Yellowish color for old computer graphics / TUE 2-24-26 / Tiny swine / Brew that's a little cloudy and fruity / Utter rubbish / President of China beginning in 2013 / Supermodel Hadid

Constructor: Adam Aaronson

Relative difficulty: Medium-Challenging (**for a Tuesday**)

THEME: e.g. — every theme clue ends with "e.g.," and every theme answer has the initials "E.G.":

Theme answers:

• ETHNIC GROUP (17A: Nuyoricans, e.g.)
• ELECTRIC GUITAR (24A: Fender Strato caster, e.g.)
• EL GRECO (36A: "The Disrobing of Christ," e.g.)
• ENDOCRINE GLAND (50A: Thyroid, e.g.)
• EVENING GOWN (59A: Dress for a soirée, e.g.)

Word of the Day: Nuyoricans (see 17A) — 

Nuyorican is a portmanteau word blending "New York" (or "Nueva York" in Spanish) and "Puerto Rican," referring to Puerto Ricans located in or around New York City, their culture, or their descendants (especially those raised or currently living in the New York metropolitan area). This term is sometimes used for Puerto Ricans living in other areas in the Northeastern US Mainland outside New York State as well. The term is also used by Islander Puerto Ricans (Puerto Ricans from Puerto Rico) to differentiate those of Puerto Rican descent from the Puerto Rico-born. (wikipedia)

• • •

Feels like it's been a while since I thought the editors misjudged the level of difficulty in this direction—that is, since a puzzle felt harder than average for its day of the week. But this one, yeah, this one felt like a Wednesday, for sure. Spelling XI JINPING alone was a total adventure (31D: President of China beginning in 2013), then there was the toughish (for me) clues on EL GRECO and AMBER (I had OCHER (?)) (6A: Yellowish color for old computer graphics) and BOO (8D: Honeybun) (so many three-letter "Honeybun"s out there), and then the supermodel I don't know (GIGI), the ARM/AIM thing (43A / 33D: Asset for a thrower), the WHEAT part of WHEAT BEER. All of this was gettable, it just took more time than most Tuesdays take. More "what?," more hacking around until the letters fell into place. And it didn't just take more time to solve—it also took more time for me to understand the theme. Not a ton of time, just ... some. At the end, I could see that all the themers had "E.G." as their initials, but ... why? I kept looking for a revealer, but ... nothing. "E.g., e.g., where would you put the 'e.g.' in a puzzle like this?" Well, duh. The clues. I had not noticed that every clue ended in e.g. because crossword clues end in e.g. all the time—it's not a distinctive feature. So that little twist—turning a perfectly ordinary clue element into a theme element—was surprising. Clever. Again, more characteristic of later week puzzles. But I appreciated the "oh!" moment. 

'Mainly I was just relieved that there was a revealer (of a sort). Because before that, I was thinking "uh ... just having E.G. initials is not enough. Not themeworthy." The cluing conceit gives the E.G. stuff purpose. It's a neat little trick. During the solve, my ideas about what the theme might be were all over the map. At first, I noticed that both ETHNIC GROUP and ELECTRIC GUITAR feature an "ICG" letter string broken across their two words. But then EL GRECO broke up that pattern. By the time I got ENDOCRINE GLAND, I was like "is there 'CRINGE' in every answer? Anagrammed? For some reason?" But no, that didn't check out either. I don't necessarily enjoy fumbling around like that, but I did think it was kinda cute the way the "e.g." in the theme clues was eventually like "hey, hey there ... you missed me. I'm right in front of your damned face."

The fill today wasn't really on my wavelength or in my pleasure zone (... sorry, that sounds erotic, I won't ever say it again ...), but at least it's not dull. I don't really know what a MINIPIG is (46A: Tiny swine). I assume it's a small pig. Maybe a pet? I also hate / never hear the term AUTOBIO (30A: Self-written life story, informally). Just say the word, yeesh. Maybe it's a written and not a spoken thing? Neither of these "words" is really my thing, but I see them trying, and I appreciate the effort, esp. on a Tuesday. The fill was not promising right out of the gate—any time I stop to take a picture of the NW corner, that is a bad sign. A sign that the fill annoyed me so much I needed to document it:

I'd recommend that if you have a particularly rough corner in your grid, you not call attention to the problem by literally labeling it DRECK (1A: Utter rubbish). Looking at it now, it doesn't seem so bad, but DMED and RETIE back-to-back set my "no, make it stop" alarm off early. Once I got momentum going, the uglier stuff (your ENTs and your laugh syllables and your PCHELP, etc.) didn't bug me as much because I blew right through it. There's something kind of ugly about the mash-up of EVEVEVEVE material in the south. EVE crossing EVENING crossing VEE crossing LEVEE (crossing LEVIES!!!?). Need some air down there. Way too same same (same same same). But the rest of the grid is lively and varied. This is one of those puzzles that wasn't really for me, but seemed well made overall. My gut said three stars, but my head was like "it's probably a little better than that, you should bump it? If only for being a little weird and kinda hard, you should bump it." So I bumped it.

Bullets:

• 36A: "The Disrobing of Christ," e.g. (EL GRECO) — using the artist's name as a descriptor of their work is completely conventional ("Is that a PICASSO!?"), but I was still expecting a general category here (like, I dunno, OIL PAINTING).

• 11D: Brew that's a little cloudy and fruity (WHEAT BEER) — I think the "fruity" part threw me. I didn't know that about WHEAT BEER. Of all the things that are "fruity" in this world, I'm not sure I would've placed WHEAT in that category. The "fruity" had me thinking "sour," but SOUR BEER wouldn't fit.
• 6A: Yellowish color for old computer graphics (AMBER) — as I said earlier, my first guess here was OCHER. What I did not say earlier: after MARDI gras forced OCHER out, my next move was not AMBER. It was UMBER. I don't even really remember what color UMBER is. I just remember the name from the "Burnt UMBER" crayon color among my Crayola crayons when I was a kid. Burnt umber is reddish. Straight up UMBER is pretty brown. If you squint and wish real hard, you can kinda see "yellowish" in there, but nah, it's pretty brown.

• 15A: Actress Watts of "The Friend" (NAOMI) — Easy (what other "Actress Watts" is there?) but my first response was "That's a strange way to clue her. What the hell movie is that?" Then I remembered: it's the NAOMI Watts / Bill Murray / Great Dane movie from a couple of years back that I really meant to see and never did. Read a whole (fascinating) article about that dog, and what it took to cast the dog and care for the dog during filming, etc. It was in the New Yorker, I think. (Yep, here it is). Really made me want to see the movie. And then I didn't. I hate when that happens. Guess I'll watch it now. On to the Letterboxd Watchlist it goes!

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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Gentlemen, jocularly / SAT 1-17-26 / Longest number writable in standard Roman numerals / Korean barbecue rib dish / Setups for some elaborate group pictures / Servant in "The Handmaid's Tale" / Carlos Jobim, father of the bossa nova / Artificially unsophisticated / "All that really matters is if your rhymes was ___" (MF Doom lyric)

Constructor: Adam Aaronson

Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium

THEME: none 

Word of the Day: GALBI (43D: Korean barbecue rib dish) —

Galbi (Korean: 갈비; pronounced [kal.bi]), kalbi, galbi-gui (갈비구이), or grilled ribs is a type of gui (grilled dish) in traditional Korean cuisine. "Galbi" is the Korean word for "rib", and the dish is usually made with beef short ribs. When pork spare ribs or another meat is used instead, the dish is named accordingly. Galbi is served raw, then cooked on tabletop grills usually by the diners themselves. The dish may be marinated in a sweet and savory sauce usually containing soy sauce, garlic, and sugar. Both non-marinated and marinated galbi are often featured in Korean barbecue. In Japan, this and many other dishes in Korean barbecue influenced yakiniku, a fusion cuisine that often makes use of galbi (glossed as karubi). (wikipedia)

