It might grad a bite mostly to eat / FRI 5-16-25 / Carnival treat / Radioactive element whose name is derived from the Greek for "unstable" / Like some stories and ships / One-stop shopping spot / Actress Thompson of "Selma" / ___ Walcott, 1992 Literature Nobelist from St. Lucia

Constructor: August Lee-Kovach

Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium



THEME: None

Word of the Day: PENDULUM (9D: Aid for a hypnotist) —

A pendulum is a device made of a weight suspended from a pivot so that it can swing freely.^[1] When a pendulum is displaced sideways from its resting, equilibrium position, it is subject to a restoring force due to gravity that will accelerate it back toward the equilibrium position. When released, the restoring force acting on the pendulum's mass causes it to oscillate about the equilibrium position, swinging back and forth. The time for one complete cycle, a left swing and a right swing, is called the period. The period depends on the length of the pendulum and also to a slight degree on the amplitude, the width of the pendulum's swing.

• • •

It's Rafa again covering for Rex, who should be back tomorrow! Just one more day stuck with me. You guys are almost there. I am writing this post with my cat purring on my lap while eating deliciously crunchy and juicy grapes. It's the perfect blog-writing setup and I will have to replicate it every time I sub in the future. I hope you are reading this blog post in a similarly delightful set of circumstances.

My cat Georgia on my lap right now

Friday is my favorite crossword day. It's the day of the whoosh-whoosh, wow I'm so smart, wow this is such a fun expression, wow this is such a clever clue, etc. The top-left corner got me in a weird solving funk because I desperately wanted the "shooting for the stars" misdirect to be something paparazzi-adjacent, and I had LOOS and then LAVS before CANS. But eventually we got there, and the rest of the grid provided a lot less resistance for me. Oh, I was very confused by how SHAG was [Chase, as some flies] (I had SWAT for a while) ... but Google tells me it's a baseball thing. Honestly, whenever I'm totally clueless, it's usually a baseball thing. I should know better by now.

(Aside: there are two things that I very canonically Know Nothing About: baseball and movies. That extremely famous movie that shaped an entire era? Never heard of it. That iconic actor? Never seen this face in my life. That baseball slang term? (how are there so many?!?!?!) -- nope, never heard of it! To be clear, I am not trying to "fix" this. I am very content, blissful even, in my ignorance of all things baseball and movie. There are other things I know a lot about that I'm sure would have the baseball and movie buffs stumped.)

The delicious and juicy grapes I am currently eating (I am almost done)

Back to the puzzle. There's very little to nitpick here. I have always died on the hill that LINE A is not a thing. Yes, if you go on irs.gov and look at the instructions for Schedule C, they do refer to LINE A, line B, etc., but ... ugh ... it just feels really tortured to me. I have also heard that SI SI is not a thing that is actually ever said in Spanish, but I don't speak Spanish so that's not a hill I am qualified to die on. But (singular) yes, overall, clean short fill.

(Aside #2: *puts CPA hat on* (disclaimer: I am not a CPA), Schedule A and Schedule B both start with "Line 1" ... you have to go to Schedule C to see "Line A" ... ok I'm done.)

Some fun long entries too. DOOMSDAY MACHINE just didn't really do a ton for me to be honest. It has kind of an apocalyptic end-of-the-world vibe that is maybe a bit too close for comfort. The rest was all solid but I just wish it had felt a bit more fresh and exciting and whoosh-whoosh (a very scientific term, of course). The grid spanner is the only entry that is a debut. I don't normally care about debut entries but it was interesting to check to see if it would corroborate my feeling that the puzzle was missing a je ne sais quoi.

(Aside #3, a note about debuts: a puzzle can have many debuts and not be good! An entry can be debuted but be bad (see: STRAWY)! A puzzle can have zero debuts and still feel fun and fresh and fantastic! You get the idea.)

A very STRAWY photo

Anyways, I'm just being annoying. It was a good puzzle! I liked it! Just the bar for a Friday is astronomically high for me. Let's say nice things now. I loved the fresh (to me) angle for FOR THE WIN (yes, I am praising a sports angle), and it was fun to see next to FREE AGENT (yes, I am praising a sports-vibes stack).

Alright, I'm done with my grapes and it's time to go rot on the couch (still with the cat, of course!). I feel like a lot of the blog today was me rambling in my three asides ... but that's just how the blog cookie crumbles sometimes. Hope you all are well and see you next time!

