Cold Asian desert / THU 2-9-23 / Garment patented in 1914 by Mary Phelps Jacob / Midas Wolf Disney's Three Little Pigs antagonist / Only human briefly

Constructor: Alex Rosen

Relative difficulty: Monday-Easy, with fussy theme stuff pushing it to just "Easy"

THEME: REVERSE EACH / TWO-WORD CLUE (18A: With 66-Across, hint for solving this puzzle)— what it says: reverse the words in each two-word clue if you want to make sense of it. The printed clues are normal-seeming, while the reversed clues often skew wackier, but are still literal enough to make sense:

Theme answers:

• DOLE (17A: Firm fruit) (i.e. Fruit firm)
• NEIL (41A: Young musician) (i.e. Musician Young)
• TRIPOD (42A: Mount Olympus) (i.e. Olympus mount) (etc.)
• SCAN (44A: Look good)
• BATTER UP (50A: Call home)
• BOBS (69A: Cuts short)
• ERIE (72A: Water buffalo)
• BOUT (11D: Engagement ring)
• A-TEAM (29D: Crew top)
• HEIST (30D: Job bank)
• BUCKS (33D: Does not)
• MENSA (35D: Group thinking)
• OGRE (43D: Giant storybook)
• TUBE (57D: Part IV)
• WOK (67D: Pan Asian)
• ORE (68D: Rock hard)

Word of the Day: CASPAR (45A: One of the Three Magi) —

Saint Caspar (otherwise known as Casper, Gaspar, Kaspar, Jasper, and other variations) was one of the 'Three Kings', along with Melchior and Balthazar, representing the wise men or 'Biblical Magi' mentioned in the Bible in the Gospel of Matthew, verses 2:1-9. Although the Bible does not specify who or what the Magi were, since the seventh century, the Magi have been identified in Western Christianity as Caspar, Melchior and Balthasar. Caspar and the other two are considered saints by the Catholic Church. (wikipedia)

• • •

I don't know how you go about making a puzzle like this, nor why you'd want to. There must be a theoretically infinite (give or take) number of words you can clue this way. So ... what? Find a set of mostly short words you can do this with, shove them in a grid in random places, add instructions (huge ugh) and then bake at 350 for 20 minutes? It's a themeless puzzle with this two-word reversal gag affecting clues scattered will-nilly around the grid. Only it has a theme ... and the theme is instructions. Instructions are always so awful, so unfun, such an ungodly space-waste. And today it was just a chore — albeit a very easy chore — to hack through the crosses in order to uncover the instructions in order to figure out why some of the clues seemed to be worded weird. Whole chunks of this grid have absolutely no theme material, no two-word clues (the entire NW and N, the entire SE), but then in other places, those theme clues are bizarrely DENSE (three in the tiny SW alone, for instance). The whole thing felt bizarre. A Monday-easy puzzle with a Thursday-type theme slapped on top. A theme that felt ... infinitely replicable, and therefore not that special. Theme answers bunched up or not there at all, depending on where you were in the grid. And then instruction-answers, lifelessly taking up space that would normally go to interesting fill. You do get some clever two-word reversals—[Mount Olympus] is probably the best, and best-disguised (for a while, the answer looked like it involved a "GOD" somehow (TRIPOD). But mostly the clues felt ... meh/shrug, or else, well, French, with the adjective following the noun (e.g. [Cuts short], [Rock hard], etc.). Also, the MENSA clue, as most MENSA clues are, is just garbage. "Thinking group"!?!? What a vague load of garbage. They don't "think" any more than any other people, they just really really really want you to ... think they do. 

