Backpedaling qualifier / FRI 6-7-24 / Eponym of a popular vodka brand / Massachusetts college specializing in engineering / Feature of many haute couture dresses / Craze of late-2000s politics / Legendary figure whose first name sounds like something he's known for doing /

Constructor: Alice Liang and Christina Iverson

Relative difficulty: Medium

THEME: none 

Word of the Day: TRIPLE SEC (9D: Ingredient in a Long Island iced tea) —

Triple sec is an orange-flavoured liqueur that originated in France. It usually contains 20–40% alcohol by volume.

Triple sec is rarely consumed neat, but is used in preparing many mixed drinks such as margaritas, cosmopolitans, sidecars, Long Island iced teas, and mai tais. // 

The origin of the name "triple sec" is disputed. The term is French and composed of triple, with the same meaning as in English, and sec, the French word for "dry". Some sources claim it comes from a triple distillation process used to create the liqueur, but others say that a triple distillation is not used. Cointreau, a brand of triple sec, is reported to have invented the term based on the three types of orange peels used in the liqueur, although other reports have Cointreau claim the triple to mean "three times the flavour of Curaçaos." (wikipedia)

• • •

I'll start with the only thing I really didn't love, and sadly it was the very last answer I filled in: OBAMANIA (33D: Craze of late-2000s politics). Now I was there, I remember the mania, but this word ... I mean, say it to yourself. How ... how do you say it? You can't say OH-buh-mania because that's not where the stress in his name goes, but you can't pronounce his name the way you're supposed to or you end up with a word that rhymes with "gonorrhea." I guess you have to hard-hit each and every one of the first *three* syllables for it to come out like anything anyone would understand coming out of your mouth, whereas OBAMAMANIA fairly trips off the tongue. It's got that "MAMAMAMAMA" string that makes it fun to say. Also, when I google ["OBAMANIA"] the first, and I mean very first, hit I get is to the Collins Dictionary, and it's an entry for the extra "MA" version: OBAMAMANIA. Now I can see very well that OBAMANIA is an accepted variant—I'm just saying I *hate* it. My ears hate it. My sense of lexical beauty and cadence and mellifluousness hates it. The one thing I love about it is that it's juxtaposed with SATANISM. Have fun with that one, you racist/birther/conspiracy theory-addled f*ckwits. I wish I could buy a record where the ALBUM ART featured an orgy of OBAMANIA and SATANISM. That would rock.

But before I hit that (to my ears) clunker of a final answer, I was having as good a time as I've had with a themeless (and a Friday in particular) in a long while. I actually had to work a bit to make answers appear, and my work routinely felt like it was properly rewarded. Love to struggle and then get the answer and go "oh, cool" (rather than "oh, bad," which is, obviously, worse). My first smile came with WINE GRAPE—back to the bar! (see yesterday's alcohol-heavy puzzle). It's a nice phrase, well disguised by what appears to be a geography clue (4D: Muscat, for one) (Muscat is the capital of that popular crossword destination, OMAN). But after WINE GRAPE I was left with BARG- as the answer to 23A: Quarters, e.g. and man I was stumped. "Quarters" are coins, "Quarters" are a living space, "Quarters" are segments of a football game (or anything, really) ... but the only thing I could get out of BARG- was BARGAIN or, I dunno, BARGLES (is that a word? I think I'm thinking (aptly) of "garbles"). My brain was doing that common thing of assuming the answer was one word. Bah. When I finally got it, I thought "neat trick. Clever." Though I don't think I know how to play the game. I just remember John Cusack's "dime for every quarter" con at the beginning of The Grifters, and I don't think that's a BAR GAME, strictly speaking:

"I DID INDEED!" is indeed smug, good clue (18A: Smug affirmative). The best clue, with probably my favorite answer of the day, was the one for the symmetrical counterpart to "I DID INDEED!"—50A: Backpedaling qualifier ("... IN A GOOD WAY"). There's something about the phrase "Backpedaling qualifier" that (unlike OBAMANIA) sounds great in my head, and just imagining the context where one might need to utter such a backpedaling qualifier made me laugh. "Your mom kinda looks like Sid Caesar ... IN A GOOD WAY!" 

