... SCALE! By dumb luck, SCALE and SCORE end up sharing 60% of the same letter DNA. So I "confirm" SCALE with TO SPARE, so now SCALE is really locked in ... which sets the stage for perhaps the greatest wrong answer I've ever entered into a grid—any grid, ever. Now, I don't know much about Latin legal terms, but I was pretty sure that this ... was wrong:

Lawyers, judges: I demand that one of you use "A FARTIRIORI" the next time you object to some line of argument on the grounds that it stinks. "Objection, your honor! A FARTIRIORI reasoning!" "Sustained! Clear the court!" Maybe you can work MALIO in there too, when the reasoning is particularly bad-faith. "A MALIO FARTIORI, your honor! I demand a retrial! Contempt of court!" Oh, man, A FARTIRIORI, I love you so much. Thank you for appearing to me in a crossword. What a blessing. 

Another great thing about the FARTIRIORI error is that I was able to catch it immediately, so it didn't bog me down. A lot easier to laugh at your mistakes when you catch them quickly. With the NW fixed, I zoomed into the center of the grid, for the first big whoosh of the day. I briefly considered EMOJIKEPEDIA (?) for 30A: Smartphone feature that debuted worldwide in 2011, but then ... success.

At this point, I had a toehold in the NE, and pretty good prospects for getting down into the SW and across the grid to the SE. This was the point at which the good answers felt like they started popping off like popcorn, in all directions. "I JUST WORK HERE," STUDY DATE, WIDE BERTH, etc. Not that there weren't some hiccups along the way. I misread "Zocdoc" (?) as "Zodiac" and so really really didn't understand when MDS ended up being the answer to 16D: Figures listed on Zocdoc, for short. I saw the -B-RT pattern at 26A and instinctively wrote in EBERT before deciding maybe I should actually read the clue and discovering that it was actually Q*BERT (26A: Orange video game character who appears in "Wreck-It-Ralph"). You ever watch the cartoon "Letterman" on the Electric Company back in the day? (this was the '70s, so you pretty much have to be over 50 for this). He was a superhero figure who would save the day by changing a letter in the name of something scary or bad, thereby rendering it harmless. Like turning a "gun" into "gum" or something. Anyway, I'm imagining Letterman changing EBERT into Q*BERT and it's making me happy.

Bullets:

• 31D: Cosmetic additive that comes from the Southwest (JOJOBA OIL) — I took one look at JOJO-, before looking at the clue, and the only thing I could imagine was JOJO DANCER (Your Life Is Calling). Luckily, I remembered JOJOBA OIL from ... I wanna say '70s shampoo commercials?

• 43A: Digs up by the roots (GRUBS) — this ... is not a word I know. I think of GRUBS as larvae. 
• 46D: Bygone recorders (TIVOS) — Today I learned that TIVOS are "bygone," LOL, wow, when did that happen. I rely on crosswords for all my TIVO-related information, so this is the first I'm hearing of it.
• 57A: What might add a bit of flavor to a salsa? (BONGO) — since I was having trouble coming up with EMBRYOS (39D: Items frozen in cryopreservation), I didn't have the final "O" here and thought that maybe people were livening up their salsa dancing by taking hits off of BONGS. Really adds flavor, they say!

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

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on BlueSky and Facebook and Letterboxd]
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Kaelin of the O.J. trial / FRI 7-17-26 / French seafood topping named after another country / Rod whom the A.L. batting title is named after / Google smartphone feature that edits the photographer into the group shot / Savory Chinese dish prepared on a griddle / Marvel antagonist who wears a metal mask / Island nation north of Fiji / Pulitzer-winning author whose only two novels were published 55 years apart / Historical figure known to have acquired and dissected human corpses / Landform commonly seen in a crescent shape on Mars / Disney antagonist who rules the Pride Lands

Constructor: Coz Berlin

Relative difficulty: Easiest Friday I've ever done

THEME: none 

Word of the Day: SAUCE AMERICAINE (59A: French seafood topping named after another country) —

