Gorp tidbit / TUE 5-19-26 / Standard musical progression / Football, informally / Massachusetts local of Manchester-by-the-Sea / Joint thing in the Venn diagram of "instruments" and "fish" / Heads of Hogwarts? / Companion to Fannie and Freddie in the mortgage biz / Classic falling-block game

Constructor: Brad Wiegmann

Relative difficulty: Easy

THEME: TWO-DRINK MINIMUM (52A: Requirement at some comedy clubs ... or for 17-, 22-, 33- and 47-Across?) — there are two drinks "hidden" inside each theme answer:

Theme answers:

• PENTATONIC SCALE (17A: Standard musical progression)
• CHAIR UMPIRE (22A: High court judge?)
• TEAM SPORT (33A: Basketball or baseball, but not boxing)
• TWIN ENGINES (47A: Matching pair on many jets)

Word of the Day: SUE Bird (19D: Bird of the W.N.B.A.) —

Suzanne Brigit Bird (born October 16, 1980) is an American former professional basketball player who played her entire career with the Seattle Storm of the Women's National Basketball Association (WNBA). Bird was drafted first overall pick by the Storm in the 2002 WNBA draft and is considered one of the greatest players in WNBA history. As of 2025, Bird is the only WNBA player to win titles in three different decades. In 2025 she was inducted into the Women's Basketball Hall of Fame and the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame, and in 2026 she was inducted into the NYC Basketball Hall of Fame and the FIBA Hall of Fame. In addition to her WNBA career, Bird played for three teams in the Russian league. [...] Bird has won a joint-record four WNBA championships with the Storm (2004, 2010, 2018, 2020), five Olympic gold medals (2004, 2008, 2012, 2016, and 2020), two NCAA Championships with UConn (2000, 2002), and four FIBA World Cups (2002, 2010, 2014, 2018). She is one of only 11 women to attain all four accolades, and is one of only two basketball players—of any gender—to win five Olympic gold medals. She is also a five-time EuroLeague Women champion (2007–2010, 2013) // During Bird's WNBA career, she was selected to thirteen WNBA All-Star teams and eight All-WNBA teams. She was voted by fans as one of the WNBA's Top 15 Players of All Time in 2011, was voted into the WNBA Top 20@20 as one of the league's top 20 players of all time in 2016, and was voted into The W25 as one of the league's top 25 players of all time in 2021. Bird retired from professional basketball after the 2022 WNBA season.

• • •

I kinda like this theme, or want to like it, but the overall fill was so abusively stale today, from almost square one, that I found it hard to enjoy the puzzle. Unless you are a mathematician, I suppose, ENNEADS is one of those words that exists only in crosswords. It always seems like such desperate fill, and to encounter it right away was really deflating. And then to get AER right after that, on top of slightly less annoying but still slightly annoying gnat-like answers like CPA and AWS and SERE ... it just felt like not nearly enough care went into polishing the grid. "I've seen it in crosswords before, must be OK." Even SMORE and IOWAN felt like they were out of Central Crosswords Casting. I don't mind short simple words, but I do mind a barrage of words that scream "crosswords! you know me from crosswords! hey, how ya doin'? nice to see me again?" No. We're still doing Beau GESTE? In 2026? On a Tuesday? We're still doing EGAD? EGAD. As for the theme—TWO-DRINK MINIMUM is a really interesting revealer. It's a snappy phrase in its own right, and it kinda indicates what's going on in the theme. Kinda. I have two picky things to say about TWO-DRINK MINIMUM, though. One is, with these phrases, you don't have a TWO-DRINK MINIMUM. You have two drinks exactly. If one of these phrases had three drinks in it, I think my mind would've been blown, because that would've captured precisely the spirit (!) of the phrase. That is, it would've made the "MINIMUM" part seem something other than extraneous when it came to the execution of the theme. The other thing I found mildly annoying was the highlighting of the "drinks" inside the theme answers. Visually ugly and completely unnecessary. Let Me Discover The Drinks!!! You let me discover the SMALL STARTS yesterday, you can let me discover the "two drinks" today. Having those "drinks" outlined in bold felt condescending. If you want to do something in the app where the "drinks" light up or bubble or explode or whatever once you're finished, I guess I don't care about that. But flagging them ahead of time? Bah. Child's placemat stuff.