• • •

Seems like this comes down to whether figuring out the longest possible Roman numeral is your idea of a good time or not (8D: Longest number writable in standard Roman numerals). For me: not. Not awful, just ... tedious. Actually, in the end, not that hard. I just kept writing the Roman numerals in descending order, as many as I could write of each without the number looking wrong ("DD" = "M," so ... wrong; "LL" = "C," so ... wrong). And there it was: 3,888. That is ... something. A number. That is what that is. A very arbitrary number. Feels like a showy kind of stunt, but it left me cold, as did the somewhat juvenile fill. FARTSY and F-BOMB and PIT STAINS are the kind of thing that seem designed to get a laugh out of a twelve-year-old. I could've gone my whole life without seeing FARTSY in the grid, honestly. You'll be fascinated / thrilled / bored to know that this is not the first FART in the NYTXW—that great moment in crossword fill history came back in 2023 ([Brain ___]). But this is the first FARTSY. You can just imagine me tapping the Not All Debuts Are Good™ sign here. This is all to say that I could feel the puzzle trying to be flashy, "young," etc., and it felt like it was trying a little too hard. But most of the grid is actually pretty solid. Ordinary. Fine. The three "X"s from the Roman numeral and the four "K"s from KNICK-KNACK make for some lively fill in the crosses. None of the marquee fill really wowed me, but MEGAPIXELS has some juice (41A: Units for. high-resolution camera). FAUX-NAIF is also kind of cool (39A: Artificially unsophisticated). I thought "NAIF" was the noun and "NAIVE" was the adjective, so FAUX-NAIF (as an adjective) seemed odd to me, but it's right. Even though "naive" is much more common as an adjective than "naif," when you add "FAUX" to the front, only NAIF survives. No such thing as "faux-naive." I guess the "FAUX" Frenchifies it, and since "naif" (unlike "naive") is a French word ... voilà! 

[38A: "All that really matters is if your rhymes was ___" (MF Doom lyric)]

Not loving the triple "IN" in the puzzle today (MIX-INS, ASK IN, LAID IN). LAID IN is particularly awkward, in that those exact words aren't really likely to leave your mouth in that particular formation. There's definitely such a thing as a LAY-IN, and you can LAY (the ball) IN, but you'd probably never say "she LAID IN the basketball." "Laid it in" is the phrase I'm hearing in my head. The answer here is grammatically correct, but awkward-sounding. Also awkward: DELINT. I am quite sure it is a verb. It just looks silly. The only real trouble I had today involved (shockingly!) names. ANTONIO was certainly the best guess for how that name was going to turn out, but I thought maybe ANTONIN or maybe some other Brazilian spelling as yet unknown to me (6D: ___ Carlos Jobim, father of the bossa nova). As for the [Servant in "The Handmaid's Tale"] (RITA), no idea. I read that novel when I was in college (on my own, not for school), and liked it, and saw the (somewhat maligned) movie adaptation starring Natasha Richardson, and liked that, but once it came around again as a TV show, I was like "meh, I get the idea, I think I don't need to see this." And I haven't seen a single episode. So the names of anyone in that novel / movie / TV series are all unknown to and/or long forgotten by me. I'd also never heard of GALBI. Haven't lived near a good Korean place since I left Ann Arbor, and back then, all I ever ordered was bibimbap. I looked at GALBI (the last answer I got—I needed every cross), and thought, "isn't that some bygone Roman emperor?" And no, it's not, but yes, almost. I was close. GALBA has been in the NYTXW 20 times, usually clued as [Nero's successor]. It's somewhat less common these days than it was in the pre-Shortz era. 

Speaking of "less common these days than it was in the pre-Shortz era," I did another 1986 crossword today (printed out from the "Times Machine," which shows you old editions of the paper, and which I was using to look at movies that were in theaters this week forty years ago). It was a Thursday puzzle and I managed to solve it all perfectly. It had a theme, but it was very rudimentary (answers containing a standalone letter, e.g. C-RATIONS, DOCTOR K, MISTER T, etc.). The letters didn't even spell anything. Felt like a themeless. But doable. Why am I talking about it? Because it contained one answer that looked so nuts that I was sure it was wrong. That answer: ETAH (18A: Peary's winter base). I knew (or mostly knew) that Admiral Peary was an arctic explorer, but ... ETAH? Really wanted to change it to UTAH, but first of all, weird place for a "winter base" if you're exploring the Arctic, and second of all, the "U" would've given me EDUNS in the cross (5D: British noble family), and while I'm willing to buy almost any name, I was fairly sure EDENS had to be right. Which left me with ETAH. Unavoidably ETAH. So I looked it up and—sure enough:

There's also an ETAH in Uttar Pradesh. Just FYI. ETAH is a great example of Shortz's obscurity-eliminating effect on the puzzle. ETAH is emblematic of the kind of obscure geographical trivia that used to run rampant in crosswords, short answers you were expected to know if you wanted to solve crosswords. ETAH was going gangbusters for decades. 108 appearances before Shortz. Margaret Farrar, Will Weng, Eugene T. Maleska, they all loved ETAH. Then Shortz took over, and the ETAH pipeline went dry overnight. There were three appearances in 1993 (just before Shortz took over), and then ... none for over a decade. And after that single appearance (2004), there haven't been any more. None. Zip zero zilch. The only other thing in the 1986 grid that I really didn't know was SHEE, which is apparently a [Gaelic fairy].

