"Right?," in British lingo / SAT 6-13-26 / Lovingly, in a score / Sinister cackle / Retired rapper Azalea / Many a modern chess-playing program / Submissive sort, informally / Obsolescent office accessory / Outmoded living room fixtures / Alligatorid of Central and South America

Constructor: Ryan McCarty

Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium

THEME: none 

Word of the Day: IGGY Azalea (46A: Retired rapper Azalea) —

Amethyst Amelia Kelly (born 7 June 1990), known professionally as Iggy Azalea (/əˈzeɪliə/ ə-ZAY-lee-ə), is an Australian model, businesswoman and former rapper. Born in Sydney, Azalea moved to the United States at the age of 16 to pursue a career in music. She earned recognition on YouTube with the music videos for her 2011 songs "Pussy" and "Two Times". She then self-released her debut mixtape Ignorant Art (2011) before signing with American rapper T.I.'s Grand Hustle Records.

Azalea's debut studio album, The New Classic (2014), peaked within the top five of several charts worldwide and later topped the Billboard Top R&B/Hip-Hop Albums, making Azalea the first non-American female rapper to do so. Its preceding single, "Fancy" (featuring Charli XCX), achieved significant commercial success; it peaked atop the U.S. Billboard Hot 100 and was nominated for Record of the Year at the 2015 Grammy Awards. Azalea was featured on Ariana Grande's 2014 single "Problem", which peaked at number two behind "Fancy". The two songs made Azalea the second musical act (aside from the Beatles) to rank at the top two spots simultaneously with their debut entries in the chart. The album spawned one further single, "Black Widow" (featuring Rita Ora), which peaked within the chart's top ten. [...] 

In 2024, Azalea announced her retirement from music as posted on her social media and by Billboard. // Azalea is one of the best selling female rappers in the world, and her accolades include two American Music Awards, three Billboard Music Awards, an MTV Video Music Award, a People's Choice Award, and four Teen Choice Awards, in addition to nominations for four Grammy Awards. Her YouTube channel together with other collaborators has accumulated 7 billion views, and 15 of her music videos have received over 100 million views on Vevo. (wikipedia)

• • •

A real mixed bag for me. I normally enjoy Ryan McCarty puzzles but this one ... it was like it was intentionally trying to alienate me, starting with A.I. MODEL (3D: Many a modern chess-playing program) (A.I. and chess? This clue really hates me). The encroachment of "A.I." terms into the grid has been one of the worst crossword developments of the past year or so. Whatever the opposite of "gung-ho" is, that is how I feel about A.I. Also how I feel about multi-billionaires (what an unnecessarily horrid clue for HAVE) (24D: Multibillionaire, e.g.). So I've got A.I. and multibillionaires and I've barely gotten started? Inauspicious! What else? Vaping, for one. And then there's this weird obsession with obsolescent things. An obsolescence obsession. Obsolescent office accessories! (STAMP PAD). Outmoded living room fixtures! (PLASMA TVS). Add to that embarrassing manosphere lingo (26D: Submissive sort, informally = BETA), and yeah, there just wasn't that much for me to love. A single ALARM BELL? (Just ONE?). The grid seems very solidly filled, and yet there were no points where I felt really happy with a clue or answer, except maybe early on when I semi-jokingly used "MWAHAHA" to confirm AMASS and AHOY and it turned out to be right! I do love that [Sinister cackle]. But otherwise, highs were hard to come by today.

The puzzle was also really uneven in terms of difficulty. A tough clue on HAVE plus the improbability of a single ALARM BELL meant that I couldn't get into the middle on the first pass. Had to reboot in the SW, which I did in the strangest way—I considered RARE for 24D: Multibillionaire, e.g., even though I knew it could not be right (clue is a noun, so answer has to be a noun). But for some reason I still decided to check that "E" from RARE against the cross and somehow that "E" alone got me BADE (31A: Wished). I wasn't sure about BADE so I checked crosses and confirmed it with AMOROSO (32D: Lovingly, in a score). Except then I wasn't sure about AMOROSO, so I checked its crosses, and both POP ART and AMA checked out, so I was up and rolling again.