Sauce américaine (pronounced [sos ameʁikɛn]; French for 'American sauce') is a recipe from classic French cookery containing chopped onions, tomatoes, white wine, brandy, salt, cayenne pepper, butter and fish stock. It is sometimes incorrectly referred to as sauce armoricaine (pronounced [sos aʁmɔʁikɛn]), but in fact the sauce was invented by a cook from Sète, Hérault, who had worked in the United States. // Louis Saulnier gives the following recipe: Américaine - Treat as for Lobster Américaine. Pound shells and meat in the mortar and incorporate equal quantity of fish velouté, add butter. // As with many other classic dishes the original recipe has been adapted over time and almost every chef will prepare the sauce in a slightly different way. Modern recipes usually include tarragon and use lobster stock rather than pounded lobster, and often replace cayenne pepper with paprika. (wikipedia)

• • •

You don't see this triple-stack stuff much anymore. Used to be considered quite the feat (by some) back in the day. It's still a feat, but constructing software has made this "feat" far more accessible to the average constructor, so it's no longer quite as impressive-seeming. Since there are so many far more interesting and entertaining grid shapes that don't involve having most of your Downs (the stack crosses) being overfamiliar and/or clunky 3-4-5s, you just don't see 15 stacks like this as often. Ironically, though the stacks look daunting, because there are usually so many opportunities to hack into them via their short crosses, they frequently end up being easier than average. Once you get one element in the stack, the others tend to fall quickly. Today ... well, today. Today. Sigh. smh. Look, I think the grid is of perfectly ordinary and average quality. There's nothing wrong with it. The stacks are clean, their crosses never particularly irksome or off-putting. It's all fairly smooth. A puzzle-shaped puzzle, totally acceptable. But the difficulty level has been lowered to such an extent that it's not even fun, unless perhaps you are new to puzzles—always feels great to take down a late-week puzzle when you're just starting out. But if you're not new to puzzles, dear lord this one is over before it begins. Where's the fun in that? 

How easy was it? So easy that I literally never saw the clues for MADE A CLEAN BREAK, ORDERED A  LA CARTE, or STAND AT THE READY. Or REM or EWER or EWE either, but those are less remarkable. I took one look at 1A: Savory Chinese dish prepared on a griddle and thought "it's a PANCAKE ... an onion PANCAKE of some kind ... just write in PANCAKE." And so I did ("griddle" is a dead giveaway that you're dealing with a PANCAKE). If you write in PANCAKE there at the end of 1A ... well, for me, that was like tipping over the first domino is a long line of dominos—they all just ... fell. I mean, I ran those Downs backwards from the "E" in PANCAKE, 1-2-3-4-5-6-7 ... or 7-6-5-4-3-2-1, I guess, if we're being precise. From there, it was clear the 2nd and 3rd long Downs ended CLEAN BREAK and A LA CARTE, respectively, so I wrote that much in, and more Downs fell, and I saw that the onion in the pancake was a SCALLION, and then all the Downs fell. All but one—a product placement clue written on behalf of Google smartphones.

Could've just made this ADDLE and gone with REL (or TEL, or KEL) in the cross, but instead we get this ADD ME garbage (3D: Google smartphone feature that edits the photographer into the group shot). How do you steer *into* ADD ME? Why? Whose tastes or interests are served there? Whatever, it hardly matters, the answer's easy to get, it's just so dispiriting to have the one answer that made me pause At All up there be an ad for Google products. But back to my initial point—from PANCAKE (obvious) I ran the table up there. No hesitations, ADD ME notwithstanding. I should not be able to walk through a third of a Friday puzzle in under a minute. The other two sections took a little more time, but only a little. I actually threw a couple of wrong answers down in the middle section, early, when I had almost nothing to go on. Wrote in SAMPLE for SWATCH (28D: Fabric fragment) and TAHITI for TUVALU (25D: Island nation north of Fiji). But EARTHA and DR. DOOM were easy and Margaret CHO got me to change SAMPLE to SWATCH and then the ANTI-WAR part of ANTI-WAR MOVEMENT because obvious and whoosh, there went the middle: ALMS NEON TOIL, bam bam bam, and all the long Acrosses were done for. I washed back across the grid, changing TAHITI to TUVALU along the way. 