We now return to our regularly scheduled puzzle: 

Bullets:

• 10A: What "margarita" means in Spanish (DAISY) — maybe it's because I'm solving at night instead of in the morning (when I usually solve), but my brain couldn't make sense of this clue. That is, I thought the wording meant that the answer would be "in Spanish." So my brain was like "well, there's a 'margarita' pizza, so it must be Italian, and now the puzzle wants to know what it means in Spanish ... weird." Well, first, the pizza is actually "Margherita," and second, "margarita" is already Spanish, and the clue just wants to know what it means in English. Needless to say, I got DAISY mostly from crosses.
• 16A: What Anora and Vanya do in 2024's "Anora" (ELOPE) — new ELOPE clue! Those are hard to come by. Surprised we haven't seen ANORA in the grid yet. Best Picture winner, short answer, all common letters. It's tailor-made. Ticks all the boxes. Valid in every way, and almost certainly useful from a constructing standpoint. I assume we'll see it by the end of this year. 
• 46A: Setups for some elaborate group pictures (RISERS) — I had to get this cross down to _ITA / -ISERS before I finally saw RISERS (as we've established, I didn't know the Handmaid's Tale woman). And yes, people arranged on stairs, I can see how such a photo might get "elaborate." Coincidentally, RISER (singular) was in the 1986 puzzle I just solved (above). 

• 4D: Grandson of Eve (ENOS) — here's the thing about crosswordese—it can bail you out when you're stuck, or help you get started, as it did for me today. First full answer in the grid for me today. I am no bible expert, but I am an expert on biblical names likely to appear in the crossword. ENOS is up near the top (when it not getting a chimp clue, or an early-'80s TV clue)

• 28D: Worker who's the subject of the song "Sixteen Tons" (COAL MINER) — if you look real carefully at the town square in Back to the Future (the square as it appeared in the '50s, that is), you can see a record store with a "Just Arrived" sign out front. The records that have "just arrived": "The Ballad of Davy Crockett" and ... "16 Tons"! Bizarre that I noticed this at all when I watched the movie last year, let alone remembered it today. It's completely irrelevant to the plot. Just a background detail. 

• 36D: Good marks? (SAPS) — "mark" here is a potential victim of a scam. A target. A patsy.
• 42D: Gentlemen, jocularly (GERMS) — from the (Vaudevillean??? Milton Berlean??) expression, "Good evening, ladies and GERMS." You can find some dudes being weird about the phrase on a "Men's Rights" subreddit here. 
• 45D: Dough at a taquería (PESOS) — didn't love this, as there are countless taquerías in the United States and they all take U.S. dollars. The "dough" at a taquería is going to depend entirely on where that taquería is. If the taqueria is in Mexico, then sure, PESOS. Unless PESOS is an actual dough, like MASA. It's not, is it? We're talking about money, right? Yes, I'm sure that's right. If it's not, I'll hear about it.

That's it. See you next time.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on BlueSky and Facebook and Letterboxd]
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Last language alphabetically on Google Translate / MON 10-20-25 / Music genre that Joan Jett "loves" / Two-part steakhouse entree / 50 years, for Bilbo Baggins in "The Hobbit"

Constructor: Adam Aaronson

Relative difficulty: Challenging (when solved Downs-only; otherwise probably "Easy," I don't know)

THEME: AD FREE (55D: Not interrupted by commercials ... or shortened like the middle words of 20-, 30-, 48- and 60-Across) — in four theme answers, the word "AND" is presented AD-FREE (i.e. free of the letters "A" and "D"):

Theme answers:

• COOKIES 'N' CREAM (20A: Milkshake flavor made with Oreos)
• ROCK 'N' ROLL (30A: Music genre that Joan Jett "loves")
• SURF 'N' TURF (48A: Two-part steakhouse entree)
• SCRATCH 'N' SNIFF (60A: Like some scented stickers)