And from here, things started to get much easier. That clue on REGGIE JACKSON was Monday-level easy (13D: Clutch hitter nicknamed "Mr. October"), and that "J" got me to VAPE JUICE (ew, the very term—I'm not sure anyone can say it out loud and maintain anything like dignity), and with those long crosses anchoring the middle, the puzzle started to fall quickly. The SE corner was done in about ten seconds, as the "V" from PLASMA TVS made VLOGGER obvious and the whole corner went down easy from there. That just left the NE corner, which didn't put up much of a fight. I rode the ADRIEN Brody SEX DREAMS into the sunset. The end. Ultimately, the puzzle ended up full of things I just didn't care for, and it didn't prove as challenging as I'd generally like a Saturday to be (or as challenging as they have been recently). 

Bullets:

• 1A: Bring together (AMASS) — yes, I too tried UNITE here at first. Crosses didn't check out. Then I tried AMASS, and suddenly ...

• 19A: "Right?," in British lingo ("INNIT?") — ha. Loved this. Can't believe it's been nine years since this very familiar bit of British slang has been in the grid. Five common letters, how is this answer not more popular? Maybe it's less generally familiar than I think it is. Maybe people in the U.S. don't watch as much British TV or as many British movies as I do. It's possible.
• 42A: Festival flier (KITE) — what sort of festival? Is it a KITE festival? I guess I don't go to enough festivals to know why there would be KITEs there.
• 7D: Actor Brody (ADRIEN) — I get ADRIEN Brody and Adam Brody confused. I mean, not if you put them both in front of me, I can definitely tell them apart. But ... two tall dark and arguable handsome actors named Brody, both of whose first names start "AD-" .... wait a minute! OMG I just realized that I'm not confusing ADRIEN Brody and Adam Brody, I'm confusing ADRIEN Brody with Adam Driver, and Adam Brody is somehow acting as a catalyst in this confusion (I know Adam Brody from The O.C., though he appears to have done a lot since then, including getting nominated for an Emmy for something called Nobody Wants This (Netflix, 2024-present)

• 46A: Retired rapper Azalea (IGGY) — "Retired" made me laugh. Out loud. Since when is the puzzle using "retired" for anyone besides athletes?? Since never. Literally never. I just looked over ~175 clues that featured the word "Retired" and that word has never been used in conjunction with any person who wasn't an athlete. It's also been used for old aircraft (SST) and old cigarette mascots (JOE CAMEL). For a rapper? It feels at least mildly insulting that the only adjective used to describe IGGY Azalea is "Retired." Maybe her self-proclaimed "retirement" is the most famous thing about her now, I have no idea, I haven't heard her or seen her name in ages. 
  
• 31D: It comes in handy when the chips are downed (BAG CLIP) — this clue is trying to do a punny thing with the common idiomatic phrase "when the chips are down" but wow it really fails on a literal level. What does the BAG CLIP have to do with chips being downed, i.e. eaten? Yes, when I eat some, and not all, of the chips, it's handy to have a BAG CLIP to keep the remaining chips from going stale. But there is no direct correlation between the eating and the clipping. The BAG CLIP comes in "handy" when you need to store the chips. If I've eaten all the chips, I don't need to store them. So the clue should be something like [It comes in handy when some but not all of the chips are downed]. Doesn't quite have the same ring to it. Or maybe "downed" is being used in some extremely tortured way to mean "depleted"; maybe the idea is that the chip level, the number of chips in the bag, has gone "down." I am overthinking this, but only because the clue is underthinking it. If the chips are, indeed, "downed" (as in "consumed"), then why in the world do I need a BAG CLIP?
• 6A: Alligatorid of Central and South America (CAIMAN) — "Alligatorid," what a cool word? I liked it slightly better when I thought it was "Alligatoroid," which sounds like an awesome '70s mutated-animal disaster film

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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Exhibiting a green face, stereotypically / FRI 6-12-26 / Half ass reply? / Obstacle for Odysseus / Children's book title character in a green suit / Home of the world's largest independently owned bookstore (spanning an entire city block) / Cab alternative / Style with spotty coverage? / Pastry with Austrian origins, despite its name

Constructor: Amanda Winters

Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium

THEME: none 

Word of the Day: Empire of the ANTS (19A: "Empire of the ___" (1977 sci-fi film with an approval rating of 5% on Rotten Tomatoes)) —

[Joan Collins!]

