Ivy descriptor / FRI 10-11-24 / Online provocateur, in slang / Called out on Instagram, informally / Alternative to blinds / Penalty box, in hockey slang / Array on a trolley / What hilarity often does, it's said / German beer historically consumed by monks / Southern hip-hop duo with the #1 hit "Ms. Jackson"

Constructor: Billy Bratton

Relative difficulty: Medium

THEME: none 

Word of the Day: kri-kri (19A: Island home of a goat known as the kri-kri (CRETE)) —

The kri-kri (Capra hircus cretica), sometimes called the Cretan goat, Agrimi, or Cretan Ibex, is a feral goat inhabiting the Eastern Mediterranean, previously considered a subspecies of wild goat. The kri-kri today is found only in Greece: specifically on Crete and on three small islands off its coast (Dia, Thodorou, and Agii Pantes); as well as on the island of Sapientza (Messenian Oinousses) off the southwestern coast of Peloponnese, where it was brought in great numbers in order to protect the species from extinction. [...] The kri-kri is not thought to be indigenous to Crete, most likely having been imported to the island during the time of the Minoan civilization. It was once common throughout the Aegean but the peaks of the 2,400 m (8,000 ft) White Mountains of Western Crete are their last strongholds—particularly a series of almost vertical 900 m (3,000 ft) cliffs called 'the Untrodden'—at the head of the Samaria Gorge. This mountain range, which hosts another 14 endemic animal species, is protected as a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve. In total, their range extends to the White Mountains, the Samaria National Forest and the islets of Dia, Thodorou, and Agii Pandes. Recently some were introduced onto two more islands. // By 1960, the kri-kri was under threat, with a population below 200. It had been the only meat available to mountain guerillas during the German occupation in World War II. Its status was one reason why the Samaria Gorge became a national park in 1962. There are still only about 2,000 animals on the island and they are considered vulnerable: hunters still seek them for their tender meat, grazing grounds have become scarcer and disease has affected them. Hybridization is also a threat, as the population has interbred with ordinary goats. Hunting them is strictly prohibited. [...] The kri-kri is a symbol of the island, much used in tourism marketing and official literature. // As molecular analyses demonstrate, the kri-kri is not, as previously thought, a distinct subspecies of wild goat. Rather, it is a feral domestic goat, derived from the first stocks of goats domesticated in the Levant and other parts of the Eastern Mediterranean around 8000-7500 BCE. Therefore, it represents a nearly ten-thousand-year-old "snapshot" of the first domestication of goats.

• • •

This was a decidedly unpleasant puzzle, not because it's poorly made (the grid seems fine, for the most part), but because it's just loaded with the worst people and things. BOOBIRDS and EDGELORDs and CON ARTISTS and the angry mobs with TORCHES shouting "I'M MAD" and "THAT'S A LIE!" and then the REEK and the STANK and the JELLO SHOTS, like ... this is not the vibe I want on Friday. Not at all. If the parade of awfulness doesn't bug you, there are other potential turnoffs. Maybe you dislike the puzzle because it's loaded with sports (or, in the case of poker, "sports"): ANTE (46D: Alternative to blinds) and SINBIN (40D: Penalty box, in hockey slang) and at least three (3) American football clues (RTS, Andy REID, GOES DEEP). Or you might be put off by the preponderance of pop culture: BATWOMAN and OUTKAST and Taylor Swift (again) and LASSIE—actually, that doesn't seem like that much pop culture—none of it bothered me, but I know how some of you are. Anyway, there are lots of avenues to dislike. Choose your own adventure! Or, maybe all the negativity (or sports, or pop culture) really floated your boat. If so, that's cool. I'm happy for you. But I found this a downer. I mean, the marquee answer is WASTED POTENTIAL! Lord knows I am no fan of relentless positivity, or positivity for positivity's sake, but yeesh. This was depressing.