I'm 2/3 down now and I don't think more than a few minutes have gone by. And I am by no means speed-solving at this point—just proceeding methodically, wondering when anything is going to leap out and fight me. Never happened. Once I got SHAMS and SKOR in there, every Down I threw into the lower section came up correct, immediately, effortlessly: REEDY OWNED KEIRA SPENT SICON, all off just their first letters. Like it was Monday. SICON to ACTI to ASIS CAST TUNA and now I've got the front ends of all the long Downs down there. I've never heard of SAUCE AMÉRICAINE, but it didn't stand a chance today. The surrounding fill was too easy, and the AMÉRICAINE part was ultimately inferable, and that was that. 

[my first thought when I saw SAUCE AMÉRICAINE]

If I'd been speed-solving, I think I might've broken 3 today, which is Insane. I can break 3 on a Monday. Rarely, on a Tuesday. On a Friday!?!?! At a very casual pace, taking screenshots along the way, I was done in probably 4 or 5. That should not be. If you struggled today, please don't be insulted. Everyone's different. But I'm genuinely curious where the struggle might've been. Maybe in the proper nouns? If you're young, it's possible KATO Kaelin means nothing to you (consider yourself Blessed). Maybe you've never heard the sultry, purring sounds of EARTHA Kitt (you should fix that). Perhaps Rod CAREW means nothing to you (he was a big deal when I was a baseball card-collecting boy in the '70s). DR. DOOM might be beyond your ken. We all have proper noun / pop culture gaps. But even with those gaps, it seems like the puzzle should've been very easy to handle for just about any regular solver today. Again, I like the stacks today. They are fine. But the only one I really loved, fittingly, was "IS NOTHING SACRED?!" Is the Friday puzzle not sacred? Can we not maintain late-week difficulty in the face of the overwhelming (economic?) pressure to dumb everything down into quick-solve nuggets!? Apparently not. 

Bullets:

• 40A: Historical figure known to have acquired and dissected human corpses (LEONARD DA VINCI) — this makes him sound like a serial killer. "Acquired" doing a lot of mysterious work here.
• 54A: They typically come in sets of four (PAWS) — I like this one, both because it actually made me ... pause (pun originally not intended, but as soon as I heard it, very much intended!), and it made me think of kitties and puppies, which is never a bad thing.

[high five]

• 4D: Pulitzer-winning author whose only two novels were published 55 years apart (LEE) — Stan LEE wrote novels? Actually, this is Harper LEE, author of To Kill a Mockingbird (1960) and Go Set a Watchman (2015). I had LE- and honest to god I Polish author Stanisław LEM for a half-second. He received a lot of honors in his life, but never the Pulitzer (a U.S. award).

• 52A: Something big when all the world's a stage? (CAST) — I got this from the "C," but I'm not sure the phrasing really works here. You could have a movie that roams the globe and still have a modest-sized CAST. I appreciate the attempt to give this puzzle some personality (finally), to make it seem like it was written by a human and not a machine. But the Shakespeare feels a little forced here.

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

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on BlueSky and Facebook and Letterboxd]
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Question during a brainstorming session / THU 7-16-26 / Alcohol, slangily / Feline in a 2000s meme / Symbol of spiritual insight, in Hinduism / Common garnish in a chirashi bowl / Galápagos island that was home to Lonesome George, the last tortoise of his subspecies / Music genre with "walking" bass lines / Business whose rewards program gives "Stackholder Perks"

Constructor: Zhou Zhang and Mallory Montgomery

Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium

THEME: "DOES THIS HAVE LEGS?" (61A: Question during a brainstorming session ... or of the answers to the starred clues) — theme answers are all the "THIS" in the question "DOES THIS HAVE LEGS?"; questions are all imagined replies to the question:

Theme answers:

• IRONMAN TRIATHLON (18A: *Yes—three arduous ones)
• MILLIPEDE (29A: *Yes—sometimes more than 1,000)
• DIRECT FLIGHT (37A: *Yes—exactly one, in common usage)
• YARDSTICK (50A: *No—but it does have three feet)

Word of the Day: PINTA (16A: Galápagos island that was home to Lonesome George, the last tortoise of his subspecies) —