Empire of the Ants is a 1977 science fiction horror film co-written and directed by Bert I. Gordon. Based very loosely on the 1905 short story "Empire of the Ants" by H. G. Wells, the film involves a group of prospective land buyers led by a land developer, pitted against large mutated ants.

It is the third and last film released in A.I.P.'s H.G. Wells film cycle, which include The Food of the Gods (1976) and The Island of Dr. Moreau (1977). // The opening narration notes how ants use pheromones to communicate and how this causes an obligatory response. As the opening credits roll, barrels sporting radioactive waste decals are dumped off a boat into the ocean. One of the barrels washes onto a beach and leaks a silvery goo onto the sand.

Meanwhile, shady land developer Marilyn Fryser takes prospective clients on a boat trip to view a beachfront land development in the area of the waste dump. Unbeknownst to the visitors, ants are writhing in the radioactive goo from the leaky barrel. The visitors question the value of the land, but the trip is cut short when some of them are attacked by giant mutated ants. The ants destroy their boat and chase the group through woods. After losing some of their party along the way, the survivors discover a town and gain a promise of help from the local sheriff. Their sense of safety is short-lived as they discover that the queen ant, using pheromones, has put the townsfolk under her control and is making them provide her colony with sugar from the local sugar plant. Joe Morrison, one of the prospective land buyers, kills the queen ant in an explosion, enabling the remaining survivors to escape the area in a speedboat. (wikipedia)

• • •

This was probably "Easy," but I got stupidly bogged down in the NE, so I had to bump it up to "Easy-Medium." Two main problems. First, the term GENETIC LOTTERY just doesn't resonate. Seeing it now, I recognize it as a phrase I've seen or heard before, but I don't really know how or where or why it's used. It's just ... your genes. You get what you get. You have no choice in the matter. It's luck. Is that the idea? You "win the GENETIC LOTTERY" if you live a long and relatively healthy life? Thinking in terms of "winning" or "losing" genes gets you into some pretty creepy, eugenics-adjacent territory. Anyway, the term just isn't on my radar, so even having GENETIC in the grid didn't help me get it. GENETIC ...  MAKEUP? CODE? I was looking for a more neutral and common term. So what should've been my anchor in the NE just wasn't there. Which leads to the second problem: JEALOUS. As in, "I'm JEALOUS of those of you who managed to solve the NE corner without writing in 'JEALOUS' for 5A: Exhibiting a green face, stereotypically." I looked at that clue, looked at the letters I had in place (_EA____) and confidently wrote in JEALOUS. Jealousy is the "green-eyed monster," and you can be "green with envy," which is basically the same as jealousy, so, yeah, JEALOUS. Solid as a rock, I thought. I see now the clues are doing some kind of "green" bit here, with successive "green" clues (this one followed by the BABAR one (12A: Children's book title character in a green suit)). But the clue isn't the problem. I just fell into the pit created by the coincidence of the shared letters in JEALOUS and SEASICK. It also would've helped me if, after I'd ripped out JEALOUS, I could've seen either CHRONIC (10D: Persistent) or KEY WEST (11D: Home of the Ernest Hemingway House). I found my stuckness so perplexing, I took a screenshot.