And then there's VINY (3D: Ivy descriptor). I have never described ivy as VINY. I've never heard anyone describe anything as VINY, I don't think. Something overgrown with vines might be VINY, perhaps, but ivy simply is a vine. It's not VINY. It's ... vine. A vine. A type of vine. Fun fact (sorta): the wikipedia page for "ivy" contains not a single mention of the word "vine" (to say nothing of "VINY"). Luckily, VINY is the only answer that made my eye twitch today. The grid is actually pretty smooth overall. It's just smoothly filled with offputting stuff. I was happy to have to work a little today—puzzles have been running easy, and even if this one occasionally seemed to be Trying Too Hard (TTH) where "clever"/misleading cluing was concerned, I didn't mind that much. Weirdest mistake I made all day was reading 4D: Concourse info, in brief (ETA) as [Course intro, in brief], and then writing in APP ... you know, you order APPs before the main ... course (!?!?!). Luckily "AM I TOO LATE?!" would not be denied, and then I relooked at 4-Down and read it correctly. Oof. 

Definitely had to think a bit to get CON ARTISTS (16A: Builders of pyramids, perhaps) (those pyramids are made of "schemes," I guess). First real mistake came at 21A: Dish topped with lime, basil and hoisin sauce (PHO), where I had the "H" and wrote in ... AHI! What can I say: crossword reflexes sometimes fail you. I also (briefly, and strangely) had SECOND MENU (?) before SECRET MENU (24D: What might have sandwiches under wraps?) and LOAD (??) before LOAN (29D: Floated sum). On that last one, I think I was thinking of a different realm of finance, namely mutual funds. I dunno, I'm going so fast that who knows what logic my brain is using? Anyway, LOAD made the ENSUES clue (already hard) much harder (39A: What hilarity often does, it's said). I forgot the title of DFW's first novel (The BROOM of the System); he taught for a time at my (and Joel Fagliano's) alma mater, and he was a major author, but I never could get into him. I really liked his essays, but the fiction never hooked me. Still, I am familiar with his titles, and was mad at myself that BROOM didn't come to me more quickly. Everything else in the grid was pretty easy for me today.


Bullets:

• 15A: Musician's pitch? (DEMO) — when you are pitching (as in "selling" or "shopping" yourself) around as a musician, you might give people a DEMO tape of your music.
• 35A: Shells out for dinner, say (PASTA) — this is part of that Trying Too Hard (TTH) thing I was talking about. The "shells"-for-pasta misdirection is old as the hills, but the addition of "out" here makes the whole thing awkward. Great on the (fake-out) surface level, i.e. it definitely makes you think "pays for," but the “out” is completely gratuitous on the PASTA-meaning level. I guess the shells are "out" in that they are ... out ... on the table, ready to be eaten? It's bad. Clue needs a "?" to justify itself.
• 9D: Called out on Instagram, informally (ATTED) — is there a "formal" calling out on Instagram? Like, a black-tie version of letting someone know about the cat video you just posted? ATTED is great from a "modern! In-the-language!" perspective but truly awful from a word aesthetic perspective. Some terms weren't meant to be written out. (ATTED comes from the at-sign (@), which you put in front of someone's handle in a post if you want them to be notified about it. Replying to others' posts is also a form of atting. "Don't AT me" is a common statement of defiance (often facetious) from someone expressing an opinion they believe will be highly unpopular).
• 11D: They're set for a night of drinking (JELLO SHOTS) — Jell-O has to "set," i.e. firm up.

• 46D: Alternative to blinds (ANTE) — this is all the research I'm willing to do for you, so little do I care about poker: "Blinds are forced bets posted by players to the left of the dealer button in flop-style poker games. The number of blinds is usually two, but it can range from none to three. When there are two blinds they are called the small blind and the big blind." (wikipedia)
• 20D: Array on a trolley (TEA) — I wanted something to do with luggage. Then something to do with sushi (!?). You know, where you sit at the sushi bar and the items come around on a little conveyor belt ... I thought maybe that was called a "trolley." I have never seen tea on a trolley. Desserts, yes. TEA, no. But then the amount of time I have spent in tea houses is somewhere near nil.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

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Literally, "our thing" / FRI 6-21-24 / Shape of the Crab Nebula / Peddled good / Roughly half of mice / Island that's home to Popeye Village, a film-set-turned-theme-park / Nickname for a 3.2 million-year-old Australopithecus skeleton discovered in 1974 / Repeat an interviewer's question, perhaps / Burks, N.B.A. shooting guard since 2011

