Crib for a doll / SAT 6-21-25 / "Ritorna vincitor" singer / Port WSW of Algiers / Name in the baking aisle / Old-fashioned club / Gram alternative / Black-and-yellow demarcation / Berkshire institution / Rita of the "Fifty Shades" movies / Donned quickly / QB Dawson who faced Bart Starr / First name of the "Princess of Pop"

Constructor: Christina Iverson and Doug Peterson

Relative difficulty: Medium

THEME: none 

Word of the Day: Two-Lane Blacktop (27D: Vehicles seen in the films "Dazed and Confused" and "Two-Lane Blacktop" = GTOS) —

["Warren Oates is GTO"]

Two-Lane Blacktop is a 1971 American road film directed and edited by Monte Hellman, from a screenplay by Rudy Wurlitzer and Will Corry. It stars musicians James Taylor and Dennis Wilson, Warren Oates, and Laurie Bird in the leading roles. The sparse, existentialist plot follows a group of street racers during a cross-country race through the American Southwest.

Universal Pictures commissioned the film in the wake of Easy Rider's monumental success. Hellman, who had previously worked in low-budget and independent films, developed the screenplay with Wurlitzer, then-known mainly as an underground writer, during an actual cross-country road trip. Filming took place in locations around the Southwest between August and October 1970.

On initial release, the film received generally positive reviews, but was not a commercial success. Over the years, it developed the reputation of a sleeper hit and a cult classic, and has been reevaluated as a major work of the New Hollywood movement. In 2012, the US Library of Congress selected the film for preservation in the United States National Film Registry as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant." (wikipedia)

• • •

Despite the avalanche of trivia (eight (8!) names, and that's excluding brands, institutions, geography, etc.), I really enjoyed this one, for a few reasons. First, it was hard enough. That is, it was punching at a Saturday level. It took a good lot of fussing around before I got anything like a grip on this puzzle, which is how it should be. And which brings me to my second reason for liking the puzzle—the exact moment that I got a grip. Nothing quite so thrilling (crosswordly speaking) as finally breaking through on a tough puzzle, and when that breakthrough comes in the form of shooting, sparkling answers like BARBIE DREAM HOUSE followed immediately by SIBLING RIVALRY, well, that feels like fireworks. Magic. Seriously, it was like my grid erupted in light and color. 

Third, I liked the grid's weird, skinny shape (14x16 rather than the traditional 15x15). And then fourth, and more personally, I just liked how Of-My-Generation this puzzle was. It felt like being a kid ... or someone under 30, anyway. That is, it felt RAD. Two of my favorite movies in the same clue! (one made in the '70s, the other set in the '70s) (27D: Vehicles seen in the films "Dazed and Confused" and "Two-Lane Blacktop"). Sports legends I learned about as a kid (PISTOL PETE Maravich, LEN Dawson). Young JODIE Foster! The "Muppet Show"! The puzzle was speaking my language. Not always (LOL Frozen and Fifty Shades—still never seen either). But mostly.

So many false starts today. SUET (!?) before GHEE (23A: Kitchen alternative to tallow). DIVA before AIDA (10D: "Ritorna vincitor" singer); EKG before ORG (37D: ___ chart); "BAH!" before "GAH!" (44A: "Ugh!"); "CAN WE!?" before "CAN'T I!?" (47D: "C'mon, please?"). I almost went with RICE before ROTI, but sensed that that was probably wrong (too easy) (19D: Side order with curry). As usual, the toughest part of the puzzle was getting started. Seemed like Germany was probably good at lots of Olympic sports, so BOBSLED took some time. Parsing "I HAVE TO," yeesh, tough for me (14A: Words before ask, admit or go). I see "Berkshire," I think Massachusetts, so even though I kinda sorta wanted ETON at 6D: Berkshire institution, I didn't trust it ("Berkshire" is a "ceremonial county" in England; the Berkshires are mountains in New England). And DONG ... I must've learned this currency before, but I keep forgetting it, possibly because my brain has already slotted DONG in a different meaning category. At least a couple different categories, actually, but one ("1.") in particular. 