The other answer besides BAR GAME that really challenged my parsing abilities was BIAS CUT (37A: Feature of many haute couture dresses). Again, I thought I was dealing with a single word, and after FIASCOS didn't pan out, I was out of answers to fit the letter patterns. Turns out the solution was, once again, two words and not one. I went from thinking "who the hell has ever heard of this fashion term ... MIASCUS or DIASCUM or whatever it is!!?" to "D'oh! BIAS! It's BIAS CUT ... OK, yeah, that's a thing I've at least heard of. You win again, puzzle." (and thanks, ROBIN HOOD, for the assist there—great clue on that answer too: 29D: Legendary figure whose first name sounds like something he's known for doing).

I had many single-letter problems today. CRAY before CRAW (1A: Lead-in to fish) and (as always) REMI before RAMI and SNARE before SNARL and OLEN before OLIN (52A: Massachusetts college specializing in engineering) (my daughter toured that school back when she thought engineering was the way to go, but today I convinced myself that OLIN was a name that belonged solely to actors Lena and Ken and OLEN must be the college). The OL-N family of answers is crowded and confusing:

• OLIN (Ken, Lena, college, arms and chemical manufacturer that sounds like the villain in an eco-fable)
• O-LAN (character from Pearl Buck's The Good Earth)
• OLEN (first name of author Steinhauer, middle name of author Robert Butler)

O-LAN used to be a staple of crossword grids, but time and constructing software have not been kind: 47 appearances in the modern area, but only four in the last decade. OLON and OLUN, meanwhile, remain mythical.

[SATANISM!]

Bullets:

• 12D: Litmus test of a chef's basic culinary skills (OMELETTE) — I had -MEL- and wanted SMELL TEST (nevermind that it didn't fit, and that "test" was already in the clue)
• 26D: Green party figure, for short? (ST. PAT) — it's a good clue. Somehow bugs me that "figure" gets used in this clue and the clue immediately following it (29D: Legendary figure etc.). Also bugs me (slightly) that "triple" is in the ITO clue (27A: First woman to land a triple axel in major competition) when it's clearly, ostentatiously in the grid (TRIPLE SEC).
• 47D: "Is the pope Catholic?!" ("UH, YES!") — I have mixed feelings about the "UH / OH" genre of answer, especially now that the number of such answers seems to be getting out of control. You've got two of them crossing here today, with "UH, YES!" cutting through "OH HELL NO!" and I can hear both of today's phrases perfectly fine in my head but especially when you throw "UM" in the mix it can be very hard to know which two-letter sound the speaker is opening with. "UH, YES!" is kinda pushing the boundaries of feasibility.
• 22A: "I love mankind ... it's ___ I can't stand": Linus from "Peanuts" ("PEOPLE") — normally not a big fan of fill-in-the-blank quotation clues. Normally. ❤️

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

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Cry in Cologne / MON 6-12-23 / Buck first Black coach in Major League Baseball / 2017 Disney movie about the Day of the Dead / Tech for connecting wireless speakers / Filter for nostalgic photos / North America's only marsupial

Constructor: Alice Liang

Relative difficulty: No idea (from a Downs-only perspective, very hard)

THEME: WORD OF MOUTH (60A: What rumors are spread by ... or a hint to the ends of 16-, 29-, 35-/37- and 45-Across) — theme answers end with parts of the mouth:

Theme answers:

• HITS THE ROOF (16A: Explodes in anger)
• BLUETOOTH (29A: Tech for connecting wireless speakers)
• MOTHER / TONGUE (35A: With 37-Across, native language)
• BUBBLEGUM (45A: Chew on this!)

Word of the Day: Buck O'NEIL (28D: Buck ___, first Black coach in Major League Baseball) —

John Jordan "Buck" O'Neil Jr. (November 13, 1911 – October 6, 2006) was a first baseman and manager in the Negro American League, mostly with the Kansas City Monarchs. After his playing days, he worked as a scout and became the first African American coach in Major League Baseball. In his later years he became a popular and renowned speaker and interview subject, helping to renew widespread interest in the Negro leagues, and played a major role in establishing the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum in Kansas City, Missouri. He was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 2022 as an executive.

