Barker fashion photographer and reality TV judge / MON 1-3-22 / Embedded spy awaiting a mission / Intuition without logical explanation / Animal that dances ballet in Fantasia

Constructor: Beth Rubin and Trent H. Evans

Relative difficulty: Medium (i.e. normal Monday)

THEME: GUT FEELING (61A: Intuition without logical explanation, or a hint to this puzzle's circled letters) — different FEELINGs are embedded (in the GUTs) of four theme answers:

Theme answers:

• MIND READER (17A: Telepathic sort)
• SLEEPER AGENT (27A: Embedded spy awaiting a mission)
• ALL OVER THE PLACE (37A: Scattered here, there and everywhere)
• "STOP IT, YOU TWO" (45A: "Quit arguing, kids!")

Word of the Day: NIGEL Barker (54D: ___ Barker, fashion photographer and reality TV judge) —

Nigel Barker (born 27 April 1972) is an English reality TV show personality, fashion photographer, author, spokesperson, filmmaker, and former model. He is best known for his participation as a judge and photographer on the reality show America's Next Top Model, and was the host of reality show The Face for the American series. [...]  In 2017 Barker became New Zealand winery Invivo's official "glambassador". [ed.: baaaaaaaaaaaaaarf ... barf] (wikipedia)

• • •

2022: Apparently The Year I Got Much Slower. Actually I was only about 20 seconds off my normal Monday pace for today, but 20 seconds is huge when the total time is only 3:17. Sometimes when I speed solve the wheels just come off in certain places even though in retrospect those places don't seem particularly difficult. Today, I lost all 20 of those seconds (I assume) in the NOMSG GARTER STAMP BAGEL AGENT section of the grid. Had NOFAT before NOMSG (vague clue) (5A: Claim on some food packaging). I was stuck on "hose" as a green snaky thing that shoots out water at 9D: Hose holder, or a kind of snake, so the only "hose holder" I could think of was a reel, which didn't fit, and somehow the second part of the clue ("or a kind of snake") only made the "hose" image stronger. I just bought a ton of "Forever" STAMPs from the actual honest-to-god stand-in-line-in-physical-space-behind-inexplicably-slow-people post office, and yet 22D: "Forever" purchase got no response from my brain. Wait, no true; it did get a response, and that response was, "Diamond." Because diamonds ... are forever? Sigh. Stupid Bond. Stupid brain. Even now I can't really picture an EGG BAGEL (10D: Breakfast roll with another breakfast staple added in). When you say "added in," do you mean, like, to the dough, or ... between the two cut halves of the bagel? I honestly don't know if an EGG BAGEL is a type of bagel or two halves of a bagel with an egg stuck in between. OK, it looks like the former, or maybe both, but definitely the former. I appreciate this website (gothambagels dot com), which tells me, reassuringly, "Egg bagels might mystify you; many are deeply confused by what they actually are." Literally wrote in EGG BREAD for this answer at some point. And for the "Embedded spy" the only SLEEPER phrase my brain could come up with at first was SLEEPER CELL, which, again, like the hose REEL, didn't fit. Also, "STOP IT, YOU TWO!" was hard to parse, what with there being zero clue material relating specifically to the TWO part of the answer. Everywhere else felt very Monday, but the STAMP BAGEL area really (even if relatively briefly) messed me up.

As for the theme, it works just fine. Lots of different feeling types, all of them embedded in the "guts" of the themers. Doesn't seem like a particularly demanding theme, and the choice of feelings is really arbitrary, but the theme answers themselves are strong, so conceptual looseness doesn't really matter that much. With these embedded-word-type themes, I always think back to a rejection letter I got from Patrick Berry a long time ago (when he edited the Chronicle of Higher Ed. xword), in which he explained that these themes are always more elegant when the embedded word touches every word in the themer; that is, to use today's puzzle as an example, you want the feeling to touch every word in the themer it's in. MIND READER and SLEEPER AGENT do this. ALL OVER THE PLACE and "STOP IT, YOU TWO" do not ("THE PLACE" and "TWO" are just floating there, completely out of touch with their feelings). But Patrick Berry is The Greatest, and most solvers aren't going to notice or care about that level of elegance. I  notice and care, and you, now, have to endure that noticing and caring. But again, this is wisdom that came from on (very) high, so I'm just passing it on as a courtesy. Do with it what you will. Thankfully, the conceptually less-than-elegant theme answers are also the most entertaining answers in the puzzle, so I'm not mad at all. 

The fill is pretty average, with only the SE corner making me think "errrrr you could probably tear it all out and do better." TÉA / LEONI  and ARIE are crosswordese royalty, MOIRE is the official fabric of crosswordese, and a single WILE never made any corner better. Also, please give me a better NIGEL, one that isn't a, and I quote, "reality TV judge." Or, and I even more ruefully quote, an "official glambassador" for a New Zealand winery. Better NIGELs include Hawthorne, Kennedy, Tufnel (of "Spinal Tap"), and whoever the NIGEL is in XTC's song "Making Plans for NIGEL." See you tomorrow.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

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