The grid is 16 wide. I don't know why. Probably so TRIPOD can sit in the center—it is the marquee clue/answer pairing, after all. But the grid width is yet another thing that seems arbitrary about this puzzle. As for difficulty, there was none, for a while, and then themers came, and even then I somehow worked out those areas. The NE corner, for example—just worked BOUT/DOLE down to the last letter and guessed what it had to be from what the clue words suggested, but at that point, I did not see the reversal thing. I somehow got all the way to the bottom of the grid without knowing the trick (via AIG OGRE (educated guess!) RESIN SPINDLE) and managed to put together the second part of the instructions, and that was that. Only real difficulty came, as usual, with proper nouns I didn't know (ZEKE, for instance) (73A: ___ Midas Wolf (Disney's "Three Little Pigs" antagonist)), and then with the single square in the puzzle that absolutely tripped me up. No idea what the Magi's names are (45A: One of the Three Magi), and no idea what Grossglockner is (37D: Grossglockner, for one). I had the latter down as an ALE ... which made one of the Magi CASEAR, which seemed both nuts and ... I don't know, kinda like CAESAR, so kinda plausible. Anyway, when I completed the grid, at first, the "Congratulations!" message did not go off, so I thought "well, it's gotta be CASEAR, what kind of name is that!?" But honestly every cross looked good. But then I thought about Grossglockner, and how I had no idea, and so I pulled the last letter in ALE and boom, ALP, CASPAR, done.

I don't think the puzzle really plays fair with you at 72A: Water buffalo, though that clue is certainly one of the most inventive. First words of all clues are capitals by position, but "Buffalo" is capital "B" by nature. The idea that you have to mentally capitalize something in order to make it make sense seems wrong. Yes, if you move "buffalo" to the beginning of the clue, its first letter becomes (by position) a capital, but still. Seems more "we're making up rules as we go" than properly tricky. Once you get the theme, though, it's easy to see what's going on, and as I say, the reversal there is one of the good ones, so maybe it works despite (or even because of) its unfairness. The one answer that was bugging me long after I'd finished solving was ADAM (8D: Only human, briefly). I just could not make sense of it. I knew that ADAM was the first human (biblically), but I could not make sense of the "Only" and I really really couldn't make sense of the "briefly"—which is the great trick here. The clue takes a bit of clue phrasing you see all the time  "briefly" added (after a comma) to the end of a clue to signify an abbreviation of some kind), and uses it in a completely unexpected way. I went looking for an abbreviation that meant "only human" (as in "error-prone" or "subject to screw-ups" or whatever else that Billy Joel song is about), but what I got was someone who was THE only human for a BRIEF period of time. Like, there was ADAM, briefly, and then Eve came along and ADAM was no longer the ... only human. Great clue that had me totally lost. I wish the puzzle had more clever and challenging stuff like that. But most of the non-theme stuff today is pretty humdrum and Very easy. The theme ... well it's the theme. Doesn't seem like much of one, but some of those reversals are good. I hope you enjoyed it all more than I did.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld 

P.S. really liked TRASH TV as an answer (42D: Object of hate-watching, perhaps). One of a handful of times during the solve where I thought "ooh, nice."

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

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Aptly named ski town in Utah / THU 5-19-22 / Holy Roman emperor beginning in 973 / Potted ornamental / Fallopian tube traveler / City whose name is Siouan for good place to dig potatoes

Constructor: Alex Rosen

Relative difficulty: Easy

THEME: phrases of omission — four pairs of answers (each pair appearing on the same line); for each pair, the first answer appears to have letters missing, and the second is a phrase describing (literally) why the letters in the first answer are missing, or "what to do as you enter the answer to the previous clue":

Theme answers:

• DISCIPL[in]ES (17A: Punishes / CUT IN (19A: Interrupt ... or what to do as you enter the answer to the previous clue)
• S[up]PORTED (29A: Backed financially) / SCRUB UP (31A: Prep for surgery ... or what to do etc.)
• HOME [off]ICE (48A: Workplace with no commute / TAKE OFF (50A: Leave ... or what to do etc.)
• FL[out]ING (64A: Brazenly disregard) / STRIKE OUT (66A: Flail at home plate ... or what to do etc.)

Word of the Day: pound cake (63A: One of the pounds in a pound cake) —

Pound cake is a type of cake traditionally made with a pound of each of four ingredients: flour, butter, eggs, and sugar. Pound cakes are generally baked in either a loaf pan or a Bundt mold. They are sometimes served either dusted with powdered sugar, lightly glazed, or with a coat of icing. (wikipedia)