Pinta Island (Spanish: Isla Pinta) is one of the Galápagos Islands in Ecuador, west of South America. Pinta has an area of 60 km² (23 sq mi) and a maximum altitude of 777 meters (2,549 ft). // The Spanish name Pinta—an adjective meaning "spotted"—honors the Pinta, the nickname of one of the three ships of Christopher Columbus's first voyage. Santa Maria Island is similarly named for another one of his vessels and Pinzón Island is partially named for the Pinta's captain Martín Alonso Pinzón. [...] Pinta was the original home to Lonesome George, perhaps the most famous tortoise in the Galápagos Islands. He was the last known representative of the subspecies Chelonoidis nigra abingdonii. The most northern major island in the Galápagos, at one time Isla Pinta had a thriving tortoise population. The island's vegetation was devastated over several decades by introduced feral goats, thus diminishing food supplies for the native tortoises. A prolonged effort to exterminate goats introduced to Pinta was completed in 1990, and the vegetation of the island is starting to return to its former state. (wikipedia)

• • •

I know the expression "to have legs," as in "to last," but I am not familiar with the brainstorming convention of asking the question "DOES THIS HAVE LEGS?" Perhaps I have not been in on a lot of brainstorming sessions. Almost certainly, yes, this is true. Is this a business-world thing? It's kind of redolent of businessspeak. Anyway, the revealer was kind of a let-down today, just because it meant very little to me as an expression. I do think there's something cute about the whole theme idea, especially the cluing premise. I was slower today than I should've been simply because I refused to jump down to the bottom and get the revealer first. I could tell it was gonna be one of those puzzles where starting at the end would make the rest of it much easier, but I decided to power through without breaking stride. I had to get all of IRONMAN TRIATHLON before I began to understand what the thing in question was, and it was only after I got MILLIPEDE that I knew that that thing was "leg." Sadly, I had written in GST instead of GMT at 24D: Clock-setting std. (Greenwich Mean Time), so I didn't have the "M" for MILLIPEDE, so the "leg"-ness of it all was slow in coming. I also had trouble understanding what the DIRECT FLIGHT clue was going for (37A: *Yes—exactly one, in common usage). The "in common usage" part really threw me. I had no idea what it was doing. I was looking for a common phrase in which someone spoke of one ... something. I still don't really understand why "in common usage" is necessary. Is DIRECT FLIGHT a slangy expression? Is there a different expression "in formal usage"? How is DIRECT FLIGHT a phrase that needs any kind of qualification?? The clue feels overwritten, which (for me) resulted in confusion. And not the good kind of confusion, either. Not the "whoa, you tricked me, good one" kind. The "this should've been clearer" kind. The puzzle gets some points off for using the same meaning of "leg" twice (with both IRONMAN TRIATHLON and DIRECT FLIGHT, the "leg" is a "segment"), but then it gets those points back for going with an inventive, unexpected "No" answer at YARDSTICK (50A: *No—but it does have three feet). The theme was creative, even if the revealer didn't really resonate with me.

The puzzle was on the easy side again, with only the themers providing any real resistance. If your time was a little slow, it's probably because of the oversized grid (16x15). I had one very real struggle point today, and it fittingly involved the one-word clue [Struggle] (8D). I wrote in STRIVE with total confidence and when almost every cross confirmed it, I kept it there. I just couldn't figure out why I couldn't come up with a good "V"-containing answer for 26A: Spoil. I ended up with DEVILE and every time I checked the crosses of DEVILE ... nope, no problems, everything checks out! I just stared at DEVILE like ... "well, you look like a word. You kind of sound like a word. How have I lived over a half a century and never heard of you, DEVILE?" I think the ambiguity of [Spoil] made matters (much) worse. "Spoil" as in "dote on"? "Spoil" as in "go bad"? Actually, neither of those things. "Spoil" as in "ruin, mar, desecrate," i.e. DEFILE. And it's STRIFE ... [Struggle] is a noun, not a verb. I just finished reading the first two books of Colson Whitehead's Harlem Trilogy, and much of it is set in an area of Harlem known colloquially as "Striver's Row": 

