Verdant privacy features / TUE 12-9-25 / Pigmented rings / Asahi Super Dry or Kirin Lager / Termites, for an aardwolf / Gossip, in slang / "Edie & ___: A Very Long Engagement" (2009 documentary) / Music app named for a figure in Greek myth

Constructor: Kate Hawkins

Relative difficulty: Medium 

THEME: HEDGEROWS (35A: Verdant privacy features ... or a punny description of the four longest answers in this puzzle) — phrases that "mitigate or weaken the certainty of a statement" (American Heritage Dictionary) (i.e. "HEDGE"s) appear in "ROWS" (i.e. as Across answers ... as opposed to Downs?):

Theme answers:

• "AS FAR AS I CAN TELL..." (17A: "Judging from the information available to me ...")
• "JUST SPITBALLING..." (23A: "These are merely my spur-of-the-moment suggestions ...")
• "FOR WHAT IT'S WORTH..." (50A: "Here's my two cents, which might not amount to much ...")
• "ONLY A THOUGHT, BUT..." (57A: "Feel free to dismiss this idea — however ...")

Word of the Day: Edie & THEA: A Very Long Engagement (2009 documentary) (47D) —

Edie & Thea: A Very Long Engagement is a 2009 American documentary film directed and produced by Susan Muska and Gréta Ólafsdóttir for their company Bless Bless Productions, in association with Sundance Channel. The film tells the story of the long-term lesbian relationship between Edie Windsor and Thea Spyer, including their respective childhoods, their meeting in 1963, their lives and careers in New York City, Thea's diagnosis with multiple sclerosis and Edie's care for her partner, and their wedding in Toronto, Canada, in May 2007, because gay marriage was not then legal in their home state of New York.

Upon its initial release, the film was screened primarily at LGBTQ film festivals in 2009 and 2010. The Edie in the film's title was Edith Windsor, who after the death of Thea Spyer on February 5, 2009,^[1] was hit with an estate tax bill of $363,053 from the IRS. Had Thea been a man, Edie would have been exempt from this tax due to the marital exception. But the U.S. Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), which defined marriage as limited to a man and a woman, was in effect at the time. Windsor filed suit against the federal government on November 9, 2010, which ultimately made its way to the Supreme Court of the United States as United States v. Windsor. In June 2013, the Supreme Court upheld the lower court rulings in Windsor's favor and declared that DOMA was unconstitutional. (wikipedia)

• • •

Conceptually, this is pretty interesting. The execution was a little rough for me in places, primarily because the length requirement (every themer a 15) is a Procrustean Bed that forces the phrases (sometimes painfully) into uniform shape. "AS FAR AS I CAN TELL" and "FOR WHAT IT'S WORTH" are perfect, actually. "JUST SPITBALLING" really wants an "I'm" to start it off and a "here" to follow it (it also kinda wants the final "g" to be elided, but that's a much more cosmetic issue). If you search "just spitballing," the "I'm just spitballing here" option comes up right away in the predictive search box:

So you lop off "here" ... it's still intelligible, it's fine. Doesn't land as smoothly as the first two I mentioned, but it lands. "ONLY A THOUGHT, BUT," on the other hand, feels contorted—ad-libbed, improvised, home-made in the clunkiest way. "Artisanal" hedge. Like "JUST SPITBALLING," it's missing the verb phrase up front, but somehow here, the omission is far more jarring. Which brings me to the next problem, which is "JUST A THOUGHT..." feels way more natural to my ear than "ONLY A THOUGHT”; if you go with "JUST A THOUGHT," you miss the "It’s” less. Also, the attachment of "BUT" starts a separate clause and so the whole answer feels far more awkward and gangly than the others. When you require every themer to be a perfect 15, these are the compromises you have to make.They didn't ruin the puzzle, but I felt their bumpiness for sure.

I like the revealer, though the "ROWS" part doesn't ... add much. I mean, crossword answers are, by definition / design, linear, so any answer in any grid might be considered a "ROW." There's nothing especially "ROW"-y about these answers. I suppose you can say that in a crossword grid (or spreadsheet) situation, "ROW"s go Across, whereas columns go Down, and so the Acrossness of the answers matters. But then most theme answers do run Across, so again the "ROW"-iness isn't exactly an exceptional feature of the theme. But no other revealer will do. HEDGES would be anemic. The grid-spanning nature of the theme answers does give them a certain hedgerow quality, in that they seem to divide the grid into lots. If your hedgerow really is a "privacy feature," then I guess you might run it from one end of your property to the other I don't know. I've got sugar maples. I think the theme works. Not spectacularly, but it works.

The fill seems pretty average, though at parts it ran a little tough for me, for a Tuesday. Perhaps the most un-Tuesday moment of the solve was THEA (47D: "Edie & ___: A Very Long Engagement" (2009 documentary)). I'm not sure there's any THEA answer famous enough to qualify as a Tuesday answer, but this one was a real "????" to me. The documentary is about a very important U.S. Supreme Court case, and it sounds fascinating, but yeesh, as a piece of trivia, it's pretty Friday/Saturday. This could easily have been THEO as far as I, the ignorant solver, was concerned (of course if THEA had been THEO then the couple could've legally married in the U.S. and the documentary would never have existed). THEA is one of the few answers where I think I'd prefer the good old-fashioned partial over any one person's name. You can see that the NYTXW relies a lot less heavily on the Billy Strayhorn / Duke Ellington Orchestra song than it used to...