• • •

A very familiar gimmick. Many a puzzle has been built around a single phrase like this, which acts as a revealer with each of the theme answers conforming to the instructions. In today's case, we get a kind of speed version, with four different "revealers" instead of the more typical lone, final revealer. The same act is involved every time—dropping letters—so there's a consistency there. In typical drop-a-letter / add-a-letter (or letters)-type puzzles, though, there's some wackiness, some attempt to at least try to make the "incorrect" answers funny by having the answers be obviously, zanily wrong, and having the clues be of the loopy "?" variety. Here, we just get single words. They don't fit the clue, but that failure to fit yields zero pleasure, which I guess also means zero cringing, but I'd rather a puzzle go for the joke and fail than not go for it at all. I guess the "joke" is in the second answer to each pair, the verb phrase that explains the first answer in the pair. But there wasn't much "aha" there, since I could clearly see that "IN" was missing from what should've been DISCIPLINES. I was just waiting to find out why. Then I hit CUT IN. Pretty straightforward, not at all amusing. I'd say that HOME ICE is the one first answer of the four that has something like sufficient zaniness—the new phrase is really, really new and different and completely reoriented. But DISCIPLES is just a thud (it's etymologically closely related to DISCIPLINES, so it hardly reorients the word at all). And FLING and SPORTED are just ... there. This is like four different ideas for a puzzle all crammed into one puzzle without much thought for how fun it would be to solve. The theme isn't bad, by any means; just flat. 

With the exception, possibly, of the theme answers with omitted letters, there was nothing at all challenging about this puzzle. No Thursday heat. I had one little area of trouble because I didn't realize that SPORTED was a themer. Combine that with a brutal (but brilliant) clue on MIRROR (23A: Compact disc?), and then my only 75% certainty about David CARR, and then, oof, an extremely random Holy Roman emperor with extremely random Holy Roman numerals in his name (easily the worst thing in the grid), and you've got Stucksville, population me. But even then, not so stuck. I just went down from the top through SCRUB UP and then went back and made sense of that whole lower NW area. The other bit of "difficulty" I had was just pure idiocy, a mistake I made that amused me more than anything in the puzzle did. I had -EKA at 36A: City whose name is Siouan for "good place to dig potatoes" (TOPEKA) and my brain decided to completely disregard the "Siouan" part of the clue and focus instead on "potatoes" ("hmm ... near Idaho?") and the idea that you'd be thrilled to discover said potatoes; that is, I wrote in EUREKA! (which is a city in Washington). Sadly, the etymological origins of EUREKA have nothing to do with the Sioux, or North America at all:

Eureka (Ancient Greek: εὕρηκα) is an interjection used to celebrate a discovery or invention. It is a transliteration of an exclamation attributed to Ancient Greek mathematician and inventor Archimedes. (wikipedia)

The result of this mistake was mostly me being very angry at this alleged "abstract expressionist" who was somehow not ROTHKO but some guy named RUT- ... RUTLIN? RUTHIE? "Who the hell has ever heard of this RUT- guy!?" Well, no one, I made him up (32D: Abstract Expressionist Mark).

Yellow Over Purple (1956)

Notes:

• 23A: Compact disc? (MIRROR) — in case the wordplay eludes you, a "compact" is a small circular (or "disc"-shaped) case that flips open to reveal a MIRROR (as well as face powder, commonly).
• 42D: "And ___ ..." (YET) — Had the YE- and wasn't sure I wasn't dealing with the beginning of some kind of admission. "And YES, technically, I did eat the last six brownies, but in my defense, they were delicious."
• 63A: One of the pounds in a pound cake (EGGS) — absolutely 100% news to me that the "pound" in "pound cake" had to do with the (equal!) weight of all the ingredients. Seemed like an impossible rationale for a recipe, so I very much hesitated there.
• 61D: Marty Feldman's role in "Young Frankenstein" (IGOR) — enjoy:

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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Makes less powerful in video game slang / SUN 9-12-21 / Soul-seller of legend / Phenomenon such as the tendency to see human forms in animate objects / Savory Chinese snacks / Munch in modern slang / Ryerson insurance salesman in Groundhog Day / Martinez with statue outside Seattle Mariners' stadium / One who consumes a ritual meal to absolve the souls of the dead / Group dance popularized in the U.S. by Desi Arnaz

Constructor: Alex Rosen

Relative difficulty: Easy

THEME: "What a Character!" — there's an emoticon pictured in the grid, with the pieces of the sideways face composed of letters spelling out the PUNCTUATION MARK they represent (semicolon + hyphen + parenthesis); then we are told that to see it as a face we have to ROTATE CLOCKWISE (which is obvious); we are told the emoticon is a SMILEY FACE (it absolutely is not); and we are told that the tendency to see faces in animate objects is called PAREIDOLIA (which doesn't really apply to emoticons since they are *intended* to look like faces, sigh) (25A: Phenomenon such as the tendency to see human forms in animate objects)