The St. Nicholas Historic District, known colloquially as "Striver's Row", is a historic district located on both sides of West 138th and West 139th Streets between Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard (Seventh Avenue) and Frederick Douglass Boulevard (Eighth Avenue), in the Harlem neighborhood of Upper Manhattan, New York City. It is both a national and a New York City historic district, and consists of row houses and associated buildings designed by three architectural firms and built in 1891–93 by developer David H. King Jr. These are collectively recognized as gems of New York City architecture, and "an outstanding example of late 19th-century urban design" [...] King sold very few houses and the development failed, with Equitable Life Assurance Society, which had financed the project, foreclosing on almost all the units in 1895, during an economic depression. By this time, Harlem was being abandoned by white New Yorkers, yet the company would not sell the King houses to blacks, and so they sat empty until 1919–20, when they were finally made available to African Americans for $8,000 each. Some of the units were turned into rooming houses, but generally they attracted both leaders of the black community and upwardly-mobile professionals, or "strivers", who gave the district its colloquial name.

Constant exposure to the name "Striver's Row" over the past couple weeks made the [Struggle] / STRIVE connection feel natural, obvious. So obvious that I'm going to go on pretending DEVILE is a word. It really wants to be a word. It's got an undeniable wordness about it. I think when you DEFILE something super duper bad, you DEVILE it. Yes, that will work.

What else? Oh, PINTA???? With that clue? LOL (Galápagos island that was home to Lonesome George, the last tortoise of his subspecies). I wrote in PALAU there at first and then thought "that ... wasn't a Galápagos island, was it? They let Survivor film in the Galápagos? That can't be right." Correct: that is not right. I guess you use this seemingly obscure clue to avoid mentioning Columbus? Except the island is named after Columbus's ship, so ... as far as avoiding colonizers, that doesn't really work. Maybe the puzzle was deemed too damn easy (not untrue) and so they put in this bit of interesting if depressing trivia about the last tortoise of his subspecies, who died all alone on a rock in the ocean because introduced feral goats destroyed his tortoise ecosystem. You can sneak in the odd bit of strange trivia here and there if all the crosses are fair, and these were. I don't see any other parts of the puzzle that gave me trouble, except for my initial and fairly trivial CHIC / CHI error (1A: Smart = POSH / 1D: Letter after upsilon = PHI).

Bullets:

• 31A: Patooties (BUTTS) — lol I really got turned around on this one, anatomically. Somehow I got the phrase "cutie patooties" and "tootsies" mashed up in my head and somehow convinced myself that "patooties" was a cutesy name for hands, i.e. MITTS. (I know “tootsies” are toes or feet, that was an important step on my associative journey to hands)
• 43A: Common garnish in a chirashi bowl (ROE) — yet another "bowl" I've never heard of. Throw it on the Bowl Pile with AÇAI and POKE and the rest. "Chirashi" means "scattered: "It’s a bed of sushi rice and ingredients “scattered” over the top in a decorative manner" (The Japanese Bar).

• 54A: Country that las islas Canarias are part of (ESPAÑA) — congrats to ESPAÑA on their World Cup semifinal victory over France. Also to Argentina on beating England yesterday. I missed the England / Argentina match because I was in Ithaca seeing The Invite (worth it—genuinely hilarious), but I saw the (beautiful) late goal by Argentina. Excited for the final. Sad the World Cup is winding down. I've grown used to having high-stakes soccer to watch every day, and to seeing colorfully dressed and extremely excited people cheering and crying. August is going to be boring. Am I going to have to get into Premier League? I swore I would not do this...
• 41D: Symbol of spiritual insight, in Hinduism (THIRD EYE) — I feel like Ed Norton's character in The Invite says something about opening his THIRD EYE. I know he talks about being "almost certified" at rolfing. There's something almost parodic about his character's New Agey / wellness / sexploration vibe, but he's so honest and earnest and open that he's hard to laugh at—he becomes something much more than a figure of derision. The movie steers in and around movie tropes very deftly. Mostly it just made me wheeze laughing at how accurate all the awkward "getting to know you / dinner party" dialogue was. And all the sex stuff. That, also, funny. 

• 9D: World's most populous Creole-speaking country (HAITI) — back-to-back HAITI days. I don't really have anything to say about this. Just noticed, is all.
• 12D: Feline in a 2000s meme (LOLCAT) — wikipedia tells me that an "Lolcat" is an "image macro of one or more cats." So it's not one "Feline" so much as an image of one or more felines, with "idiosyncratic and intentionally grammatically incorrect text [...] known as lolspeak" (wikipedia).

