Five train in Brooklyn / THU 1-29-26 / Like a listening device made out of a paper clip, a plastic straw and seven Lego blocks / Busiest French airport not serving Paris / Bum's place in a bar / Michigan's historic 1991 basketball team, familiarly / Texter's declaration of affection / Villain portrayer in "Rocky III" / Clubber ___, "Rocky III" villain

Constructor: Kit Sheffield

Relative difficulty: Easy

THEME: "Gently down the stream ..."— answers ending with the letter string "-ROW" are entered in the grid as if "ROW" were a separate word describing how the remaining letters should be written in; that is, all the preceding letters in the answer are arranged in a repeated, grid-spanning ROW:

Theme answers:

• GGGGGGGGGGGGGGG (20A: Expand => GROW = "G" ROW (i.e. a row of "G"s))
• SORSORSORSORSOR (37A: Sadness => SORROW = "SOR" ROW (i.e. a row of "SOR"s))
• TOMORTOMORTOMOR (52A: Day after today => TOMORROW = "TOMOR" ROW (i.e. a row of "TOMOR"s)

Word of the Day: MACGYVER[ED] (3D: Like a listening device made out of a paper clip, a plastic straw and seven Lego blocks) —

to make, form, or repair (something) with what is conveniently on hand

Angus MacGyver, as portrayed by actor Richard Dean Anderson in the titular, action-packed television series MacGyver, was many things—including a secret agent, a Swiss Army knife enthusiast, and a convert to vegetarianism—but he was no MacGuffin (a character that keeps the plot in motion despite lacking intrinsic importance). In fact, so memorable was this man, his mullet, and his ability to use whatever was available to him—often simple things, such as a paper clip, chewing gum, or a rubber band—to escape a sticky situation or to make a device to help him complete a mission, that people began associating his name with making quick fixes or finding innovative solutions to immediate problems. Hence the verb MacGyver, a slang term meaning to “make, form, or repair (something) with what is conveniently on hand.” After years of steadily increasing and increasingly varied usage following the show’s run from 1985 to 1992 (tracked in some detail here), MacGyver was added to our online dictionary in 2022. (merriam-webster.com)

• • •

Congratulations to frequent comments-section contributor Kit ("kitshef") on this NYTXW debut. Was a little confused when I saw all the "G"s start to line up but decided to keep solving and assume everything would eventually become clear. That moment came (with a genuine, big "aha" moment) when I saw SOR SOR take shape and thought "OK, now I really need to know what's going on with the theme." Looked at the clue (37A: Sadness), thought SORROW, wondered why I was only seeing "SOR"s ... and pow, aha. It's a "SOR" ROW. Very clever. Yes, you get gibberish in the grid, but it's ... meaningful gibberish. It's actually a rather simple, elegant visual expression of ordinary words. There's something strangely poetic about it, almost like the units that make up the "rows" are metrical units, poetic feet making perfectly regular 15-letter lines. It's not exactly iambic pentameter, but SOR SOR SOR SOR SOR does have five units, and TOMOR(row) and TOMOR(row) and TOMOR(row) is straight out of Shakespeare, for god's sake. My one disappointment with the theme came just after I got the "SOR" row. At that point, I didn't know the themers were all going to be rows, so when I looked back at the "GGGG...." answer I had left behind, I thought, "ha, amazing—a G-STRING!" But no, no stripper attire today. Just a "G" row ("GROW!"). If having the "G" string be just another "Row" was kind of a let-down, getting TOMOR TOMOR TOMOR brought my appreciation of the them back up somewhat. Anytime the puzzle wants to quote Macbeth to me, I'm here for it.