O'Neil's life was documented in Joe Posnanski's 2007 book The Soul of Baseball. (wikipedia)

• • •

This seems too remedial a concept, somehow. They're just ... mouth parts? Why these parts? Why, generally? It's just a group of things that have something, vaguely, in common. And the revealer doesn't really bring it all together well. WORD OF MOUTH is meant to be taken as "word ... related to the mouth"? Do I have that right? The TONGUE in MOTHER/TONGUE is bad in two respects, first because it's way way way too close to the actual tongue in your mouth (note how "roof" "tooth" and "gum" all appear in decidedly non-mouth contexts, whereas here "tongue" = language, an extension of the anatomical tongue to the activity it performs). The other way the central themer falls short is in being split. Something about isolating the "mouth" part like that (i.e. cutting "tongue" off and having it sit there on its own) feels awkward, out of keeping with the other answers, where the "mouth" parts are all run together, attached. Better for this to be 16 wide with MOTHERTONGUE sitting in the middle. I realize this is purely an aesthetic judgment, but I don't like TONGUE hanging out there all on its own. Severed TONGUE. No good. But mainly this theme suffers from being blah. A generic and unambitious concept. Execution-wise, everything seems OK. The fill is maybe a little weaker / crosswordesier than you'd like an easy Monday to be (ACH ORA AMNIOS URAL PCS CIO OOH AHS AOL ATRIA IMAM AIME etc.), but the puzzle is a bit theme-dense, so maybe that put some strain on the grid. This makes the iffier fill understandable, at least.

This was the hardest Downs-only solve I've had this year. In particular, those 3x6 NE and SW corners were brutal, in that two of the three Downs in each instance were ???? This is mostly because three of those four were colloquial expressions—fun to see in the grid, but notoriously hard to get without some hint from crosses. I had "___ IT!" at 11D: "Relax!" and wanted "COOL IT!" but was not at all sure, and when you put that lack of certainty alongside 12D: "Unbelievable!"—about which I was Not At All sure—well, you've got stuckness. PC- and OO- looked really unpromising, but eventually I just committed to "COOL IT!" and eventually "___ESH!" turned itself into "YEESH!" I feel like "YEESH" can mean millions of things, with lots of nuances depending on context, so getting there was hard. Not as hard, though, as getting the SW corner, where I nearly died, for real. The problem? Well, partly it was BARTER, which had the vague [Trade] clue (solely because the puzzle thought, wrongly, once again, that doubling up clues would be fun! (see 56D: Trade (SWAP))). But the much bigger problem was "BE-" at 45D: "Stop acting up!" ("BEHAVE!"). Again, the problem was one of context, i.e. imagining the right one. Couldn't figure out what kind of "acting up" we were talking about. The only answers I was considering there, for the longest time, where two-word answers: "BE COOL!" (impossible, as COOL was already in the grid, which I realized ... eventually) and "BE NICE!" I wanted BARTER to work but couldn't make it happen with the "BE-" answers I was entertaining. Eventually had to run the alphabet at -ORAS to see which letter seemed most plausible. Nearly went right past HORAS. First reaction: "meaningless." Then: "Whoa whoa, wait ... a dance plural? ... OMG it's 'BEHAVE!' ["Stop acting up!"] is 'BEHAVE'." And the "Congratulations" message appeared! Along the way, both POT ROAST and "GO FIGURE!" took a lot of work to uncover, but it was those NE/SW corners that really knocked me around today.

Not much else to say. Conceptually, this one didn't seem original or ambitious enough, and the revealer just didn't snap. The themers themselves are mostly interesting answers, and "GO FIGURE!"  adds some more colloquial spice to the mix. Mostly I'm really digging COOWN, just because of how strange it looks in the grid, with no hyphen or anything (21D: Possess jointly). Looks like a typo for CROWN or CLOWN. I'm pronouncing it "COWN" in my head, only with the vowel drawn waaaay out, like you're a lowing ... well, cow, I suppose. See you tomorrow.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

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