But after the BARBIE DREAM HOUSE / SIBLING RIVALRY explosion, the puzzle got a lot easier—though not so easy that it got boring. STOPPED ON A DIME was also a highlight, as was some of the mid-range fill (THREW ON, BOBSLED, AIR KISS, RANG OUT). And I only had to dip into my Bag Of Old Crosswordese once (for ORAN—the thing about the Bag is that it's full of ugly things that are also very helpful things) (50D: Port WSW of Algiers). Actually, SNERD is probably in the Bag as well, but I knew SNERD before I ever started doing crosswords, so I don't think of him that way (12D: Mortimer who once made a guest appearance on "The Muppet Show"). No one area of the grid really stood out as too tough or too rough, which means that the puzzle played toughish but also smoothish. 

Bullets:

• 29A: Black-and-yellow demarcation (POLICE TAPE) — another good long answer. Kinda grim, but solid.
• 34A: Foster kid in "Taxi Driver"? (JODIE) — this was a gimme, despite the attempted misdirection. Needed a more obscure young-JF vehicle. Maybe Freaky Friday, or better yet, Bugsy Malone.

• 3D: Crib for a doll (BARBIE DREAM HOUSE) — "Crib" here is just slang for "residence," which you probably knew, but just in case ... 
• 12D: Mortimer who once made a guest appearance on "The Muppet Show" (SNERD) — also just in case ... just in case it's not clear, Mortimer SNERD is a ventriloquist's dummy of mid-century renown.

• 33D: Name in the baking aisle (KARO) — I think this is ... what ... like a sweetener of some kind. A corn syrup, I think ... yup, that's it. I sometimes get it confused with KNORR, which is a brand of bouillon:

• 51D: Gram alternative (NANA) — nickname for "grandmother"; I almost wrote in NANO here (thinking "Gram" was a bygone MP3 player, maybe?)

If the puzzle had too many proper nouns for you, here are some more proper nouns you're sure to love: I'm going to see WAXAHATCHEE tonight, with M.J. LENDERMAN and (a recent and, to me, thrilling addition) HURRAY FOR THE RIFF RAFF tonight at an orchard (!) in central NY. This is my Christmas gift from my wife. Then tomorrow we're off for our annual Great Lakes vacation with my best friends. I'll blog a couple of times over the next week, but it'll mostly be my tried-and-true guest writers for a while (starting tomorrow, w/ Rafa). See you (...checks calendar...) oh, Monday. That's not so long. Until then, or whenever next time is ...

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

P.S. Oh no, due to miscommunication, Rafa did *today's* write-up. So now there are two write-ups of this puzzle LOL. So scroll down to enjoy Rafa's work (Or click here if you’re on your phone). And then also look for him tomorrow.  

[Follow Rex Parker on BlueSky and Facebook]
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First name of the "Princess of Pop" / SAT 6-21-25 / Old-fashioned club / Kitchen alternative to tallow / Donned quickly / Performs a perfect dismount, e.g. / Like "Animal Farm" and "Don Quixote" / Average booster / Literature Nobelist who wrote "Dodsworth" and "Kingsblood Royal"

Constructor: Christina Iverson and Doug Peterson

Relative difficulty: Hard

THEME: None

Word of the Day: BOBSLED (1A: Olympics event in which Germany is the traditional powerhouse) —

Bobsleigh or bobsled is a winter sport in which teams of 2 to 4 athletes make timed speed runs down narrow, twisting, banked, iced tracks in a gravity-powered sleigh. International bobsleigh competitions are governed by the International Bobsleigh and Skeleton Federation (formerly the FIBT).

• • •

Hello crossword people! It's Rafa here subbing for Rex. Happy to be back on your screens, and I hope you've all been doing great since I was last here. I've been doing OK, and can't wait for summer to finally start. (Summer in San Francisco starts in late August, and goes through early October. June and July and mostly cold and sad and windy. Boo!)

More excitingly, tomorrow is Westwords -- the West Coast crossword tournament! I cannot wait to hang out with crossword friends new and old, and solve some great puzzles. If you're there, say hi! I'll probably have a sticker that says "Rafa" on my shirt. If you won't be there, pencil it in your schedules for next year! (Remember when I said June is cold and sad and windy? That only applies to San Francisco. Westwords is in Berkeley, which is only 10 miles away but it is beautiful and warm and sunny in June. This is very important to know!)