Word of the Day: HAYAO Miyazaki (56A: Filmmaker Miyazaki) —

Hayao Miyazaki (宮崎 駿 or 宮﨑 駿, Miyazaki Hayao; [mijaꜜzaki hajao]; born January 5, 1941) is a Japanese animator, filmmaker, and manga artist. He co-founded Studio Ghibli and serves as honorary chairman. Throughout his career, Miyazaki has attained international acclaim as a masterful storyteller and creator of Japanese animated feature films, and is widely regarded as one of the most accomplished filmmakers in the history of animation. [...] Miyazaki co-founded Studio Ghibli in 1985, writing and directing films such as Laputa: Castle in the Sky (1986), My Neighbor Totoro (1988), Kiki's Delivery Service (1989), and Porco Rosso (1992), which were met with critical and commercial success in Japan. Miyazaki's Princess Mononoke (1997) was the first animated film to win the Japan Academy Film Prize for Picture of the Year and briefly became the highest-grossing film in Japan; its Western distribution increased Ghibli's worldwide popularity and influence. Spirited Away (2001) became Japan's highest-grossing film and won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature; it is frequently ranked among the greatest films of the 21st century. Miyazaki's later films—Howl's Moving Castle (2004), Ponyo (2008), and The Wind Rises (2013)—also enjoyed critical and commercial success. He retired from feature films in 2013 but later returned to make The Boy and the Heron (2023), which won the Academy Award for Best Animated Feature. (wikipedia)

• • •

There's a jokey revealer, which is cute, but otherwise this is a fairly dull theme, in that it's just a bunch of ___ 'N' ___ phrases. AD-FREE just doesn't seem like an interesting enough phrase or a clever enough punchline to justify a puzzle whose themer set is that listless. The fill seemed listless as well, with overcommon stuff like ARLO at ATBAT and IPAD and BLAT and ICU and ELON dominating, and then the bizarrely adjectivized AFROED making things awkward. DRUM SOLO isn't bad, especially alongside BAZAAR, but that's about the only real high point in the grid. The whole puzzle seemed like a long way to go for a tepid revealer, and the road to the revealer just didn't have enough sparkle. So the revealer is clever, but the overall solving experience was unsatisfying.

[8D: Band with the aptly titled debut album "High Voltage"]

As a Downs-only solve, this ended up being brutal for me. Fatal, in fact. There was just no way I was ever going to get VERY SAME. I don't even feel that bad about the fail. If I'd been more patient, maybe I could've gotten there, but I needed to get on with things, so I looked at an Across clue or two; thus: fail. VERY SAME ... [Aforementioned] ... I suppose those are equivalents, but I was not looking for a two-word phrase, and even when the first part looked like VERY, I couldn't imagine how the phrase would conclude. I was thinking of common uses of "aforementioned," and in most cases VERY SAME would be a very unclear substitute. Here's the first (recent) real-world example of "VERY SAME" at m-w.com:

The Public happens to be the very same venue where Hamilton made its off-Broadway debut in February 2015, before moving to Broadway's Richard Rodgers Theatre that August.—Erin Clack, PEOPLE, 19 Oct. 2025

Doesn't mean "aforementioned" in that case at all. These examples are better:

Yet the very same murmur can also appear when the heart is structurally normal and healthy.—Joshua Hutcheson, The Conversation, 16 Oct. 2025Because Kacie herself was also asking that very same question after finding out that her ex-fiancé Patrick Suzuki was there.—Sydney Bucksbaum, Entertainment Weekly, 8 Oct. 2025

VERY SAME is way more colloquial than mere "aforementioned." and requires a much clearer, more proximate referent. I could drift away from my topic and then use "aforementioned" to bring you right back, whereas if I used "VERY SAME," I'd need to have just been talking about whatever I was talking about for it to make sense. Again, [Aforementioned] is a defensible clue, just a vague and rather unclear one, to my brain (obviously).  I had V-R-S--E and no idea. All the crosses could've been other multiple things: AGE / AGO, FRAT / FRET, LIMO / LIPO. I also had no real idea about FACTOR, which seemed so oddly clued (49D: Decision-making consideration). Seems like a synonym of [Consideration] all on its own. I wrote in FACETS, and then eventually did write in FACTOR, but wasn't at all sure of it. The fact that HA--O looked like nonsense, like I must've had an error, didn't help matters. Even if I had been able to look at the clue at 56A: Filmmaker Miyazaki, I'm not entirely confident I could've remembered his first name without help from crosses. This is only HAYAO's third NYTXW appearance, and the first on a Monday. "Miyazaki" is a name I know very well, but HAYAO ... not so much; inability to see HAYAO definitely factored into my VERY SAME failure. Can't believe we've had Miyazaki's first name three times now, but still haven't had Yasujiro OZU's last name even once. "Widely regarded as one of the world's greatest and most influential filmmakers" (wikipedia), and still ... nothing. [note, as with Miyazaki, I know OZU's last name extremely well but always have to look up his first name to be sure]