Now please understand that when I say I got bogged down, I mean "relative to the rest of the puzzle." It actually took me very little time to get out of this mess. It's just that there were no other messes in the puzzle, so this bit stood out. Couldn't parse CHRONIC and wow I really should've seen KEY WEST but my Florida associations with Hemingway are surpassed by my Idaho associations, probably because my family is from Idaho and I've been to Ketchum, ID in the not-too-distant past (that's where Hemingway killed himself). Also, did you know—Ketchum, Idaho also has an Ernest Hemingway House!? It's true. The one in Ketchum is actually called the Ernest and Mary Hemingway House, but still, a house is a house, and a house is not a home, and two houses both alike in dignity divided against itself shall not stand! Or something like that. I'm laughing now at the fact that KETCHUM and KEYWEST, like JEALOUS and SEASICK, share two letters! Anyway, after all this floundering, I was saved by ice cream (9D: Place where customers get their licks in? = ICE CREAM PARLOR). Are there no limits to its magical powers!? Looking forward to hitting the ICE CREAM PARLOR later today—going up to Ithaca to catch a movie (Stop! That! Train!) and then hitting Purity Ice Cream directly afterwards so I can have my vanilla malt (drink of the summer! third-best beverage in the world after hot black coffee and a cold Manhattan). It got hot and humid here all of a sudden yesterday, so a cool theater followed by a cold melt is gonna feel amazing. 

I found this puzzle a little dull for a Friday. Something about the shape of it meant that the longer answers were cut off from each other and everything around them was kinda short. It's a very choppy grid that appears to have very little to offer in the way of marquee fill, though there are six long answers, which is ... reasonable, I guess. I'd like something closer to ten or even a dozen, but six isn't terrible, I suppose. Very few of those answers seemed particularly marquee-worthy. I can see someone liking GENETIC LOTTERY, I guess, but as we've established, I did not. I do love ICE CREAM PARLORs, and BEST-KEPT SECRET is a plucky phrase, but the others are just OK. Not bad. But lacking the kind of zing and oomph that makes for a really bright Friday. The parts I enjoyed most were, again, ICE CREAM PARLOR, and then PORTLAND, OREGON, largely because of the clue (58A: Home of the world's largest independently owned bookstore (spanning an entire city block)) The bookstore in question is Powell's ... I guess putting the name in the clue would've made it too easy? But if you know Powell's, then the clue is already easy, so why not just name the bookstore? You do all this free advertising for Apple and Oreo, you can name an independent bookstore, New York Times, it won't hurt you.

[my Tuesday mug, but maybe I'll break it out today in honor of the puzzle ... oh who am I kidding, I will not do that, the mug schedule is the mug schedule and it changes for no one!] 

Nothing particularly tricky in the grid today, that I can see. I laughed at the clue on ATTIC (7D: Ghost story?). It's almost certainly not original, but it's funny and vivid and clever and everything a "?" should be. I also liked that there was both a "cup" clue (44A: Big name in cups = SOLO) and a "cone" clue (63A: Cone holders = RETINAS) in a puzzle that also contained ICE CREAM PARLOR. Big day for ice cream, at least in my head.

Bullets:

• 1A: Get-up (DUDS) — so, "get-up" as in "clothing." I was thinking "get-up" as in "pep," "vim," "vigor," but maybe that's "get-up-and-go"

• 20A: Velociraptor, e.g., informally (DINO) — yesterday was the 33rd anniversary of the release of Jurassic Park. Spielberg's got a new one in theaters this weekend, Disclosure Day, which sounds ... good, actually. Or promising. The trailers make it seem a little somber / humorless, which has never been true of his great blockbusters (E.T., Close Encounters, Jurassic Park, etc.). But maybe that won't be true. I'm going to see it no matter what, per the Josh O'Connor Rule (which is the rule that says I will see any movie starring Josh O'Connor):

• 29A: Half ass reply? (HEE) — cute. I had HAW at first.
• 35D: Baseball trio (OUTS) — you know you've been doing crossword puzzles way, way too long when you see [Baseball trio] and the letters "OU" and your first thought is ALOUS (brothers Felipe, Matty, and Jesus all played in the Majors, and at one point (1963) made up the entirety of the Giants' outfield)

[Baseball trio]

• 49D: Do business? (SALON) — "Do" as in "hairdo"; I was just just grateful the answer wasn't urination- or defecation-related.
• 51D: Obstacle for Odysseus (SIREN) — there were a lot of obstacles! Scylla Charybdis Cyclops Circe on and on. But of those, only CIRCE fit, and I must've had other letters in place because I never considered her. Odysseus makes his men tie him to the mast when they pass the SIRENs so he can hear their call without being tempted (to his death?) by it. His men plug their ears.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on BlueSky and Facebook and Letterboxd]
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