• 46D: Music genre with "walking" bass lines (SKA) — a walking bassline is: "A bassline composed of nonsyncopated notes of equal value, used in jazz and baroque music, for example." (wordnik)

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

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on BlueSky and Facebook and Letterboxd]
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Budget airline of Ireland, informally / WED 7-15-26 / Narrator on "Euphoria" / Liam Neeson action trilogy / Ben Jonson wrote one to himself / Bold way to go when bluffing / Name repeated in a hit 1963 rock song / Giving up one's amateur status / Mork's planet on an old sitcom

Constructor: Jonathan Raksin and Jeff Chen

Relative difficulty: Easy

THEME: SPEEDCUBER (56A: Competitor suggested by 17-, 23- and 45-Across) — three theme answers are punny descriptions of speedcubing (i.e. competitive Rubik's Cube solving), and then there's a kind of mock-up of a Rubik's Cube in the middle of the grid, with nine letters forming a 3x3 square (one side of an implied "cube"), with those letters unscrambling to spell the name of the Cube's creator: ERNO RUBIK. You have to "solve" the "cube" in the middle yourself, I guess:

Theme answers:

• TURNING PRO (17A: Giving up one's amateur status) (speedcubers are professional turners, of a sort)
• MAD SCRAMBLES (23A: Frantic rushes) (speedcubers ... well, I would've said they 'unscramble' madly, but whatever, close enough)
• FLYING COLORS (45A: Something it's good to pass with) (Rubik's Cubes have brightly-colored sides, so presumably the colors "fly" when you solve them quickly)

Word of the Day: SPEEDCUBER (56A) —

Speedcubing or speedsolving is a competitive mind sport centered around the rapid solving of various combination puzzles. ^[3] The most prominent puzzle in this category is the 3x3x3 puzzle, commonly known as the Rubik's Cube. Participants in this sport are called "speedcubers" (or simply "cubers"), who focus specifically on solving these puzzles at high speeds to get low clock times and/or fewest moves. The essential aspect of solving these puzzles typically involves executing a series of predefined algorithms in a particular sequence with pattern recognition and finger tricks. // Competitive speedcubing is predominantly overseen by the World Cube Association (WCA), which officially recognizes 17 distinct speedcubing events.^[5] These events encompass a range of puzzles, including NxNxN puzzles of sizes varying from 2x2x2 to 7x7x7, and other puzzle forms such as the Pyraminx, Megaminx, Skewb, Square-1, and Rubik's Clock (until 2027). Additionally, specialized formats such as 3×3×3, 4×4×4, and 5×5×5 blindfolded, 3×3×3 one-handed (OH), 3×3×3 Fewest Moves, and 3×3×3 multi-blind are also regulated and hosted in competitions.

As of February 2026, the world record for the fastest single solve of a 3×3×3 Rubik's Cube in a competitive setting stands at 2.76 seconds. (wikipedia)

• • •

Did the makers of Rubik's Cube pay for this puzzle? What a weird niche thing to build a puzzle around. I knew there were speed-solving competitions, but SPEEDCUBER? Yeah, I'm not familiar with your slang, fellas. Not that that held me up at all today. I didn't solve the puzzle in 2.76 seconds (the world record for ... speedcubing, is it?), but it went by pretty fast, as most of it was composed of incredibly boring, completely ordinary fill. An avalanche (I'm gonna need new metaphors here) ... a landslide? ... of the most dull-as-ecru 3-4-5s I've ever seen. IPA ARIA TESSA UAE ISAY ERIE ADO RARER ODE ASTO ICET EST ALLIN ALIT ORATE OMIT APED IBIS OVA  ... its' like the puzzle was trying to put me to sleep. Hardly. There are only four non-theme answers longer than 6 letters. For me, this was like solving the world's plainest and easiest themeless, except for the revealer, which did its job, but ... it hardly seems worth it. The theme answers are kind of cute as punny descriptions of what speedcubing must be like, though MAD SCRAMBLES feels a little less apt than the others. Is the solver "scrambling" to solve it? Is the idea that the colored squares on the Cube are all "scrambled" up and the solver has to unscramble them? The exact meaning of that one feels ambiguous and slightly off in a way that the other two do not. Anyway, if you just take the thematic bones of this puzzle, I think it's OK. But the bulk of the puzzle felt like an afterthought. Total snooze.