Constructor: Billy Bratton

Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium

THEME: none 

Word of the Day: LUCY (33A: Nickname for a 3.2 million-year-old Australopithecus skeleton discovered in 1974) —

AL 288-1, commonly known as Lucy or Dinkʼinesh (Amharic: ድንቅ ነሽ, lit. 'you are marvellous'), is a collection of several hundred pieces of fossilized bone comprising 40 percent of the skeleton of a female of the hominin species Australopithecus afarensis. It was discovered in 1974 in Ethiopia, at Hadar, a site in the Awash Valley of the Afar Triangle, by Donald Johanson, a paleoanthropologist of the Cleveland Museum of Natural History.

Lucy is an early australopithecine and is dated to about 3.2 million years ago. The skeleton presents a small skull akin to that of non-hominin apes, plus evidence of a walking-gait that was bipedal and upright, akin to that of humans (and other hominins); this combination supports the view of human evolution that bipedalism preceded increase in brain size. A 2016 study proposes that Australopithecus afarensis was also, to a large extent, tree-dwelling, though the extent of this is debated.

Lucy was named by Pamela Alderman after the 1967 song "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" by the Beatles, which was played loudly and repeatedly in the expedition camp all evening after the excavation team's first day of work on the recovery site. After public announcement of the discovery, Lucy captured much international interest, becoming a household name at the time.

Lucy became famous worldwide, and the story of her discovery and reconstruction was published in a book by Johanson and Edey. Beginning in 2007, the fossil assembly and associated artefacts were exhibited publicly in an extended six-year tour of the United States; the exhibition was called Lucy's Legacy: The Hidden Treasures of Ethiopia. There was discussion of the risks of damage to the unique fossils, and other museums preferred to display casts of the fossil assembly. The original fossils were returned to Ethiopia in 2013, and subsequent exhibitions have used casts. (wikipedia) [my emph., what the hell!? Were the archaeologists being punished? This sounds like torture]

• • •

Usual trouble up front and then usual Friday whoosh. Not particularly remarkable in terms of how it played, or how exciting it was. Solid. Fine. There's this meme (is it a meme?) going around on Twitter (which apparently we're just calling "X" now) where people are asked to post their most "boomer" opinion ("boomer" being a relentless and stupid byword for "old" and "out of touch" used by social media lemmings terrified of aging and death). Well, I have not as yet participated in this mass confession of "old man yells at cloud" opinions, but if I did, my own most "boomer" opinion—crossword edition—would be "Get Your Damn Emojis Out of My Crossword Puzzle!" I don't mind emojis, in their place. I use them. A bunch. Where they belong—in texts and social media posts. Every time I see the puzzle trying to be "modern" by using emojis for clues, I just feel very, very ... tired. Disappointed. Will Shortz absolutely changed crossword puzzles in the '90s by making them more contemporary, including more everyday phrases and names, steering puzzles away from arcane trivia and leaning more heavily into wordplay. His approach was a substantial innovation. If you're going to innovate, innovate. Adding emojis ... is not innovation. It's just bad redecoration. This is all to say that "THIS IS NOT A DRILL!" is a great answer (best in the puzzle, appropriately placed in a marquee position) and does not deserve to have its clue cheaply bedazzled by siren emojis, or any emojis (8D: 🚨"Serious situation developing!"🚨). It's degrading. I am exaggerating the extent to which I actually care, but I do think there's something Vegas-ugly about taking an elegantly designed thing like the crossword and slapping emojis, animation, etc. on top of it. It's not making the puzzles better. It's just making them tackier.