Anyways, let's talk about this puzzle now. I don't know if it's because it's kind of late at night and my brain is somewhat mush, but this played quite hard for me! One of the slowest Saturday solves in recent memory. There was just resistance everywhere I tried to go, and very few answers came easy. As a seasoned solver, it's somewhat rare that a puzzle feels this hard, and it was fun to crack it slowly. I'm curious to know if this also played hard for others -- let me know!

Trains and buses in San Francisco are called MUNI

The first thing I noticed about this grid was that it had an unusual shape. Non-Sunday crosswords are typically 15x15, but this one is 14x16. This makes it easier to include entries of length 16 (impossible in a 15x15 grid) and 14 (annoying to build around in a 15x15 grid), which are more likely to be new to solvers. BARBIE DREAM HOUSE and SIBLING RIVALRY were my favorites here. RAILROAD STATIONS feels a bit more neutral but has a lovely clue in [Training facilities?] (facilities where you get on trains, aka train-ing). STOPPED ON A DIME is a totally legit idiom but didn't feel super zingy to me.

Netflix is headquartered in LOS Gatos, in the Bay Area

Overall, the clue-answer pair in PRIVATE JET and [Flight of fancy?] felt like the pièce de résistance. I said "ooh, that's good" out loud when I figured it out. There lots else to love in the non-spanner fill -- things like LET IT GO, HEART SMART, AIR KISS, THREW ON, etc. I had never heard of PISTOL PETE, but I also have never heard of most sports things, so alas I am unable to comment on whether it is good crossword fill!

There's an iconic hike at Stanford to walk up to this dish, which I guess is an ANTENNA

Hmm, what else? [It has its peaks and valleys] didn't totally land for me for GRAPH. Maybe I'm missing something but I don't think of high and low points on a graph as "peaks" and "valleys" ... it felt like a misdirect that was trying too hard. ORAN was the only piece of fill that felt off. I tend to be a very geography-forward crossword constructor, but ORAN and ADEN have always felt a bit a bit too ... obscure? ... to me. "Obscure" isn't really the right word here, actually. ORAN is a city of >1M people. But there are >100 cities with >1M people in China, and >65 in India. I'm not sure what makes a city "worthy" of inclusion in a crossword by an American publication, genuinely. I personally have never heard of ORAN in the news or in any other context outside of a crossword puzzle. Though of course (see: "I also have never heard of most sports things"), this is not a good metric for worthiness of crossword inclusion. Maybe I need to read more about Algeria? Anyways, this became a whole tangent. I'm just trying to convey that everything has Nuance™. But we can move on now!

Actually, this is pretty much all I wanted to say. A fun Saturday offering today that put up a good challenge for me!

Bullets:

• 51D NANA [Gram alternative] -- This is "gram" as in a nickname for a grandma.
• 34A JODIE [Foster kid in "Taxi Driver"?] -- This is a ? clue because "Foster" is the actress JODIE'S last name, and she was a kid in the movie Taxi Driver. (Yes I had to look this up. Real fans of Rafa's blog subs will recall that I famously know nothing about movies or actors.)
• 10D AIDA ["Ritorna vincitor" singer] / 12D SNERD [Mortimer who once made a guest appearance on "The Muppet Show"] -- big "old time" crossword vibes in this little corner with these answers
• 14A I HAVE TO [Words before ask, admit, or go] -- I can't decide if I like that this was essentially clued as a three-word partial instead of as a standalone phrase

Signed, Rafa

[Follow Rex Parker on BlueSky and Facebook]
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❤️ Support this blog ❤️: 

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✏️ Upcoming Crossword Tournaments ✏️

• Westwords (Berkeley) (Sun., Jun. 22, 2025)
• Boswords (Boston) (Sun. July 27, 2025)
• Lollapuzzoola 18 (NYC) (Sat., Aug. 9, 2025) 
• Midwest Crossword Tournament (Chicago) (Sat., Oct. 4, 2025)

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📘 My other blog 📘:

• Pop Sensation (vintage paperbacks)

Read more...