Bullets:

• 57A: CUBER [Superfast puzzle solver, of a sort] — I had a CUBER era in middle school but I never got good :(
• 19A: LOSS [The "1" of 3-1-4, say] — Took me forever to get this, but clever angle! (Yes, here I am praising *yet another* sports thing. Who am I even?!) (It's wins / losses / draws)
• 61A: NERD ALERT [Sarcastic reply when someone quotes "Star Trek"] — As a nerd who knows nothing about Star Trek (see aside #1, subsection "movies") I do not feel represented by this clue!
• 14D: YAK [Its milk is a source of chhurpi (Nepalese cheese)] — I don't want to claim what is Right or Wrong but it's interesting to see which "foreign" things warrant a parenthetical explainer and which don't. Editing crosswords is hard! You're always making assumptions about what "the average solver" should or should not know. This clue made me think about that!
  

Signed, Rafa

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Big feller? / THU 10-17-24 / Punny summary of the battle between editor and writer / Gru's twin brother in the "Despicable Me" series / Tall and pointy, as ears / 1930s vice president John ___ Garner / Consonants articulated with the tongue against the upper teeth / Thomas Lincoln, familiarly / Hebrew name meaning "my God" / First city in Europe with paved streets (1339) / Do some grapplin' / Drug also called "rocket fuel" or "ozone," for short

Constructor: August Lee-Kovach

Relative difficulty: On the easy side for a Thursday

THEME: ALTERCATION (56A: Punny summary of the battle between editor and writer seen in 17-, 24-, 35- and 46-Across) — ordinary phrases clued as if they related to a fight about ALTERing a piece of writing (if you're wondering how "-CATION" is "punny," You Are Not Alone)

Theme answers:

• PERIOD DRAMA (17A: Much ado about some punctuation?)
• RUN ON FUMES (24A: Anger over a grammatically incorrect sentence?)
• TENSE EXCHANGE (35A: Harsh words regarding the past and the present?)
• TITLE FIGHT (46A: Brawl over what to call a piece of writing?)

Word of the Day: Thomas "TAD" Lincoln (6D: Thomas Lincoln, familiarly) —

Thomas "Tad" Lincoln (April 4, 1853 – July 15, 1871) was the fourth and youngest son of the 16th President of the United States Abraham Lincoln and his wife Mary Todd Lincoln. // Thomas Lincoln was born on April 4, 1853, the fourth son of Abraham Lincoln and Mary Todd. His three elder brothers were Robert (1843–1926), Edward (1846–1850), and William (1850–1862). Named after his paternal grandfather Thomas Lincoln, he was soon nicknamed "Tad" by his father, for his small body and large head, and because as an infant he wiggled like a tadpole. Tad's first name has occasionally been erroneously recorded as Thaddeus. // Tad was born with a form of cleft lip and palate, which caused him speech problems throughout his life. He had a lisp and delivered his words rapidly and unintelligibly. Often only those close to Lincoln were able to understand him. For example, he called his father's bodyguard, William H. Crook, "Took," and his father "Papa Day" instead of "Papa Dear." [...] On Saturday morning, July 15, 1871, Lincoln died at the age of 18 at the Clifton House hotel in Chicago. The cause of death has been variously referred to as tuberculosis, a pleuristic attack, pneumonia, or congestive heart failure. In an obituary, John Hay affectionately referred to him as "Little Tad." (wikipedia)

 • • •

[My question, exactly]

Gonna be quick about it this morning because I'm kinda angry about this puzzle's revealer, and, you know ... don't write angry. Is that common advice? It certainly should be. Definitely don't post angry, don't tweet angry, don't reply angry. So I'm gonna try to put my objection to this puzzle plainly and then just move on. See, it's one thing for me to finish a puzzle and have no idea what the theme is. That happens from time to time. Usually, I just have to look around the grid and think about it a little, and then I see it. Once in a very blue moon, I honestly don't get it, and usually I'll just tell you so. Sometimes I'll look elsewhere on the internet to see if someone else knows. But today is a special kind of frustration Perfect Storm because I finished the puzzle and thought "... I don't get it. I mean, I see the ALTER part ... and the answers are about ALTERing manuscripts, so ... that makes sense, but ... what the hell am I supposed to do with -CATION?" I sat there and looked at the letters in "CATION." I said it out loud, trying to hear what the pun was. I said the whole word, ALTERCATION, trying desperately to hear something "punny" that I was missing. In the end I went searching for answers online. And ... it seems that the CATION does nothing. I had already discovered the "punny" part in "ALTER," and then kept looking for punniness even though there was none left to find. Fruitless searching for promised punniness—I can't think of a worse way to spend my (crossword) time, especially when it's my responsibility to know this stuff, and I'm on the clock (i.e. my window for writing this blog in the morning is pretty tight). If we're dealing with drama about periods, fumes about run-ons, exchanges about tenses, and fights about titles, then why aren't we dealing with ... something, Anything, about ALTER(ing)? Or why aren't we altering ... something. We could be altering something. I really thought we were altering something... something that sounds like "CATION." The problem is, nothing sounds like CATION. Sigh.