Word of the Day: PAREIDOLIA (25A) —

Pareidolia (/ˌpær.iˈdoʊ.li.ə, ˌpɛr-/; also US: /ˌpɛr.aɪˈdoʊ.li.ə, -ˈdoʊl.jə/) is the tendency for perception to impose a meaningful interpretation on a nebulous stimulus, usually visual, so that one sees an object, pattern, or meaning where there is none.

Common examples are perceived images of animals, faces, or objects in cloud formations, seeing faces in inanimate objects, or lunar pareidolia like the Man in the Moon or the Moon rabbit. The concept of pareidolia may extend to include hidden messages in recorded music played in reverse or at higher- or lower-than-normal speeds, and hearing voices (mainly indistinct) or music in random noise, such as that produced by air conditioners or fans. (wikipedia)

• • •

This was over fast. Got PUNCTUATION MARK early, and once I got the little "SEMI" part of "semicolon," I filled the rest of the circled squares in. Done. Just, done. What else is there to do? Well, apparently there is the completely unnecessary and anticlimactic instruction ROTATE CLOCKWISE. Then there is the completely erroneous description of the emoticon as a SMILEY FACE (this one is actually shocking, as the face in this puzzle is 100% without a doubt indisputably a WINKY FACE; a SMILEY FACE is made with a simple colon for the eyes, but a WINKY FACE is made with a semicolon, they are different different different, as you can see here in this "List of emoticons": totally different listing. Diff.Er.Ent!!). 

Then there's what I assume is the raison d'etre of this puzzle, the word PAREIDOLIA, which is a word I've never heard of before, which makes me think the entire damned puzzle is just to teach us the word PAREIDOLIA, but since an emoticon is a terrible example of PAREIDOLIA, since emoticons are *supposed* to look like faces (i.e. it's not like looking at the front of a car and thinking the headlights are eyes or whatever, i.e. you aren't "seeing things" when you see a face in an emoticon). So incredibly wrong and off and misguided on every level. Head-shakingly ill-conceived and -executed. I was literally saying to myself "Don't be SMILEY, don't be SMILEY" as I was filling out the pre-FACE part of that last themer. But it was SMILEY. And then the fill's really not that good (-SAUR ERATO ECOCAR ... and that's just in a tiny patch in the south, I don't really have the time / inclination to catalogue the rest). At best this is HO-HUM. I really wish the editor would reconceive, or at least ... think about? ... what the hell the Sunday's point is. It's the most visible puzzle, the biggest puzzle, the one with the most solvers (my traffic nearly doubles on Sunday). But no one who does the puzzle daily thinks the Sunday is the best. I have friends who skip it because it's just a big bore most of the time and there are sooooo many other puzzles in the world to do (there really are, if you look). Make Sunday Worthy Of Its Fame and Reputation. Because currently, and for years and years if we're being honest, it is sputtering.

Never heard of:

• PAREIDOLIA (as we've established) 
• SIN-EATER (81D: One who consumes a ritual meal to absolve the souls of the dead)
• ARI Aster (though I have heard of "Midsommar") (76A: "Midsommar" director Aster)
• NERFS (121A: Makes less powerful, in video game slang)
• OH, HELL (the card game; I'm familiar with the exclamation) (58D: Card game with a PG-rated name)
• FLEABANE (90A: Plant said to repel bugs)
• TEA EGGS (34A: Savory Chinese snacks)

The rest was no problem, though I had WOW at first instead of WOE at 13D: What "vey" of "Oy vey!" translates to at first. Thankfully, PARWIDOLIA looked very, very wrong, so I ran the alphabet for WO- and hit on WOE pretty quickly. I liked CONGA LINE. I wish this puzzle had circled squares that just twisted through the grid spelling out CONGA LINE. That would've been more fun.

