Toll collectors of folklore / TUE 9-5-23 / Figures advised by consiglieres / Island group that straddles the International Date Line / Big name in applesauce / Barn hooter / Laser pointer or yarn ball maybe

Constructor: Alan Siegel

Relative difficulty: Easy

THEME: SYMBIOTIC (62A: Mutually beneficial ... or a hint to three pairs of crossing answers in this puzzle) — three SYMBIOTIC pairs:

Theme answers:

• CLOWNFISH / ANEMONE (14A: Orange-and-white-striped swimmers that lure prey to 5-Downs / 5D: Stinging sea creature that offers protection to 14-Across)
• TICKBIRD / RHINO (28A: "Hitchhiker" whose warning cries help a 31-Down avoid poachers / 31D: Horned grazer that provides mite meals to a 28-Across)
• FRUIT BAT / FIG TREE (44A: Nocturnal flier that disperses seeds of a 40-Down / 40D: Ficus that produces sweets favored by a 44-Across)

Word of the Day: TICKBIRD (28A) —

: a bird (as the oxpecker or ani) that eats ticks infesting quadrupeds (merriam-webster.com) // The oxpeckers are two species of bird which make up the genus Buphagus, and family Buphagidae. The oxpeckers were formerly usually treated as a subfamily, Buphaginae, within the starling family, Sturnidae, but molecular phylogenetic studies have consistently shown that they form a separate lineage that is basal to the sister clades containing the Sturnidae and the Mimidae (mockingbirds, thrashers, and allies). Oxpeckers are endemic to the savanna of Sub-Saharan Africa. // Both the English and scientific names arise from their habit of perching on large mammals (both wild and domesticated) such as cattle, zebras, impalas, hippopotamuses, rhinoceroses, and giraffes, eating ticks, small insects, botfly larvae, and other parasites, as well as the animals' blood. The behaviour of oxpeckers towards large mammals was thought to be exclusively mutual, though recent research suggests the relationship can be parasitic in nature as well. // The swahili name for the red-billed oxpecker is Askari wa kifaru (the rhino's guard). (wikipedia)

• • •

Conceptually, this is interesting, but I'm not that sure about the execution. Something both dull and forced about it. The "dull" part is the mere trivia of it all. I enjoy learning facts, but somehow just having animals crossing isn't that interesting (P.S. why hasn't "ANIMAL CROSSING" been a revealer yet? ... or maybe it has, in a different puzzle). Then there's the fact that one of these pairs doesn't involve animals crossing at all. Instead, we've got a bat crossing a tree. The SYMBIOTIC part is supposed to be the bat's dispersal of seeds, but ... that ... I mean, that doesn't seem that SYMBIOTIC to me. I'm sure in some Big Picture way it is, but literally every animal that eats seeds and poops in the woods (or wherever) does this. If you've ever stepped in unidentified animal feces in the woods (or your yard, as I did yesterday), then you know this: very seed-heavy. The animal pairings feel true to the spirit of the theme, but the bat/tree one feels ... well, as I said above, "forced." Plus, though I love bats, I am in no mood to see them so soon again after my recent bat infestation (an infestation of maybe one or two, but you just need one flying around your bedroom at 2am for it to *feel* like an infestation) (please, no lectures about rabies, I get my last shot tomorrow). 

TICKBIRD is slang I've never heard, and I don't really get using it here, given that the name of the specific bird found on RHINOs is the OXPECKER, and guess how many letters OXPECKER has? Yes, the same number as TICKBIRD. There is no universe in which OXPECKER doesn't beat TICKBIRD. There is no universe in which OXPECKER doesn't beat most things. Kindly add OXPECKER to your wordlists and disperse it liberally throughout all future grids, as a bat disperses fig seeds (though maybe less messily). Take TICKBIRD out, put OXPECKER in—you don't even have to change the grid, just move RHINO over one column (to cross the "R" in OXPECKER), and bam, there you are! It's true that OXPECKER is kind of an obscure word for a Tuesday, but then so was TICKBIRD—the only thing in the grid I'd never heard of. I looked it up and M-W basically shrugged at me: "I dunno, a bird that eats ticks?" OK, they were slightly more definitive than that, but only slightly. Also, no one seems to know how to write TICKBIRD; that is, if you google it, you can find it as one word, two words, or a hyphenated word, all in the first few hits. I have no feelings about this matter. I'll just point out that no one seems confused about how to write OXPECKER.

The problem with this puzzle wasn't so much the theme as the fill, which was something close to gruesome in places. My first wince went up at RICEU. (It's Rice, it's called Rice, everyone calls it Rice, please stop) (27D: Houston sch.). And then OHSO into ORECART across ECHECK made me rewince, and just when I started recovering from that, I slammed into the worst bit of all: "'A' IS" (!? ) (38A: "___ for apple") crossing "DO SAY" (!?!?) (32D: "Ooh, tell us everything!"). DO SAY? DO SAY!? I would happily accept "DO TELL," which is a real expression, an actual thing, a thing of the highest order. "DO SAY," however, you can feed to the fruit bats ... only don't, they'll just disperse it. Yeesh. I have a big "OOF" written in the margin there. The one good thing about that terrible crossing is that the puzzle itself appears to be crying out in pain: "I CAN'T!" See you tomorrow.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld 

P.S. There has, in fact, been an ANIMAL CROSSING puzzle, and (bizarrely) it also has CLOWNFISH as an answer! Anyway, here it is (thanks to the constructor, Hanh Huynh, for pointing it out) 

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Palm that yields deep purple fruit / MON 2-14-22 / Genre for boy band BTS / The one for Starbucks shows a two-tailed mermaid / Trove of business contacts / Receptacle into which a quill is dipped / Apt infographic for showing a bakery's sales / She may take your temp before tucking you in