Also, what is this Wednesday-type theme doing in my Thursday puzzle? I expect real trickery on Thursday, not just half-assed "pun" themes (CATION being the half of the ass that's not pulling its weight). You can tell the puzzle knows the theme is not tricky enough because it tries to lard the puzzle with difficulty via the cluing, which means that the theme feels pretty remedial and the solve ends up being a bit of a slog. Not Thursday-hard, just ... plodding. The fill is also less than great in many places: RDA EARLAP NANCE ADSALE INRE DRU AMI IFS OTOH ... I've seen worse, but I've seen better. The NE corner has a certain elegance and class with a BECOMING FLORENCE alongside FINESSE, and the opposite corner is at least interesting. TO DIE FOR is a fun phrase (as well as a great movie) and BATLIKE is weirdly entertaining. But between the inadequate revealer and the early-week theme type, I was a little disappointed today. 

[38D: Tall and pointy, as ears]

My big holdups today were actually quite small, in that they involved just two squares in the NE and just one in the center of the grid—dead center, in fact. I had a hell of a time parsing TENSE EXCHANGE because I had 32D: Big feller? not as AXE (you might "fell," or cut down, a tree with an AXE) but as APE (!?), which left me trying to make something out of -EEP CHANGE. In the NE, I had the Hebrew name as ARI (16A: Hebrew name meaning "my God" (ELI)). Not an exciting or interesting error, but it slowed me down a bit. Otherwise, as I say, there was nothing like the typical trickery of a Thursday puzzle on display here today, so I anticipate that people will have better-than-average solving times across the board.


Notes:

• 15A: One who might make a comeback? (ALUM) — an ALUM might "come back" ... to their alma mater ... for a class reunion. Pretty sure that's the intended context.
• 21A: Only city that entirely surrounds a country (ROME) — funny that that "country" is the only country with "city" in its name: VATICAN CITY. 0.19 square miles!
• 30A: Hunting cap feature (EARLAP) — I remember the first time I saw this word (in a crossword, of course) and thought "where ... where's the 'F'? What did they do with the 'F'?"
• 5D: What Alexander Graham Bell suggested as the standard telephone-answering greeting ("AHOY") — most of what I know about American history, I learned from "The Simpsons"; please enjoy this video montage of Mr. Burns answering the phone:

• 12D: First city in Europe with paved streets (1339) (FLORENCE) — FLORENCE and ROME, lah-di-dah! My daughter, a theater production manager, has a new gig coordinating the building and installation of theaters on board cruise ships, and those ships are being put together somewhere just outside ... Venice. Most of her work is actually done remotely (meetings meetings meetings), so she's in the States for now, but come January ... Italy. Not a bad perk.
• 24D: Half-baked? (RARE) — think steak. 
• 14A: Hercule's creator (AGATHA) — think Christie
• 27D: Consonants articulated with the tongue against the upper teeth (DENTALS) — technical linguistics terminology! I don't mind it! Has FRICATIVE ever been in the grid? No!? And not FRICATIVES either? What's the hold-up!?

See you next time.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

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1990s-2000s Volkswagen seven-seater / SUN 3-27-22 / Bellini opera that takes place in Gaul / High-arcing shots, in basketball lingo / One-act Oscar Wilde play / Most massive dwarf planet in the solar system / Harp-shaped constellation / New York town that's home to Playland amusement park

Constructor: August Lee-Kovach

Relative difficulty: Easy, mostly

THEME: KHUFU — circled squares form a pyramid shape that spells out "THE GREAT PYRAMID OF GIZA"; then there's a lot of trivia related to that. Further, there is an isolated part of the grid within the "pyramid" (the KING'S CHAMBER) where we find KHUFU ... I have no idea who that is (see Word of the Day, below):