.

..but I say: "Take THE A Train" is way better known than any other THEA option, and any puzzle that reminds me of Ellington can't be all bad. If you must use THEA ... then by all means, take THE A Train:

I stumbled in a few non-THEA places as well. For some reason DIET was not a word that leapt to mind at 14A: Termites, for an aardwolf, so even though I had the "D" in place, I wrote in DISH (?). I was today years old when I learned RICE BEER existed (inferable, but ???) (8D: Asahi Super Dry or Kirin Lager). I hesitated at the final letter of AREOLAS ... then defiantly wrote in the "S," daring the puzzle to do the stupid Latin plural thing to me (which thankfully it didn't) (25D: Pigmented rings). The ZEE / ZED crossing was actually a teeny bit tricky, since there's nothing in either clue to indicate "letter" (33A: 33-Down, across the Atlantic / 33D: 33-Across, across the Atlantic). 

Really loved the GAY / TEA / "Oh, MARY!" nexus. A dishily queer little cluster of words. My daughter did some work on the earliest, off-Broadway production of Oh, MARY! before it even opened (possibly carpentry, possibly something else having to do with production design), then was invited to work on the show once it moved to Broadway but already had other commitments. The show sounds hilarious but I've never seen it. I like that even if you've never heard of Oh, MARY!, you can infer the answer fairly easily because the clue gives you "Mrs. Lincoln."

Bullets:

• 48A: Sound from someone sitting down at the end of a long day ("AAH...") — still not sure how this differs from the sound you make at the dentist. AAH v. AHH is tricky for me. Also, I thought the "sound" here was going to be the sound of someone literally "sitting," like ... PLOP!
• 54A: "Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a ___" (old maxim) ("FIRE") — ugh, this is awful. It's a weak maxim to begin with, but also ... I've never, ever heard this so-called "maxim." Why in the world would you use a quotation if you don't know where it comes from? If the "maxim" is universally familiar, great, but this one is not—too long, too fussy, too banal to be truly well known. So the clue is fussy, overly long, not well known, and not interesting. Four strikes.
• 6A: One who might ask "Fair dinkum?" (AUSSIE) — got this easily enough, but still have no idea what that question is supposed to mean. Merriam Webster dot com says it's a general expression of approval. Not sure why it's appearing here in interrogative form.
• 58D: "J to ___ L-O! The Remixes" (2002 Jennifer Lopez album) ("THA") — first remix album to reach #1 on the Billboard 200 chart (I just learned). I had "THE" here for a half second before realizing "oh, no, if they're going to pop music, that's gonna be a THA"—and so it was.

That's all, see you next time. 

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

P.S. two more days to send in your 🌲🐈Holiday Pet Pics🐕🌲 by Thursday of this week. Expecting to see a whole lotta cats in trees, just like Calypso here. Don't disappoint me!

[Thanks, Andrea]

[Follow Rex Parker on BlueSky and Facebook and Letterboxd]
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Gesture suggesting "I see what you did there" / MON 12-8-25 / Wyoming skiing mecca / Center of a stone fruit / Stuff on an artist's palette

Constructor: Dan Kammann and Zhouqin Burnikel

Relative difficulty: Medium-Challenging (solved Downs-only)

THEME: DIGIT (40A: Finger or toe ... or, when read as two words, what you can do to the ends of 17- and 62-Across and 10- and 34-Down) — last words of themers are things you can "dig":

Theme answers:

• JACKSON HOLE (17A: Wyoming skiing mecca)
• WORK OUT WELL (62A: End successfully)
• LAST-DITCH (10D: Eleventh-hour)
• CHERRY PIT (34D: Center of a stone fruit)

Word of the Day: Robert Benchley (13A: "___ is where a guy gets stabbed in the back, and instead of dying, he sings": Robert Benchley => OPERA) —

Robert Charles Benchley (September 15, 1889 – November 21, 1945) was an American humorist, newspaper columnist and actor. From his beginnings at The Harvard Lampoon while attending Harvard University, through his many years writing essays and articles for Vanity Fair and The New Yorker and his acclaimed short films, Benchley's style of humor brought him respect and success during his life, from his peers at the Algonquin Round Table in New York City to contemporaries in the burgeoning film industry.