The puzzle was also very easy. The fill was clued in an extremely straightforward manner, for the most part. There are a handful of "?" clues to try to make things at least a little twisty, but they didn't add much difficulty in the end. After wanting to cram in YOU ARE at 1A: What you eat, I then wrote in FOOD. Also wrong! But that was my only mistake of the day. Oh, and I had CAT POSE before COW POSE and BON AMIE before MON AMIE (39D: Term of friendship for a French woman) (should've known BON AMIE was wrong—for a woman, it would be BONNE AMIE). Other than that, there was exactly one clue that made me stop long enough to think "huh?" And that was 34D: Leaves together? (PILE). I knew right away that "Leaves" was going to be a noun rather than a verb (I've seen enough "leaves" puns in TEA and SALAD clues to last me a lifetime), but SALAD wouldn't fit and I couldn't think of a four-letter TEA starting with "P" so ... I had to work the crosses. Yes, if you rake a bunch of leaves "together," you do get a PILE. I had trouble making the leap from mere "togetherness" to a PILE structure specifically. Perhaps if this puzzle had come out in autumn, the connection would've been clearer. This clue is the only one I'd classify as "difficulty" in the whole puzzle. The rest is (mostly) remedial trivia and straight definitions.

Bullets:

• 42A: Heads of Hogwarts? (LOOS) — gratuitous Potterization. Always a bad choice. Grow up. ("Heads" are toilets, which is where this clue belongs)
• 60A: Breads for Reuben sandwiches (RYES) — I was all set to say "there shouldn't be any drinks in this puzzle outside the theme answers!" and then realized that this was a bread clue, not a whiskey clue. No foul!
• 29A: Joint thing in the Venn diagram of "instruments" and "fish" (BASS) — I see what you're doing here, but no. They're spelled the same, but they are not the same, and so would not be a "joint thing" in a Venn diagram. Unless you can play the fish like an instrument, in which case, I withdraw my objection.

• 30A: "That's so sweet!" reactions / 46A: "Ick!" ("AWS" / "EWW!") — you can have one one of these reactions, but you may not have two. Eww, no. One. One awkwardly-spelled reaction maximum! This applies also to U.S. state demonyms. You used yours up with IOWAN, puzzle! You can't then try to shove ALASKAN down my throat. Violation!
• 45D: Major unknowns (BIG IFS) — probably my favorite thing in the puzzle. Nice and slangy. A lot more lively than your run-of-the-mill shorter fill. Oh, I also liked PIGSKIN (25D: Football, informally). Apparently I just like "-IG" words.
• 8D: Gorp tidbit (RAISIN) — this wasn't my favorite clue, but I am enjoying saying "Gorp Tidbit" over and over. "Hey, who's that new guy over in Accounting?" "Oh, that's Gorp Tidbit." "I'm sorry, who?" "Gorp Tidbit." "Gorp Tidbit? Where's he from?" "Uh ... I don't know. Vermont, maybe?" 

That's all. See you next time.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on BlueSky and Facebook and Letterboxd]
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Zinnia or sunflower / MON 5-18-26 / Governing body in the Harry Potter universe / Outlandishly over the top, in modern slang / Roll of two ones / Pioneering hybrid car / Stereotypically antisocial pets / English town famous for its salts / Cool, slangily

Constructor: Rena Cohen

Relative difficulty: Easy

THEME: START SMALL (63A: Advice for the overambitious ... or a hint to 17-, 25-, 40- and 50-Across) — every theme answer starts with a letter string that can mean "small":

Theme answers:

• BABYLONIAN (17A: Like the Code of Hammurabi)
• TOYOTA PRIUS (25A: Pioneering hybrid car)
• MINISTRY OF MAGIC (40A: Governing body in the Harry Potter universe)
• WEED WHACKER (50A: Gardener's tool)

Word of the Day: MOUE (29A: Pouty expression) —

Moue is one of two similar words in English that refer to a pout or grimace; the other is mow, which is pronounced to rhyme either with no or now. Mow and moue share the same origin—the Anglo-French mouwe—and have a distant relationship to a Middle Dutch word for a protruding lip. (They do not, however, share a relationship to the word mouth, which derives from Old English mūth.) While current evidence of moue in use in  English traces back only a little more than 150 years, mow dates all the way back to the 14th century. Moue has also seen occasional use as a verb, as when Nicholson Baker, in a 1988 issue of The New Yorker, described how a woman applying lip gloss would "slide the lip from side to side under it and press her mouth together and then moue it outward…." (merriam-webster.com)