Theme answers:

• SEVEN WONDERS / OF THE / ANCIENT WORLD (5D: With 51-Across and 15-Down, group in which [see circled letters] is the only one still largely intact)
• LIMESTONE (41A: Approximately 5.5 million tons of it was used to build [see circled squares])
• CHEOPS (10D: Greek name for this puzzle's enclosed answer)
• KING'S CHAMBER (74D: With 101-Across, where this puzzle's enclosed answer is located)
• THREE (79D: Number of 101-Acrosses in [see circled squares])

Word of the Day: KHUFU (121A in the grid pictured above) —

Khufu (/ˈkuːfuː/, full name Khnum Khufu /ˈknuːm ˈkuːfuː/, known to the ancient Greeks as Χέοψ, Khéops, and the ancient Romans as Cheops; Old Egyptian: ḫw.f-wj, Ḫawyafwī pronounced [χawˈjafwij]) was an ancient Egyptian monarch who was the second pharaoh of the Fourth Dynasty, in the first half of the Old Kingdom period (26th century BC). Khufu succeeded his father Sneferu as king. He is generally accepted as having commissioned the Great Pyramid of Giza, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, but many other aspects of his reign are poorly documented.

The only completely preserved portrait of the king is a three-inch high ivory figurine found in a temple ruin of a later period at Abydos in 1903. All other reliefs and statues were found in fragments, and many buildings of Khufu are lost. Everything known about Khufu comes from inscriptions in his necropolis at Giza and later documents. For example, Khufu is the main character noted in the Westcar Papyrus from the 13th dynasty.

Most documents that mention king Khufu were written by ancient Egyptian and Greek historians around 300 BC. Khufu's obituary is presented there in a conflicting way: while the king enjoyed a long-lasting cultural heritage preservation during the period of the Old Kingdom and the New Kingdom, the ancient historians Manetho, Diodorus and Herodotus hand down a very negative depiction of Khufu's character. Thanks to these documents, an obscure and critical picture of Khufu's personality persists.

• • •

It's hard to explain how tedious I find puzzles like this. There's a visual gag, so we can admire the architecture of the thing, sure, but solving it was mostly a dry and dull and trivia-laden experience. It is interesting to learn who KHUFU is. I know CHEOPS, as that is what the ancient Romans (apparently) called him, but KHUFU? Is that name exceedingly well known? If so, dear lord why does it not appear in the grid way, way more often. A five-letter answer ending in "U"!? You'd think we'd've seen that a lot (lot) by now. Instead, KHUFU is literally making its NYTXW debut here, today. If the name had made earlier crossword appearances, as I'd expect a name of real historical import to do, then I'd've seen the name before, which, as far as I know, I haven't, or hadn't, until the exact moment of solving this puzzle. Which means KHUFU is just ... more trivia. I can do further research ... but again, at the solving level, even if I know KHUFU's name, the whole "discovery" experience is more of a slog than a revelation. Felt like I was building the damn pyramids instead of admiring them. Filling in squares (or circled squares) in a kind of paint-by-numbers / programmatic way until the whole thing was filled in. THE GREAT PYRAMID OF GIZA, unlike KHUFU, is very familiar to me, and so filling in those squares was a cinch, even though I honestly didn't look to see what the letters were until late. I mostly just tried to solve this like a regular crossword, kind of a themeless. I could see it was about a pyramid and I just took the trivia answers as they came (was happy to remember CHEOPS, though to be honest I wrote in PELOPS in there at first...). Wrong -OPS. Anyway, I'm just never going to be a fan of the puzzle where I'm supposed to ooh and aah at the cleverness of the architecture, but where the pleasure of the solving experience itself seems not to have been given any consideration. Visual pyrotechnics are fine, but this is just a trivia test with two unusual visual elements; no wordplay, no actual trickery, no cleverness (beyond, again, the obvious cleverness of the visual design). Is ENCRYPT supposed to be a bonus theme answer, a kind of wink at the solver? (68A: Make secret, in a way). KHUFU is indeed ENCRYPTed, after all. If so, I think it's my favorite part of the whole puzzle. At least it shows a sense of humor.