The rest of the puzzle, IT'S A BLUR (which, by the way, is another good answer) (52A: "Everything happened so fast!"). One last thing: the title. Isn't an emoticon made out of *several* "characters"? When you say "What a Character!" what is the pun, exactly? Yes, the emoticon represents a human face, which you could call a "character," but I think the point is that the face is made out of characters, plural, so the pun just ... misses. What Three Characters! Not such a great ring to it. OK, bye.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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For those who think young sloganeer once / WED 7-28-21 / Signal that a reply is coming in a messaging app / Be motto for wikipedia contributors / Noted colonial pamphleteer / Diatribe trigger / Remove from danger informally

Constructor: Alex Rosen and Brad Wilber

Relative difficulty: Medium (maybe a little tougher)

THEME: DRIBBLE-ing (39A: Make art like 53-/21-Across (as suggested by this puzzle's circled letters?)) with JACKSON / POLLOCK (53A: With 21-Across, artist known to 39-Across pigments back and forth onto canvases) — you can find the letters P, A, I, N, T (in circled squares) DRIBBLEd "back and forth" inside of four answers (well, "back" (reversed) inside one Across and one Down themer, and "forth" (in correct order) in their symmetrical counterparts):

The PAINT answers:

• PETUNIA PIG (17A: Porky's significant other)
• PADDINGTON (61A: ___ station, Central London railway terminal)
• UP TO A POINT (11D: Somewhat)
• TENNIS CAMP (29D: Where you might find love away from home?)

the back-and-forth "PAINT"

Word of the Day: RED BUD (50A: Oklahoma's state tree) —

Cercis canadensis, the eastern redbud, is a large deciduous shrub or small tree, native to eastern North America from southern Michigan south to central Mexico, east to New Jersey. Species thrive as far west as California and as far north as southern Ontario, roughly corresponding to USDA hardiness zone 6b. It is the state tree of Oklahoma. // The eastern redbud typically grows to 6–9 m (20–30 ft) tall with an 8–10 m (26–33 ft) spread. It generally has a short, often twisted trunk and spreading branches. A 10-year-old tree will generally be around 5 m (16 ft) tall. The bark is dark in color, smooth, later scaly with ridges somewhat apparent, sometimes with maroon patches. The twigs are slender and zigzag, nearly black in color, spotted with lighter lenticels. The winter buds are tiny, rounded and dark red to chestnut in color. The leaves are alternate, simple, and heart shaped with an entire margin, 7–12 cm (3–4.5 in) long and wide, thin and papery, and may be slightly hairy below. // The flowers are showy, light to dark magenta pink in color, 1.5 cm (1⁄2 in) long, appearing in clusters from spring to early summer, on bare stems before the leaves, sometimes on the trunk itself. There are cultivars with white flowers. The flowers are pollinated by long-tongued bees such as blueberry bees and carpenter bees. Short-tongued bees cannot reach the nectaries. The fruit are flattened, dry, brown, pea-like pods, 5–10 cm (2–4 in) long that contain flat, elliptical, brown seeds 6 mm (1⁄4 in) long, maturing in August to October.

• • •

Like Sunday's constellation puzzle, this puzzle is trying to do a lot. You've got the artist's name, the alleged technique he uses (DRIBBLE) and then the "PAINT" gimmick, where the letters can be found in forward and reversed order inside the themers (a back-and-forth set of Acrosses, a back-and-forth set of Downs). It was the discovery of the "back-and-forth" thing, the precision of it, that warmed me to this puzzle a little bit at the end. Before that, I wasn't paying too much attention, and it felt like the letters in PAINT were just mixed up / scrambled, i.e. appearing in random order. This is probably because the first themer (PETUNIA PIG) has them backwards and so when I noticed PAINT was involved (inside PADDINGTON), I didn't see PAINT reversed, I just saw "the letter in PAINT out of order." But no, there is a definite "double DRIBBLE" (which ... thank you, puzzle, for laying off the basketball pun). PAINT goes forward, PAINT goes back, etc. Before noticing this little detail, I was put off by a couple of things. First, the very word DRIBBLE, which feels simplistic and reductive. DRIBBLE sounds unskilled or else accidental. You DRIBBLE your drink down the front of your shirt if you're clumsy or inebriated or whatever. A baby DRIBBLEs on its bib. I'm sure it's a word that's been used for his technique, but it looks like his technique is generally called the "drip technique," and splashing is another purposeful verb that's been used. I get that the letters in PAINT represent drops of paint, and that maybe DRIBBLE conveys the idea of droplets well, but the word felt almost condescending to me in its oversimplification. Also, JACKSON / POLLOCK never threw paint in such an orthogonal way. The crossword puzzle grid is maybe not the best medium for imitating POLLOCK—it's all right angles, all orderly and precise. If you look at a POLLOCK ... well, here, just look at a POLLOCK:

"Number 48"

But as I say, the back-and-forth element won me over somewhat by the end. Oh, I also did not at all like all the cross-references in the clues for the artist and DRIBBLE, or the fact that the last name comes first (i.e. POLLOCK is up top while JACKSON is below), so his name is out of order and so you have to go down to the bottom of the grid and hunt for the 53-Across clue if you want to begin to understand 21- or 39-Across (a thing I stubbornly refuse to do). This makes the solve feel a bit fussy, awkward, clumsy. Outside the theme, I had some trouble. Because DRIBBLE was unknown to me for a while, I had trouble with the whole middle, especially SWABBIE (!?), which is a word maybe I've heard, but it feels very slangy / informal (25D: Low-ranking sailor). In fact, it is slang. It should really be clued as slang (I had a similar feeling that BFFS should be clued as an abbr., but BFFS is what people actually say, so maybe it can stand on its own with just a slang word in the clue ("buds") tipping us off to its slanginess) (1A: Buds that are very close). In that same DRIBBLE / SWABBIE area, I also had trouble with BOAR (44A: Male hedgehog) and BOLD too (not a fan of the fill-in-the-blank clues for either BOLD or ONLY, neither of which meant anything to me). 

Had RED ___ and no idea what the rest of the tree was (50A). I know only RED OAK (New Jersey!) and maybe RED FIR (or am I thinking "red fern"?), but BUD, no, that was not on my list of possibilities. See also TENNIS ___, where I was out of ideas after TENNIS COURT (for most of us, the TENNIS COURT is, in fact, "away from home"). Never heard of ROCK COD (just "cod," maybe "Atlantic cod"), but strangely I never even saw the clue for that one, so I can't say it bothered me or held me back. For as dense as the theme was, the fill was alright. I watched EPEE last night (Olympics!) so the "touch" reference in the clue was instantly clear to me (16A: Sports event in which athletes try to avoid being touched). Weird that OIL didn't get folded into the theme somehow (would've preferred that to this punny "strikes?" business) (47A: Industry that encourages strikes?). Overall, an interesting, ambitious, mostly successful endeavor.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

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Mystery writer Blyton / TUE 3-30-21 / Mortal lover of Aphrodite / Compensating reduction of greenhouse gas emissions / Fourth word of a Star Wars prologue / Swivel on an axis / Leading female role in Pulp Fiction

Constructor: Alex Rosen and Brad Wilber

Relative difficulty: Medium

THEME: MONONYM (38A: Person known by a single name, as found in 20-, 29-, 47- and 55-Across) — one-named *musical* performers all found inside longer theme answers:

Theme answers:

• CARBON OFFSET (20A: Compensating reduction of greenhouse gas emissions)
• SPIN KICK (29A: 360º martial arts maneuver)
• TEN YARDS (47A: Distance for a first down)
• "MINE, MINE, MINE!" (55A: Greedy person's cry)