Benchley is remembered best for his contributions to the magazine The New Yorker; his essays for that publication, whether topical or absurdist, influenced many modern humorists. He also made a name for himself in Hollywood, when his short movie How to Sleep was a popular success and won Best Short Subject at the 1935 Academy Awards. He also made many memorable appearances acting in movies such as Alfred Hitchcock's Foreign Correspondent (1940) and Nice Girl? (1941). Also, Benchley appeared as himself in Walt Disney's behind the scenes movie, The Reluctant Dragon (1941). His legacy includes written work and numerous short movie appearances. (wikipedia)

• • •

Felt lucky that I was able to get this to WORK OUT WELL in the end, because the Downs-only solve was definitely a struggle for me today. It started out very smoothly, as I ran the table on the first five Downs I looked at, but after that, my progress became halting and awkward. Got OAKS and could see that the first word of 17A had to be (probably) JACKSON, but I crossed that "N" with FINS (6D: Scuba gear = TANK), and screech, no more progress in that direction. I managed to get down the west side of the grid, all the way down through CHERRY PIT, but once down there, yeesh, that SW corner. Couldn't decide on SCAB v. SCAR (56D: Covering over a wound), had no idea about LULL, but the real problem was that I could not figure out how to make any kind of answer out of S-YN--. Even after I got it down to S-YNOD, I just stared at it. I know the word "synod," but there was an extra space in there. SKY NOD, is that a thing? I figured I had something wrong, but all the crosses were very right, and so eventually I just had to run the alphabet to come up with SLY NOD. Not a happy discovery. SLY NOD must've come from someone's overcrowded wordlist. I can imagine sly looks and sly grins, but SLY NOD ... man, it just doesn't look good. I'm not sure how a nod can be "sly." Metaphorically, maybe, in the sense of a subtle reference ("... De Palma's SLY NOD to Hitchcock..."), but as clued, it's harder to see (56A: Gesture suggesting "I see what you did there"). I just searched ["sly nod"], in quotation marks, and most of the first hits that come up are crossword-answer sites referencing this clue. I didn't actually work out SLY NOD until the very, very end of the solve. 

["... and giving a [SLY?] NOD, up the chimney he rose!"]

I also had some trouble remembering pets with food in cheek pouches (44D: Pet that stores food in cheek pouches). Chipmunks aren't really pets. Weirdly wanted ECHIDNA. Are those pets? Maybe I'm thinking of chinchilla? Echidnas are spiny anteaters of Australia and Papua New Guinea, so no, probably not pets. Anyway, not sure why HAMSTER wouldn't come to me, but it wouldn't. For a while. Until I got the "H" from HO-HUM. As for the WEI dynasty—no way, no how (64D: Early Chinese dynasty). I worked out WELL from the theme (which I could see at that point), and just inferred the other two letters. Eventually had to get back up to the top and fix the whole FINS debacle. After that, I bounced to the SW corner where I finished up with (ugh) SLY NOD. While I didn't like SLY NOD, I did like the theme. Or, rather, I thought it was just OK ... when I thought it was just a bunch of holes in the ground. Because I solved Downs-only, I didn't notice that DIGIT was a revealer. I thought that maybe the puzzle didn't have a revealer at all. But the reinterpretation of DIGIT is clever, and, combined with mostly solid fill, lifts this one into somewhat above-average territory. 

Bullets:

• 52A: "Let me clarify ..." ("I MEANT...") — somehow "I MEANT" is 10x worse than "I MEAN" as fill, and the clue today compounds the problem. The clue and answer aren't grammatically parallel. "Let me clarify" is a complete sentence. "I MEANT" is not. After "Let me clarify...," despite the ellipsis, you would start a new sentence, whereas "I MEANT" would be followed immediately by a dependent clause ("... [that] I can't..." "... [that] you don't ..."). There's probably some way to swap them out one for the other, but my brain can't hear it.
• 12D: From ___ to dusk (DAWN) — easy enough, but I know the phrase the other way around: "from dusk to (or til) DAWN." Maybe I've been listening to too much music about partying all the time. Or else the Tarantino movie title is wielding undue influence. Oh, no ... I remember now who's responsible:

• 30A: "Enola Holmes" actress ___ Bobby Brown (MILLIE) — I feel like crosswords are single-handedly keeping Enola Holmes in our collective memories, usually as the non-ENOLA Gay clue for ENOLA. For that reason, I think it's important to steer away from Enola Holmes whenever possible. The first half of the final season of Stranger Things just dropped last month. That's the show that made her famous. I would've used that show here, for reasons of timeliness, and also to prevent ENOLA Fatigue.

• 1D: Magic charms (MOJOS) — got this right away, which feels like a very Crossword reflex. Like, I don't think I ever thought of "mojo" this way before crosswords, but now ... it's right there. Top of the brain.
• 34D: Center of a stone fruit (CHERRY PIT) — At the center of *a* stone fruit is a "pit." At the center of one specific type of stone fruit is a CHERRY PIT. This distinction caused me several seconds of hesitation, but once I got the "C" in there (from LYCRA, where it was easy to infer—not much else can go in that empty place ... nothing, in fact), I was able to imagine CHERRY and that was that.

That's all. See you next time. 

And remember: 🌲🐈Holiday Pet Pics🐕🌲 can be sent to me through this Thursday (rexparker at icloud dot com), at which point I'll start posting them in waves, after every post through the end of the year. I'l be waiting patiently by my Inbox ... just as Sunny here waits patiently by the tree for Santa ... or for you to leave the room so she can destroy your tree:

[thank you, "crayonbeam"]

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on BlueSky and Facebook and Letterboxd]
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