• • •

Well, at least there were no remedial, hand-holding circled squares in this one. I got to discover the "small" angle all on my own, without the puzzle unnecessarily pointing it out. I do appreciate that, especially on a Monday, when the puzzle is most apt to be hand-holdy. Solving this one Downs-only, I noticed the "BABY" angle right away, because that's the word that appeared once I had the NW corner sorted, and so I kept trying to imagine what kind of "BABY" phrase that first theme answer could be. BABY LOAFER? BABY LOSERS? BABY LOOFAS? Eventually, of course, I got BABYLONIAN, but the BABY seed had been planted, such that when TOY showed up at the beginning of the next theme answer, I clocked the connection quickly. So the revealer didn't reveal much, but I did appreciate that it involved wordplay—repurposing a familiar idiomatic phrase by taking it literally. I also appreciated that all the "small" words were well and truly hidden inside their respective answers, even if that did mean that I had to endure a Harry Potter reference. I never like seeing references to the work of that bigoted billionaire hatemonger in my puzzle, but I'm giving this one special dispensation because it's thematically ... I don't know if "necessitated" is the right word, but I do know that it's hard to bury "MINI" at the beginning of a phrase that doesn't start MINISTRY or MINISTER. Words like MINIMAL or MINIMUM are etymologically linked to "MINI," so they won't work. And there just aren't great MINISTER or MINISTRY phrases out there. The MINISTRY OF JESUS is a thing, of course, but ... whatever, f*** Harry Potter and his creator, but the answer works, so no penalties have been assessed. 

The Downs-only solve was a piece of cake. No sticking points, few hesitations. Took a few puzzled head-tilts to pick up GIVE IT A GO (11D: Attempt something), but SNAKE EYES (33D: Roll of two ones) was no problem, and none of the other Downs were longer than six letters, and the shorter the answers, the easier they are (typically) to get with no help from Acrosses. I say SNAKE EYES was easy, and it was, but my first thought wasn't dice. It was "A roll of two ones? That's a pretty pathetic roll." I was envisioning a roll of cash. You ever try making two $1 bills into a roll? Me either, but I imagine it would be hard. A "Philadelphia roll" is a thick roll of cash with a big bill on the outside and a lot of small bills on the inside (the idea being that you're fronting like you have a lot of money when you don't) (I just learned that the Philadelphia roll  is also known as a Kansas City roll, a Texas roll, and a Michigan bankroll, so apparently lots of places came to be associated with phony rich guys). How do I know that term? Shrug, I just do. A Philadelphia roll is apparently also sushi. Sushi with cream cheese. Philadelphia cream cheese, I imagine. I did not know this.

Bullets:

• 14A: West Coast sch. that joined the Big Ten in 2024 (UCLA) — When I was growing up, the Big Ten and the Pac Ten (UCLA's onetime division) were not just geographically distinct, but they were pitted against each other every single year in the Rose Bowl, so telling me that UCLA has joined the Big Ten is like telling me cats have joined dogs. If you say so, but ... I hate it.
• 22D: English town famous for its salts (EPSOM) — nailed it, first try (by "it" I mean the spelling of EPSOM; the printer is EPSON; the actor is EBSEN).
• 32D: Puppy school command (SIT) — for a split second I was prepared to write in SIC. Don't teach your puppy to SIC ('EM), teach it to be a loving lover who loves. It's a sweet baby, not a weapon.
• 71A: Stereotypically antisocial pets (CATS) — speaking of sweet babies, this clue is dumb. Just because cats are not needy and will occasionally or frequently spurn your affection does not mean that they are not social. Just tonight, Ida came into the room where we were having cocktails and flopped herself down on the floor between us. She didn't want to play or even interact, really. She just wanted to be where we were. That is typical. And that is social. Also, cats sit on their owners, sleep with their owners, climb on their owner's shoulders ... purr, purr, purr, social, social, social. 

[Social Ida]

[Social Alfie]

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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❤️ Support this blog ❤️: 

• Venmo (@MichaelDavidSharp)]

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