Constructor: Alan Siegel

Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium (like, on the easier side of Monday-easy)

THEME: SMARTPHONE (63A: Device that can replace 16-, 23-, 37-, 40- and 51-Across) — the clue tells you exactly what the theme is, so why am I bothering to write an explanation? I don't know:

Theme answers:

• ALARM CLOCK (16A: Morning waker-upper)
• PEDOMETER (23A: Step counter)
• COMPASS (37A: Orienteering aid)
• ROLODEX (40A: Trove of business contacts)
• CAMCORDER (51A: What many a home movie was once shot on) (weird to reference bygone-ness here and *only* here when the point of your theme is that they've *all* been superseded)

Word of the Day: UTICA (33A: Upstate New York city) —

Utica (/ˈjuːtɪkə/) is a city in the Mohawk Valley and the county seat of Oneida County, New York, United States. The tenth-most-populous city in New York State, its population was 65,283 in the 2020 U.S. Census. Located on the Mohawk River at the foot of the Adirondack Mountains, it is approximately 95 miles (153 kilometers) west-northwest of Albany, 55 mi (89 km) east of Syracuse and 240 mi (386 km) northwest of New York City. Utica and the nearby city of Rome anchor the Utica–Rome Metropolitan Statistical Area comprising all of Oneida and Herkimer Counties.

Formerly a river settlement inhabited by the Mohawk Nation of the Iroquois Confederacy, Utica attracted European-American settlers from New England during and after the American Revolution. In the 19th century, immigrants strengthened its position as a layover city between Albany and Syracuse on the Erie and Chenango Canals and the New York Central Railroad. During the 19th and 20th centuries, the city's infrastructure contributed to its success as a manufacturing center and defined its role as a worldwide hub for the textile industry. Utica's 20th-century political corruption and organized crime gave it the nickname "Sin City."

• • •

Way too matter-of-fact to be interesting. Yes, your phone can do all these things. We all know what phones can do. They've been doing them for well over a decade now. PEDOMETER!? Were those ever common? This puzzle feels very behind-the-times, very "can you believe the gadgets and gizmos they have these days?" Maybe ten years ago this would've been moderately interesting. Today, it just reads as musty. The fill isn't doing the theme any favors, either. It also feels stale, KPOP and KCUP notwithstanding (you really should be limited to just one "K" answer per grid, but since those are some of the only currentish things in the grid, we'll let it slide). MIDI always feels old (if you clued it in relation to music technology, that would be cool, but probably not easy enough for a Monday, even though it's the only kind of MIDI that comes up when you google MIDI); INKPOT, superold; FCC OOH EMO feels rough and xwordese-y; MENSA (ugh) ORSO ODEON OMAN, same. I don't understand why the short stuff in the nooks and crannies of this grid isn't a lot cleaner. In particular, I don't understand going with this SW corner. ENGR is grievous to look upon, and under the partial BONA it's somehow even worse. This quick rewrite isn't great, but everything in it is better than ENGR and BONA (and I did it in about a minute, without the aid of construction software):

As you can see, I also got rid of DR. MOM because it feels so goopy and sentimental and faux-nostalgic and semi-sexist and just generally made-up. "MR. MOM" I would absolutely accept, as it is a funny movie starring the amazing and always criminally underrated TERI (4) GARR (4). But DR. MOM just grates. Feels like advertising copy. Also, by changing OMEN to ONES, I get rid of that awkward OMEN / OMAN 1-2 "punch" at the end of the Acrosses. And I get rid of the grid's second "Star Wars" clue—two birds, one stone! You know there's something lacking in the puzzle's overall entertainment value when I'm spending most of my mental energy just reworking the short stuff. It doesn't feel like there's much else for me to do today.

My hometown is in the grid, but I don't have a ton of nostalgia for my hometown, and literally zero family members live there any more, so ... yeah, always weird to remember that I spent most of my childhood and my entire adolescence in FRESNO (1975-87) (47D: Largest inland city in California). I've lived in Binghamton almost twice as long now, but ages 5 to 17 somehow feel way more transformative, momentous, and memorable than ages ... blah blah blah to whatever I am now, it's all a blur, and COVID Times haven't helped unblur it. I never had a ROLODEX but I always thought they were cool-looking. The world was more aesthetically pleasing with some of these bygone gadgets in them. I miss card catalogues too, frankly. So informative, so satisfying to comb through. The flattening of all human experience into phone experience is one of the very worst things about recent technological "progress," if only for aesthetic reasons. Physical things and physical spaces are nice, and everyone just looks the same no matter what they're doing now. Chatting? Hunched over phone. Banking? Hunched over phone. Watching movie? Hunched over phone. Same same same. Ah well, the three-dimensional world was fun while it lasted. I want my puzzles to be current, but much of what passes for "current" in real life you can straight-up throw in the ocean as far as I'm concerned. Only don't do that, because the fish and birds are having a hard enough time with pollution as it is. 

Hope your team won the "Big" "Game"! (I lie, I don't care ... but I do hope you're happy ... see you tomorrow!)

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld 

P.S. a message from August Thompson, who will no longer be doing the first-Monday-of-the-month blog posts on a regular basis (though he might still drop in and cover a puzzle once in a while):

Dear CrossWorld,

Thanks for letting me spend so much time with you these past few years! I'm moving on, but I'm so glad to have been a part of this blog. Thank you so much to Rex. 

Best,

August

It's been a joy having August write for me for so long (from high school through grad school!). I know everyone who's been reading the blog for any great length of time joins me in wishing August all the best with future endeavors. Thanks for helping out and decidedly changing the tone of this place once a month, August. You're welcome back any time.

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