I solved the puzzle using my Black Ink solving software, which warned me there would be visual elements that couldn't be reproduced, and suggested maybe I'd like to solve on the website itself. But the last time it gave me that warning was the magnet puzzle (from early last week), and I actually didn't end up liking having the "visual element" (in that case, a literal picture of a "magnet") presented for me. Would've been more fun / more of a challenge without it. So I thought I'd go ahead and solve in my software and just take my chances ... which was fine until the very end, when the only clue I had for KHUFU was 121A: This puzzle's subject. Me: "Uh ... CRYPT? MUMMY? How the hell should I know?!" So I had to go to the website after all, in the end, and there you got it completely spelled out for you, in a child's placement game sort of way: just transfer the letters from the numbered squares in the grid to their corresponding numbers in the KING'S CHAMBER, and you get K, H, U, F, U. No thought involved. Hardly a satisfying conclusion.

[This is the grid numeration as it appears in the newspaper]

There are some interesting non-theme answers in the grid. I especially liked THE BORG (I'm watching my way through "Star Trek: The Next Generation" at the moment) and HALF-READ (like half the books lying around my house at the moment) and WEE BIT, which is charmingly rather than irksomely quaint (58D: Tad). Weird that GERI and GERRY are both in this grid. Not offensive weird, just oddly coincidental weird. Not many trouble areas in the grid today. The EUROVAN (?) GROCERY TRACT area was a bit tough, but starting the puzzle is often the toughest part, so that's not too weird. Other than that, I think I was slowest in and around the KING'S part of KING'S / CHAMBER. Didn't know KING'S, and then the Oscar Wilde play ("SALÔME") took a while to see (100A: One-act Oscar Wilde play), and also I wrote in MUJERES instead of SEÑORAS, which is several levels of bizarre, the first level being that "Mujeres" is actually in the clue (!)  (66D: Mujeres con esposos) (and yes, I did also consider ESPOSAS, thanks for asking). But all other mistakes I made were trivial. FAVA for SOYA, that kind of thing (106A: ___ bean). Quickly fixed, insignificant. The grid is really quite clean, especially considering the demands placed upon it by the complicated architecture. It's also reasonably interesting. Not scintillating, but by no means dull. 

There's not much that needs explaining. I don't think I get the phrasing on the clue for SAP (87A: Frequent victim of an April fool). I thought the SAP was the "April fool." Is "fool" supposed to be a synonym for "trick" or "prank" here? Because the pranker can't possibly be the "fool." Whatever—the clue would make more sense if it were longer: [Frequent victim of an April Fools' joke], something like that. Not that anyone is going to stumble on that. I just like clear, precise phrasing is all. I don't know why a horse should be voting ... I mean, I get the "neigh" / NAY thing, but it's a very weird premise for a "?" clue (63A: Opposing vote from a horse?). Usually "?" have plays on words, but this one's just like "hay ... what if horses voted, what would that be like?" Weird. I think that's it. Hope you enjoyed this more than I did. Happy KHUFU to you. Enjoy the rest of your day.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld 

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Fishhook attachment / THU 3-3-22 / Soul sucker in the Harry Potter books / Accessory for a soccer fan / Goddess whose name means lovely / She met her husband Frank after beating him in a shooting match / It covers 6.8% of the earth's land / Simple recipe instruction or a hint to the answers to the four starred clues

Constructor: August Lee-Kovach

Relative difficulty: Medium-Challenging

THEME: JUST ADD WATER (35A: Simple recipe instruction ... or a hint to the answers to the four starred clues) — you need to mentally supply "water" (i.e. H2O, i.e. HHO) in order to make sense of the theme answers:

Theme answers:

• HIGLIDAYS (16A: *Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur) ("High Holidays")
• FRENCRNS (25A: *The wolf in "Peter and the Wolf") ("French horns")
• BEACUSES (42A: *Cape Cod retreats) ("beach houses")
• ELEVENTUR (56A: *Last possible second) ("eleventh hour")

Word of the Day: SNELL (45D: FisHHOok attachment) (!)—

: a short line (as of gut) by which a fishhook is attached to a longer line (merriam-webster.com)