While I enjoyed the theme, this puzzle was not nearly challenging or tricky enough for a Thursday. I supposed it's possible that solvers might've found the theme inscrutable for a good deal of time, but the rest of the grid offered almost nothing in the way of challenge. I didn't even see some of the clues in a few of these corners, so easily did everything fill itself in. ORATE DALES and D-LIST ... I don't think I looked at any of those clues. The Downs in that SW corner went right in like it was Monday. Possibly (probably) the toughest thing for solvers to tackle to day—certainly the toughest for me—was MACGYVERED (as a p.t. verb!). Parsing it was ... an adventure. Me: "what adjectives start with 'MACG'? I must have an error. But LIMO and ADAM were undeniable and NICE (despite being a city and not, in my mind, an "airport") (17A: Busiest French airport not serving Paris) was really the only option there. So ... once again, just plow forward and hope things become clear. A few more letters in and things seemed to be getting less not more clear (a "Y"? a frickin' "V"?) but then I had an "aha" moment as big as, maybe bigger than the SORSORSORSORSOR one—of course, it's MACGYVERED, from the '80s TV show I never watched about the guy who famously invents makeshift devices to ... I dunno, get out of danger? Beat the bad guys? You didn't have to watch the show to know the concept. Iconic. I even remember the actor's name, Richard Dean Anderson—how!? Childhood TV memories are powerful, I guess. Speaking of, this puzzle is awfully, terribly, exceedingly Gen-X-coded. The proper nouns in this one hardly ever escape the '80s/'90s vortex. The Princess Bride (1987). The Simpsons (still on, somehow, but biggest in the '90s), The FAB FIVE (1991-93), MacGyver (1985-92). There's even a weird mini-obsession with Rocky III (1982) (1D: Clubber ___, "Rocky III" villain = LANG) (35A: Villain portrayer in "Rocky III" = MR. T). As a card-carrying member of Gen X who watched "The Simpsons" religiously and who actually attended Michigan during the FAB FIVE years, this puzzle seemed aimed specifically at me, where its pop culture sensibilities are concerned. I'd love to cheer for that, but if I'm being fair, the cultural breadth of focus here seems awfully NARNARNARNARNAR. 

And then there's the fill, which is a little on the weak side. It's not just that the grid is built in such a way that we get a lot of short stuff, it's that the short stuff is too often OOF-y. That "X" may be the most unnecessary and costly "X" I've ever seen in a grid. A partial pharma answer???? (GLAXO-) crossed with a partial French phrase?????! (-À DEUX). Yeeesh and yikes. I feel like the (understandable) commitment to MACGYVERED created a kind of tight situation, as did the fact that the grid is built in such a way that the G---O pattern (where GLAXO is now) is immovable. It cements the first and second themer together. You cannot change that "G" or that "O" and so ... options get very, very limited. So you get this very MACGYVERED solution. GLAXO / À DEUX is the equivalent of ... trying to build a listening device out of a paper clip, a plastic straw and seven Lego blocks. Crazy emergency move. Just somehow not as cool as anything MacGyver ever did (probably—again, never seen the show). There had to have been other options (?). Not much else made me wince outright, except "I DIG," which crosswords have falsely caused us to accept as a thing people ever actually said (also, I've never heard "Capisce" used as anything but a question ("Capisce!?")—as merriam-webster dot com says, it's interrogative ("used to ask if a message, warning, etc., has been understood"). No one would say "Capisce" to mean simply "I DIG" (just as no one but a caricature of a beatnik on TV would say "I DIG" at all). The last real wince was that NETS clue (66A: Five train in Brooklyn). I think it's trying for a subway pun (???). I don't know why that clue doesn't have a "?" on it. The only way I can make sense of the clue is that it refers to the Brooklyn NETS, a professional basketball team. Since professional basketball teams have five players on the court at any give time, I think that's where the "five" comes from. Presumably, these five players "train" (in the sense of workout / practice) in Brooklyn. So it's "Five (who) train in Brooklyn" (!?). Tortured syntax on that clue. (If the clue is somehow not basketball-related at all, you'll let me know, thanks)

Bullets:

• 31D: Bum's place in a bar (STOOL) — "Bum" is your ass. Well, someone's ass. Don't mind asses in the puzzle at all, but trying to make us think of "bum" in the pejorative sense of a down-and-out alcoholic, that I could do without.
• 28D: "Toodles!" ("I'M OFF!") — I wrote in "I'M OUT!" at first. "I'M OFF!" is better. Except it's still bad because it means you've got two "I'M"s in the grid (see 46D: "Leave this to me" = "I'M ON IT")
• 33A: Folie ___ (À DEUX) — probably should've defined this phrase earlier, for those not familiar with it. It's a French phrase (literally "madness for/of two") that refers to shared delusion or psychosis. People who do crazy things as a pair that they would (probably) never do on their own.

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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Thick, spiked outer covering? / WED 1-28-26 / Score points in Pac-Man, say / Casting rod? / Number indicating position: Abbr. / Arctic fishing shelter / Article of furniture on which a plate of oats might be set? / Walk from one coop to another? / Commoner, informally / Teenager's response to a dad joke / Dirk Nowitzki's longtime team, to fans

Constructor: Kevin Curry

Relative difficulty: Easy

THEME: Animal "S" shift — familiar compound or two-part terms and phrases involving animals are clued as possessive phrases—that is, you have to mentally take the "S" from the front of the second part of the base answer and affix it (with an apostrophe) to the end of the first part. The wacky possessive phrases are clued wackily ("?"-style):

Theme answers:

• HORSE'S TABLE (17A: Article of furniture on which a plate of oats might be set?) (from "horse stable")
• DRAGON'S LAYER (23A: Thick, spiked outer covering?) (from ... the movie Dragonslayer?)
• PIG'S KIN (37A: Relatives in a sty?) (from "pigskin")
• CAT'S CAN (39A: "Throne" for a lion king?) (from "CAT scan")
• CHICKEN'S TRIP (46A: Walk from one coop to another?) (from "chicken strip")
• TURTLE'S HELL (56A: Being flipped on its back, e.g.?)  (from "turtle shell")

Word of the Day: DRAGONSLAYER (see 23A) —

Dragonslayer is a 1981 American dark fantasy film directed by Matthew Robbins from a screenplay he co-wrote with Hal Barwood. It stars Peter MacNicol in his feature film debut, Ralph Richardson, John Hallam, and Caitlin Clarke. It was a co-production between Paramount Pictures and Walt Disney Productions, where Paramount handled North American distribution and Disney handled international distribution through Buena Vista International. The story is set in a fictional medieval kingdom where a young wizard encounters challenges as he hunts a dragon, Vermithrax Pejorative.

It is the second joint production between Paramount and Disney, after Popeye (1980), and is more mature than most contemporary Disney films. Because the audience expected the film to be solely children's entertainment, the violence, adult themes and brief nudity were somewhat controversial, though Disney did not hold the North American distribution rights. The film was rated PG in the U.S. Like The Black Hole (1979), the version of the film broadcast on the Disney Channel was edited to remove two scenes.

The special effects were created at Industrial Light and Magic, the first use of ILM outside of a Lucasfilm production. Phil Tippett had co-developed an animation technique there for The Empire Strikes Back (1980) called go motion, a variation on stop motion. This led to the film's nomination for the Academy Award for Best Visual Effects, but it lost to Raiders of the Lost Ark, the only other visual effects nominee that year, whose special effects were also provided by ILM. Including the hydraulic 40-foot (12 m) model, the dragon consists of 16 puppets dedicated to flying, crawling, or breathing fire.

