Rex Parker Does the NYT Crossword Puzzle: Adrienne Atkins

Constructor: Adrienne Atkins

Relative difficulty: Medium+ (a tad slower than my usual Monday) (3:17)

THEME: BODY DOUBLE (61A: Stand-in during a film shoot ... or a hint to 17-, 25-, 38- and 51-Across) — common two-word phrases where both words are body parts:

Theme answers:

MOUTH ORGAN (17A: Harmonica)
RIB JOINT (25A: Place to get some barbecue)
KNUCKLEHEAD (38A: Dummy)
BACKLASH (51A: Negative repercussions)

Word of the Day: YUCCAS (31A: Pointy-leaved desert plants) —

Yucca is a genus of perennial shrubs and trees in the family Asparagaceae, subfamily Agavoideae. Its 40–50 species are notable for their rosettes of evergreen, tough, sword-shaped leaves and large terminal panicles of white or whitish flowers. They are native to the hot and dry (arid) parts of the Americas and the Caribbean.
Early reports of the species were confused with the cassava (Manihot esculenta). Consequently, Linnaeus mistakenly derived the generic name from the Taíno word for the latter, yuca. (wikipedia)

• • •

Riding high on a beautiful summer day, complete with a 5-mile hike on the Rim Trail at Treman State Park outside Ithaca, and then book shopping and a vanilla malt, and then a fancy benefit dinner at our local vegan restaurant (first time we'd eaten in a restaurant in 15 months). An exceedingly good day. Maybe I'm a little tired or full or sun-addled or something because I kinda stumbled through this puzzle. Wasn't as tight and methodical in my solving approach as I normally am, especially on early-week puzzles, and so kind of meandered through the middle of the grid and ended up trying to back my way into the center of the grid and let's just say that there's a reason that NW-to-SE flow makes the most sense: the more you take that route, the more apt you are to fill in the *front* ends of answers first. Much easier to get stuff, generally, when you've got a piece of the front end than when you've got a piece of the back end. For instance, I had -HEAD today at 38A: Dummy and honestly -HEAD was zero help. DUNDERHEAD? CHOWDERHEAD? STUPIDHEAD? Bah. Whereas if I'd come down into the answer from the NW, I would've had some of the front end—easier to figure out what follows KNUCKLE than what precedes HEAD. I also just didn't know MOUTH ORGAN. I guess I've heard that term, but "harmonica" and maybe "mouth harp" (??) seem like more familiar things to me (actually, the harmonica is also known as a "French harp"). So the ORGAN part took work. As did the JOINT part of RIB JOINT. All told I was only about 20 seconds slower than usual, but on a Monday, that's kind of a long time.

As for the quality of the theme: it works OK. It's a pretty damn broad array of body parts here, and I'm not sure ORGAN is specific enough to qualify (any more than, say, LIMB would qualify). But each theme answer has two parts that are also, technically, body parts, so BODY DOUBLE is apt enough, and it's a nice revealer (a nice term in its own right). Outside the theme answers, the only trouble I had came when I typo'd SPA instead of SPF (29A: Tanning lotion fig.), and wrote in SPY instead of SLY at 35D: Apt letters missing from "_tea_th_". Clearly my brain knew SPY was apt, but that means my brain must have known the word in the clue was "stealthy," in which case my brain should've known that "P" was not an option. But my brain ... try telling it anything. Hope you had a lovely weekend. This puzzle seems a reasonably good start to the puzzling week.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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