• • •

Back when I was constructing, some variation of this theme occurred to me at some point, as I'm sure it has to lots and lots of constructors. I'd be absolutely floored if the "HHO" trick hasn't been done, in some way, multiple times in puzzles throughout the years; perhaps in other venues, but still, H2O has very obvious potential to a constructor whose mind is alert to theme ideas. The question is: what are you going to do with your "HHO" idea? Just put the letters in circled squares? Maybe do a rebus? Maybe something ultra-fancy with the molecule shape? Who knows? You brainstorm ideas and see where it goes. The version we see today has a very promising revealer. It's a common instruction that you might find in simple, back-of-the-box recipes, and it's clear. It tells you exactly what to do. So that's good. The revealer is strong. But what about the rest of it? What does it feel like to solve it? And for me the answer was, it didn't feel that good. The answers are gibberish. You look at the grid: gibberish. You want to ADD WATER, OK, but you cannot actually ADD WATER because there is nowhere to add it, so all you've got, then, is dry pancake mix, and you can't eat that. FRENCRNS!? I'm not eating that, no. Having to mentally supply the HHO adds a level of challenge to the puzzle, for sure—I kept repeatedly failing to parse the waterless entries correctly. This was especially true with HIGHHOLIDAYS, which I kept wanting to have HOLY involved somewhere, despite the redundancy of HOLY HOLIDAYS. And I thought the French horn was singular (as the flute is (bird), as the clarinet is (cat), as the oboe is (duck), in "Peter and the Wolf"), so I had FRENCHRN ... obviously a violation of the whole theme idea. So it ended up being somewhat unsatisfying to solve. And very much unpleasant to look at. 

That NW corner was brutal on me. And I wanted ORBS right away! And SNL! But then ... off the "N" in SNL ... I wrote in AS IN instead of THAN (13A: Part of a comparison). And that was absolutely lethal. Could not bring myself to take it out. Seemed perfect. Also, Hammer's pants are PUFFY, or at least that's the adjective I associate with them, so that answer was confusing me (3D: Like Hammer pants = BAGGY). And RHINO, forget it, no, I couldn't see that at all. ENG could've been anything. Not sure why it took me so long to finally see ROYCE (a gimme)—that answer finally gave me the momentum to power through that thorny first-themer area. The rest of the grid was pretty manageable. Figuring out where the HHO bits were and how to write its answer into the grid was the only significant challenge. So, as is typical with Thursday tricks, there's an indefinite period of struggle just to identify the trick, and then the post-aha part, which is significantly easier. I wanted YALE at 14A: Its motto is "Fiat lux" (UCLA), which the puzzle must've known I would want, since it then taunted me with the actual YALE motto later in the grid (59A: Its motto is "Lux et veritas").

The fill was crustyish in places, for sure. EN-LAI SNELL is one of the less appealing pairs of fives I've seen in a while. Real "out of the past" energy. Meanwhile, ERST is nearby, nodding his approval: "Yes ... EN-LAI SNELL ... my old friends ... it is good to be together again ..." I'm sure TURN A LOSS is a phrase but it still rings awkward, esp. when you set it alongside its far more common counterpart, "turn a profit." You take losses, you turn profits. So no love for that long answer. Everything else is fine. Holds up. Not remarkable one way or the other. 

Bullets:

• 39A: She met her husband Frank after beating him in a shooting match (ANNIE) — wow, once that curly-haired kid moved out of that orphanage, her life really went places ... (I know, I know, just let me pretend) (this "Oakley"-free clue is weird)
• 27A: ___ People's Democratic Republic (LAO) — the official name of LAOS
• 37A: Measures of cellular strength (BARS) — think phones, not biology
• 17A: Start of some souvenir shirt slogans (I HEART) — this one wants you to think it's fresh and clever, but it's really just a weird partial. I do not heart it.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld 

P.S. just noticed the grid is only 14 wide. I knew it looked weird. Why 14? Because the grid has to be an even number of squares wide in order for JUST ADD WATER (12) to sit dead-center.

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Okonkwo's people in Things Fall Apart / SAT 10-9-21 / Much-covered New Orleans standard based on Mardi Gras chants / Arc-shaped musical notation / Part of a Navy officer's rotation / Painter whose cataract surgery allowed him to see and paint in ultraviolet / Arm muscle slangily

Constructor: August Lee-Kovach

Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium

THEME: none 

Word of the Day: IBOS (45D: Okonkwo's people in "Things Fall Apart") —

The Igbo people (English: /ˈiːboʊ/ EE-boh, also US: /ˈɪɡboʊ/; also spelled Ibo and formerly also Iboe, Ebo, Eboe, Eboans, Heebo; natively Ṇ́dị́ Ìgbò In Nigeria, Igbos are indigenous to various states. Igbos are majorly found in Abia, Anambra, Ebonyi, Enugu and Imo States. A good population of Igbos are found in Delta and Rivers States while Igbos are a minority in Akwa ibom, Benue, Cross River, Edo and Kogi states. Large ethnic Igbo populations are found in Cameroon, Gabon, and Equatorial Guinea, as well as outside Africa. There has been much speculation about the origins of the Igbo people, as it is unknown how exactly the group came to form. Geographically, the Igbo homeland is divided into two unequal sections by the Niger River – an eastern (which is the larger of the two) and a western section. The Igbo people are one of the largest ethnic groups in Africa.