The film received generally positive reviews from critics, but it performed poorly at the box office, grossing $14.1 million worldwide against a production budget of $18 million. It was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Score, which went to Chariots of Fire. It was nominated for a Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation, again given to Raiders of the Lost Ark. (wikipedia)

• • •

If nothing else, this puzzle has inspired me to watch DRAGONSLAYER (1981). Despite being the target audience for this thing (12-year-olds who were into Dungeons & Dragons, Star Wars, and video games), I somehow missed it completely. It came out the same year as Raiders, so I was probably too busy seeing that five or six times. Anyway, 45 years later I think I am in exactly the right frame of mind to watch a movie featuring a puppet dragon called Vermithrax Pejorative. That's its surname! Pejorative! Amazing. Sounds bad! Anyway, thanks for the time travel, puzzle. Now I've got a new movie for my already extensive Watchlist. As for the rest of this puzzle, it seemed rudimentary and dull to me, and lacked a clear conceptual cohesiveness. Why animals? Why is one of the animals imaginary? Why is one of the animals (cat) not an animal at all in its base phrase (CAT scan), while all the other animals remain animals on both sides of the "S" switch? I kept waiting for the revealer that never came—give me a reason to be doing any of this. What's the gag? The whole "S"-shift thing feels very very Very old-fashioned. Like, I've seen variations of this specific kind of wackiness a lot before. Feels very '90s-coded, this kind of rudimentary wordplay. The clues are trying valiantly to make it all fun—toilets for lions, pig family reunions—but ultimately the wackiness all seemed pretty tepid. And then the fill was bland, with a tired short stuff—LOS LAS ORD ADE ECO EMO etc. The bottom is particularly grim, with a whole stack of things I'd rather not see (a turtle being tortured on top of AD FEES on top of a DESPOT). I would not say this puzzle is "SO LAME," but then I would never use that phrase since disabled people I knew got me to stop using "lame" as a general pejorative decades ago. Speaking of Pejorative, I gotta wrap this up so I can go watch DRAGONSLAYER! (Actually, I gotta work today, but later, for sure!)

This one was fairly color-by-numbers, right from the jump, with the gimme AÇAI allowing me to toggle to Downs and tick them all off in order. Repeat same thing with MEDUSA. The only resistance today, outside the semi-wacky theme answers, was in the cluing for a handful of the short clues. POWER had a tricky "?" clue (13D: Outlet store?—because an "outlet" is where POWER is "stored"). For some reason CLIPS took me a few crosses to get (46D: Assortment to view on YouTube)—I think of myself as watching videos, not CLIPS (which, to me, are parts of larger filmed things), but ... fair enough. Had SLINK before SKULK (33D: Sneak around)—just glad I didn't write in SNEAK there. Seems like something I'd do, especially if I was going too fast and not really paying attention. Second ORD in the past week, so that's ... bad. Had to wait on the "N" in SNARFS since it could so easily have been SCARFS (44D: Wolfs (down)). But this is all ordinary difficulty—the kind of vagueness and misdirection you might find on any day. Very mild. Mostly this one just seemed boring. Not POOR. Just blah.

Bullets:

• 5A: Monster whose gaze remained lethal after her death (MEDUSA) — I'd forgotten this. That 12yo who played D&D (but failed to see DRAGONSLAYER) probably knew this MEDUSA fact very well. I miss that kid.
• 40A: Arctic fishing shelter (ICE HUT) — that's where I.C.E. should go—to the ICE HUT! And then, you know, stay there. Til summer.
• 2D: Member-owned business (CO-OP) — yeah, I see you trying to make this a non-chicken answer, but this still looks exactly like "COOP," which is in your CHICKEN'S TRIP clue; I'd probably have tried to figure out a way to get rid of it (or, easier, just rewrite that CHICKEN'S TRIP clue (46A: Walk from one coop to another?)—there are way, way funnier ways to go at that one). 
• 30A: Casting rod? (WAND) — I'm telling you, 12yo me would've been really into crosswords if he'd known there were MEDUSAs and DRAGONSLAYERs and wizards with WANDs!). Ooh, and Pac-Man!! (6D: Score points in Pac-Man, say). You could've sold me on your adult pastime pretty easy, I think. 

That's it 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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