I haven't cared about the Rubik's Cube since it first came out, when I was about 11. I think of it as a fad toy that stopped being popular years ago, but ... apparently there's this whole world of competitive solving I know nothing about. By "whole world" ... I don't know how big we're talking. But the Speedcubing wikipedia page is astonishingly, painfully long and detailed, so however niche that world is, it appears to be, uh, well established. I know something about niche hobbies, and niche competitions. I have the trophies to prove it. Nothing wrong with nerdy niche worlds. It's just ... I don't expect speedcubers (or anyone, really) to know about crossword speedsolving, and yet this puzzle expects me to know and care about speedcubing. That's a no on both counts for me. Still, I know what a Rubik's Cube is, so the basic concept here wasn't mysterious. The theme answer placement felt a little weird to me. It's not—it's just a arrangement of long Across answers, but that's the thing: because the puzzle centers around a cube and its turning sides, I wanted those long Downs to be themers, so that there'd be one themer on each side, evoking the square shape of a cube. In fact, when I was done, for a few seconds, I thought those long Downs were theme answers, and I was struggling to understand what PEDAL POWER or POETRY SLAM had to do with speedcubing. "I guess there's 'power' involved ... and maybe you 'slam' the cube down when you're done? Is speedcubing supposed to be 'poetry' in motion? Is the act of turning the cube sides called 'pedaling'?" So many questions flashing through my brain. Then I realized the themers were just arranged in a standard all-Across way, and those long Downs were ... irrelevant.

The only answer that held me up at all today was RYAN (42A: Budget airline of Ireland, informally). I have almost nothing written on my printed-out grid today except for next to the clue for RYAN, where I have scrawled a double-underlined "TF?" (that's the "TF" from "WTF"). I'm supposed to know a discount Irish airline? Sorry, the informal nickname for a discount Irish airline? Apparently, yes, I am. It seems that RYANair is a way, way bigger enterprise than I could've imagined: 

Ryanair is an Irish ultra-low-cost airline headquartered in Swords, County Dublin, Ireland. It is the largest airline in Europe by scheduled passengers carried, fleet size, and total flights. Globally, it is the largest airline by international passengers carried, the third-largest by market capitalisation behind Delta Air Lines and United Airlines, and the fifth-most profitable by net income. In 2025, the company sold 208 million airline tickets, averaging €70 in total revenue against €62 in costs per ticket sold. It is widely considered to be the cheapest airline operating in Europe. (wikipedia)

So I learned something today. I learned about a popular business that "consistently scores poorly in customer satisfaction ratings" but thrives nonetheless. Inspiring.

Bullets:

• 14A: One of approximately three million in Finland (for a population of less than six million) (SAUNA) — when I say America should follow more of a European social model, this is what I mean. You gotta admire a country this committed to health and relaxation. 
• 21A: Name repeated in a hit 1963 rock song (LOUIE) — wrote in "LAYLA" here (seven years off).

• 20A: Ben Jonson wrote one to himself (ODE) — it's a poem in which he takes himself to task for ... not writing poetry. Writing about how he's not writing. The poem opens with him beating himself up for not being more productive—basically a version of the voice in every self-loathing writer's head: "Where dost thou careless lie / Buried in ease and sloth?"
• 31D: Narrator on "Euphoria" (RUE) — I "know" this only from crosswords. It gets kind of densely pop-culturey in the middle of that damned cube: RUE, ORK, TAKEN clued as the Liam Neeson franchise. I doubt there's enough pop culture confusion there to scuttle someone's solve, but still, you might've taken RUE or TAKEN in a different, less name-y direction, just to be sure.

• 55A: One flying in to the coast, maybe (GULL) — so glad to find out this was just a bird and not some person flying into California to do business or take a vacation or whatever.
• 37D: Vampire double feature? (FANG) — A great clue, but maybe a better clue for FANGS, plural. I mean, yes, you can lawyer your way to a defense of singular FANG, but that "double" really wants FANGS. One FANG, double it, now you've got FANGS. Man, that word looks weirder and weirder the more you type it, so I'm gonna stop.

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

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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