A couple other answers gave me some trouble, from a Downs-only perspective. That NW corner was a disaster for me at the start, as I had PERIOD before PAROLE (2D: End of some sentences), I guessed AFROED but it felt wrong, and then I had the talk show host's "furniture piece" as a SOFA, not a DESK (4D: Furniture piece for a talk show host). I also found BRING ON hard to get, as well as CUP. I was thinking of "units" that flour actually comes in, how it's packaged. A unit of anything is a CUP if you want it to be. Anything liquid or granular, anyway. The CUP is the unit. The "flour" part seems arbitrary. I also have no idea what notes are in a G major scale, so -SHARP was a crap shoot. Just had to wait to see what the Across looked like. Not exactly fun. Oh well, better luck next Monday. Or tomorrow.

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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"Dead serious" in modern lingo / TUE 7-1-25 / Little tuber used to make Spanish horchata / Most "wasabi" at sushi bars, in actuality / Electronically produced echo effect / Tower of ___ (mathematical puzzle with disks)

Constructor: Adam Aaronson and Michael Garbus

Relative difficulty: Easy

THEME: VEGETARIAN (28D: Like the foods that answer the starred clues, despite how their names start) — fruits/vegetables that have an animal's name in them:

Theme answers:

• HORSERADISH (20A: *Most "wasabi" at sushi bars, in actuality)
• CRABAPPLE (23A: *Fruit whose name is also a synonym for a grouch)
• GOOSEBERRY (26D: *Fruit from a bush, much used in pies and jams)
• TIGER NUT (38D: *Little tuber used to make Spanish horchata)
• CHICKPEA (39D: *Garbanzo, by another name)

Word of the Day: EARL Sweatshirt (60A: Rapper ___ Sweatshirt) —

Thebe Neruda Kgositsile (born February 24, 1994), known professionally as Earl Sweatshirt, is an American rapper and record producer. Kgositsile was originally known by the moniker Sly Tendencies when he began rapping in 2008, but changed his name when Tyler, the Creator invited him to join his alternative hip hop collective Odd Future in late 2009. He is the son of South African political poet Keorapetse Kgositsile.

At the age of 16, he gained recognition and critical praise for his second mixtape, Earl (2010). Shortly after its release, he was sent to a boarding school in Samoa for at-risk teens by his mother, which he attended for a year and a half. Unable to record during his stay, he returned to Los Angeles in February 2012 before his eighteenth birthday. Kgositsile rejoined Odd Future and adopted a recording contract with the group's parent label, Columbia Records to release his debut studio album, Doris (2013).

The album peaked within the top five of the Billboard 200, while his second and third albums, I Don't Like Shit, I Don't Go Outside (2015) and Some Rap Songs (2018), both peaked within the top 20; each received critical praise. He then signed with Warner Records to release his second EP, Feet of Clay (2019)^[3] and fourth studio album, Sick! (2022). His fifth album, Voir Dire (2023), was a collaborative project with record producer the Alchemist.

• • •

Love the concept but hate the revealer. By "hate" I mean ... not really "hate," but ... it just didn't work for me, for the simple fact that I would never refer to a fruit / vegetable as "VEGETARIAN." "VEGETARIAN" is an adjective for people (who don't eat meat) and dishes (that don't have meat in them). It's a qualifier. You would never have to qualify an apple, say, or a banana. Those are plants. There's no question but that they are appropriate for people who don't eat meat. I get that the main idea of this theme is that the names of the plants suggest (superficially) that they have animal components, so VEGETARIAN would then clarify things, but still ... I had VEGETABLES and VEGETATION (!) before I had VEGETARIAN, so absurd does the idea of calling a simple plant "VEGETARIAN" seem to me. I've also never heard of a TIGER NUT, though I have heard of horchata, and I have never had a GOOSEBERRY pie or jam, despite the clues assuring me that the fruit is "much used" for those purposes. The end of VEGETARIAN, the front of GOOSEBERRY, and all of TIGER NUT—that was the extent of my troubles today. Everything else went in instantly, easier than a Monday. It's a pretty vibrant grid, despite a preponderance of 3-4-5's, and it's got interesting-looking mirror symmetry. I like all the mid-range fill in the center, particularly the dreaded STOMACH PIRANHA! Hey, did you know that NIRVANA and PIRANHA have three letters in exactly the same place? You learn this type of stuff when you get real cavalier and just fill in answers based on pattern recognition without actually looking at the clue. Not Recommended. (fun when it works, but still, not recommended).