Word of the Day: ENID Blyton (35D: Mystery writer Blyton) —

Enid Mary Blyton (11 August 1897 – 28 November 1968) was an English children's writer whose books have been among the world's best-sellers since the 1930s, selling more than 600 million copies. Blyton's books are still enormously popular, and have been translated into 90 languages. As of June 2018, Blyton is in the 4th place for the most translated author. She wrote on a wide range of topics including education, natural history, fantasy, mystery, and biblical narratives and is best remembered today for her Noddy, Famous Five, Secret Seven, and Malory Towers. [...] Blyton's work became increasingly controversial among literary critics, teachers and parents from the 1950s onwards, because of the alleged unchallenging nature of her writing and the themes of her books, particularly the Noddy series. Some libraries and schools banned her works, which the BBC had refused to broadcast from the 1930s until the 1950s, because they were perceived to lack literary merit. Her books have been criticised as being elitist, sexist, racist, xenophobic and at odds with the more progressive environment emerging in post-Second World War Britain, but they have continued to be best-sellers since her death in 1968. [...] Accusations of racism in Blyton's books were first made by Lena Jeger in a Guardian article published in 1966. In the context of discussing possible moves to restrict publications inciting racial hatred, Jeger was critical of Blyton's The Little Black Doll, published a few months earlier. Sambo, the black doll of the title, is hated by his owner and other toys owing to his "ugly black face", and runs away. A shower of "magic rain" washes his face clean, after which he is welcomed back home with his now pink face. Jamaica Kincaid also considers the Noddy books to be "deeply racist" because of the blonde children and the black golliwogs. In Blyton's 1944 novel The Island of Adventure, a black servant named Jo-Jo is very intelligent, but is particularly cruel to the children. ^// Accusations of xenophobia were also made. As George Greenfield observed, "Enid was very much part of that between the wars middle class which believed that foreigners were untrustworthy or funny or sometimes both". The publisher Macmillan conducted an internal assessment of Blyton's The Mystery That Never Was, submitted to them at the height of her fame in 1960. The review was carried out by the author and books editor Phyllis Hartnoll, in whose view "There is a faint but unattractive touch of old-fashioned xenophobia in the author's attitude to the thieves; they are 'foreign' ... and this seems to be regarded as sufficient to explain their criminality." Macmillan rejected the manuscript, but it was published by William Collinsin 1961, and then again in 1965 and 1983. [...] In December 2016 the Royal Mint discussed featuring Blyton on a commemorative 50p coin but dismissed the idea because she was "known to have been a racist, sexist, homophobe and not a very well-regarded writer". (wikipedia) (emph. mine)

• • •

This is a concept looking for a hook. As it is, it's not much different from a puzzle where ELM and FIG and OAK are "hidden" inside longer theme answers and then the revealer is just TREE. Where is the ... Where is the Why? Why these names? Why musical names? Nothing but nothing about the revealer suggests music. A tight grouping is nice, but it's not tied to ... anything. No wordplay, no zingy revealer, nothing. Just, "here are four MONONYMs, they are all related to music For Some Reason" (?). It's not that the answers on their own aren't nice. Really seems like "MINE, MINE, MINE!" was probably the impetus for this thing (easy to hide four-letter names, a lot tougher to hide a six-letter). And CARBON OFFSET has a nice modern feel, while SPIN KICK is entertainingly dynamic (TEN YARDS is blah, but you get one blah per theme set if you want it, that's the rules). I just wish the puzzle could've done something, anything, with the mononyms as a group—highlighted some kind of logic. MONONYM is such a technical, anticlimactic revealer. What about "The Masked Singer," isn't that something? Yes, the TV show ... and it's a grid-spanning 15-letters long, too. I'm not saying that that would be a top-notch revealer here. I'm just saying that it's at least Trying. MONONYM isn't trying. P.S. I think mononyms who are also singers should be called BONONYMS. All in favor? Great, it's done. P.P.S. SADE and CHER and ADELE have Got to be calling their agents right about now.

The short fill on this is quite creaky, but it's offset (!) somewhat by the nicer longer stuff. Not just the themers, but HOT TAKE and SIT BACK and BAD MOVE and EYE MASK, all give a certain life to the grid that it desperately needed. It's actually a pleasant enough puzzle to solve overall. The HUGO Boss clue even made me laugh (10A: Who's the Boss?). One thing, though: I have no idea why ENID Blyton was the ENID of choice today. First of all, she's bygone—very bygone. Second, she's British, so actually most Americans, and certainly most Americans under 60, aren't going to have a clue who she is (unless they do a lot of crosswords) (never encountered one of her books in my life; know about her only because my wife grew up in the British Empire). Third, it's slightly weird to call her a "mystery writer"—although she was that, she was far far more famous (and infamous) as a children's writer. I get her confused with ENID Bagnold (who was also a British writer—National Velvet). As I wrote in ENID I thought "Wait, is this the children's writer? The racist caricature lady? With the golliwogs? That ENID!?!" And so I looked her up and yup. It's that ENID. Maybe let's not bring her back, and look, if you can't think of any good ENIDs, just stick to Oklahoma, OK? 

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld 

UPDATE: I just learned that HUGO Boss was an actual Nazi, so while I still think the HUGO clue is clever, I'm never gonna be able to unsee the Naziness now. (Thank you to the thoughtful reader who filled me in)

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