• • •

The weirdest thing about this grid is how smooth the middle came out relative to the NW and SE corners. That stagger-stack of 9s at the heart of the grid is really pretty impressive. All solid, vivid, common words and expressions, and if you don't know what SPLITTERS are, well, you're gonna have to forgive the puzzle, it's baseball playoff season (no NATS this year). A couple of song titles (i.e. proper nouns) might also have posed a challenge for some solvers, familiarity-wise (I somehow had Zarathurstra SPRUCH-ing, though I'll be damned if I didn't get "IKO IKO" off the "I"!), but otherwise that wide-open middle gets all its difficulty from clues, not weird fill, which is admirable. You end up with a creamy center that is delightful to make your way through. So if this big, wide-open space at the center of the grid is so beautifully filled, why are the much easier-to-fill, less wide-open corners so much worse? Well, the NW isn't bad, but SEA DUTY??? (3D: Part of a Navy officer's rotation). There are times when I want to shout "Don't listen to your software! Fight back!" If the answer doesn't really mean anything to you, if you wouldn't even really know it if it hadn't been suggested to you by your wordlist, it's at least worth considering not using it. If you can build the center of this grid as well as you did, you can put three good 7s alongside a 6 in the NW. 

[29D: Much-covered New Orleans standard based on Mardi Gras chants]

The SE is much worse, based almost solely on the ridiculous alleged word, OVOIDAL (42A: Egglike). If you solve crosswords, you've definitely learned your egg-words. Those words are OVATE and OVOID. You know the Latin phrase "ab OVO," sure, and OVUM and OVA (singular, plural), but where actual English words are concerned, you have OVATE and OVOID near at hand. Perhaps, like me, you don't really know why we need two words for "egg-shaped," but it's crosswords, sometimes you need vowel-heavy 5s to make your grid come out, and OVATE and OVOID are two that you know. But let me tell you, when I got here.

... I wanted to quit. I do actually quit puzzles that aren't the NYTXW. I quit one earlier this week because it tried to foist BOUTOUTCOME on me. Nuh uh. No. That's quite enough. And here, once I had OVO, I knew I was going nowhere good, as there were way too many spaces for OVOID, which itself isn't even the better of the five-letter options for "egglike" (#teamovate). So it was with mild horror that I watched the absurd OVOIDAL come into view, and crossing HELLENE, which is also, er, uh, not the most familiar of words (38D: Spartan, e.g.). I use "Hellenic" all the time, but that's because I sometimes teach ancient literature—I have never not once used HELLENE; it's a thing, for sure, but pretty obscure, and again, I come back to the center of this grid, and wonder why it flows so nicely, while this SE corner seems to clunk and sputter to the finish line. I can tolerate HELLENE on its own, in an otherwise sparkling corner, but, yeah, it's a shame about OVOIDAL. Just because a dictionary somewhere tells you something *is* a word doesn't mean you should use it. Trust your gut; also, lean toward the words / phrases that you actually know, that seem familiar, or at least familiar-ish. Otherwise you end with OVOIDAL, which isn't a word so much as a really mean thing to call Al.

I was struggling in the NW, not thinking of a VISA as an "item" (i.e. an object) (1A: Travel item), and having no idea who CEDRIC Richmond is, but then [fanfare!], Ron ELY to the rescue. OOF, revisiting this SEA DUTY corner is making me a little seasick. Anyway, once I got going, everything was pretty easy, including the center. Had TEN before SSN (56A: Fig. often written with X's), but no other missteps, minor or major. I remembered IBOS today! (45D: Okonkwo's people in "Things Fall Apart"). Like "IKO IKO," I got it off the "I." Sometimes you learn things from crosswords of yore (like Ron ELY!), and even though they don't seem like the freshest of fill, they can really save your bacon from time to time. This is where I'm a crosswordese hypocrite—I don't necessarily love it to look at, but it bails me out of many a tough spot, for sure. Nothing else in this puzzle seems particularly tricky or obscure. Mostly a fun time; there's just some fill here and there, particularly in the SE, that should've been o-voided.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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