There are all kinds of answers today that are solidly 21st century, which is to say, they are going to be new to some people (despite having been in the puzzle before). Not living in a city with a lot of street food, I definitely learned what ELOTE was from crosswords (maybe a decade ago?). Whereas I only learned what "NO CAP" means about a year or two ago, probably also from crosswords (though not the New York Times). I remember very clearly asking my students about "NO CAP" and their confirming that it was a thing (and kinda laughing at said "thing" coming out of their middle-aged professor's mouth). I've probably written about "NO CAP" before ... oh yeah, here we go: CAP (as "lie") was a Word of the Day just last year. "NO CAP"'s first appearance as an answer only occurred two years ago, though, so if you haven't fully absorbed that bit of slang yet, that's understandable. But you should absorb it now. As for EARL Sweatshirt ... that's the name I expect to baffle more NYTXW solvers than any other today. This is actually the fourth appearance of this exact clue ([Rapper ___ Sweatshirt]), but the first appearance, was only in three years ago, so again, I think there will still be a lot of solver who don't know him and haven't assimilated him into their crossword vocabularies yet. Unlike NO CAP and ELOTE, EARL Sweatshirt didn't come to me from crosswords. I'd heard his music a bunch of times. He's great. I even bought a cassette (you heard me!) of his latest album (Voir Dire, a collab. with the Alchemist) just last year.

Bullet points:

• 54D: Muppet who posts on social media in the third person (ELMO) — "posts on social media"?? He just speaks that way generally, doesn't he? "Posts on social media" is a weird / odd attempt to sound "current." Holy (ca)moly, this Muppet wiki has catalogued Every Single Instance in which ELMO has (anomalously) used the first person, not only on the show (Sesame Street), but in all merch (!) (direct-to-video specials, CD-ROM games from the '90s, etc.). This is what we call the "good internet." Exhaustively nerdy lists designed solely for obsessive fans—this is why the Internet was invented.
• 38D: *Little tuber used to make Spanish horchata (TIGER NUT) — I was confused by "Spanish" horchata. Is that different from regular "horchata," I wondered? Well, turns out horchata is originally Spanish, made of soaked, ground, and sweetened TIGER NUTs, but in some parts of the Americas, "it is known as an agua fresca, and the base can be either jicaro (morro), rice, melon seeds, sesame seeds, along with various spices" (wikipedia).

• 51A: Electronically produced echo effect (REVERB) — some of that cool mid-range fill I was talking about. Liked this one.
• 53A: "Fine, I guess" ("OK, SURE") — liked this mid-range fill a whole lot less, in that the "OK" part seems totally arbitrary. "OH" "UH" "UM" all feel like they could work. I think I was an "UH" man myself. "UH" sounds less sure than "OK," and the clue seemed to be indicating some hesitancy or uncertainty.
• 23A: Fruit whose name is also a synonym for a grouch (CRABAPPLE) — "Crab" is a synonym for a grouch all on its own. Not sure why you'd tack "apple" on to it. 
• 2D: 1985 Kurosawa epic that is a retelling of "King Lear" (RAN) — our "local" (Ithaca) independent movie theater has a promotional video they show before movies that talks about the history of the theater, and apparently the first movie they ever screened, back in the mid-80s, was RAN. RAN was also the first Kurosawa movie I ever saw. It's been a while. I should rewatch. Speaking of great Japanese directors, I watched Ozu's Tokyo Story for the first time just last night—a beautiful film that had me wondering, once again, how in the world OZU has never appeared in the NYTXW—Tokyo Story was voted the Greatest Film Of All Time in the 2012 Sight + Sound directors poll ... that's got to be enough to get you in the crossword, come on.

Happy July, everyone. See you next time.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on BlueSky and Facebook]
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