Beyond that one marquee central answer, the answers that really grabbed my attention weren't any of the long ones. Those are OK, for the most part, but they aren't showing me anything new. Even stuff that's trying to be fresh, like BOOTY CALLS and MANSPLAINS, feels already a little dated. Not bad answers at all, but not as funky fresh as I think they think they are. "Mansplaining" is already 16 years old, as a term (I mean, it's likely ancient, as a concept, but as a term—just 16!). I only just learned that the term was coined in response to a 2008 essay by Rebecca Solnit ("Men Explain Things To Me"). Here's the origin story, in her words:

The word mansplaining was coined by an anonymous person in response to my 2008 essay Men Explain Things to Me and has had a lively time of it ever since. It was a New York Times word of the year in 2010, and entered the Oxford English Dictionary in 2018; versions of it exist in many other languages from French to Icelandic, and the essay itself has appeared in many languages including Korean and Swedish. People often recount the opening incident in that almost 15-year-old essay, in which a man explained a book to me, too busy holding forth to notice that I was its author, as my friend was trying to tell him. (The Guardian, Feb. 9, 2023)

It's a fine answer, MANSPLAINS, it's just not giving wow at this point. I was more taken with the lively colloquial phrases today, "I WOULDN'T..." and "WE GET IT." There's something about hearing the voices of people saying these things in my head that is wonderfully entertaining. I like hearing the mock-urgency in "THIS IS NOT A DRILL!," the diplomatic reserve of "I WOULDN'T," the eye-rolling impatience of "WE GET IT!" What I like less is the awkward plural HOLES-IN-ONE (valid, but dumb-looking and -sounding). SLIME TRAIL gets a thumbs-up for daring to be gross, and for giving the puzzle that lovely SLIME/GRIME juxtaposition. Most of the rest of the answers in the grid just take up space. I don't mind them. There they are. Existing. Doing what they do...

Clues on ELK (18A: Colorado's ___ Mountains) and ALEC (49D: ___ Burks, N.B.A. shooting guard since 2011) were totally meaningless to me. Sports names are always going to be problematic for a certain sizable subset of solvers, so as a rule those names should belong to players for some distinction. Now, you have to be a very good basketball player to have the kind of longevity that ALEC Burks has had (13 years in the league now), but ... no All-Star appearances, no championships, no "most this" or "highest that" or "league-leading something or other" or really anything beyond just being a solid player (sometimes starting, but mostly off the bench). He's got a name-like name and the crosses are easy, so no harm no foul (!), but there should probably be Some kind of bar that athletes have to clear before being considered crossworthy. I know you desperately want to deliver a new and better ALEC for the crossword solvers of the world, but ... come on.

Had some great mistakes / wrong thoughts today, starting with trying to make NOTRE DAME work at 1A: Literally, "our thing despite knowing very well that that is not what NOTRE DAME means. I'd like to thank ASS for giving me the "A" that helped me remember COSA NOSTRA, which jump-started the NW and sent me no my way, with no real hesitations or slow-downs thereafter, though there were a few "huh?" moments. I was very unsure about what was going on with half of all mice (27A: Roughly half of mice). Wanted SHES (!?)—the crossword puzzle has insisted over the years that HES is a plural known for "males," so why not SHES? Once I got it down to -OES ... I'm just happy I (sorta) knew they were DOES (like the deer, the female deer), and also knew the term DOPE SHEET, because I'm imagining a world where someone thinks a bookmaker publishes the betting odds on a HOPE SHEET (because bettors "hope" they win??), and then the mice would end up as HOES, which would be ... confusing, probably. I thought the decor at a lake house was an OIL ("couldn't those hang in any house?") (30A: Piece of wall décor at a lake house, perhaps), I thought SANK was FELL (3D: Didn't go down well?), and when the [Shape of the Crab Nebula] wasn't CRAB, I was fresh out of ideas there. Found the clue on WAS extremely awkward ("that WAS that"??? I've heard "that's that!" but ick this past tense version feels contrived) (11A: What might come between "that" and "that"). But I loved the clue on STALL (15D: Repeat an interviewer's question, perhaps)—again, imagining the context is part of the fun—and the clue on WARE is particularly great, with its fake bad grammar (36A: Peddled good) ("it's peddled well!" I can hear someone prematurely shouting)

Notes:

• 35A: Island that's home to Popeye Village, a film-set-turned-theme-park (MALTA) — was puzzled / intrigued by this seemingly bizarre bit of trivia until I remember that MALTA is where Altman filmed his 1980 movie Popeye, and yeah, that outdoor set is elaborate, stunning. The kind of place a kid (like me, at the time of the movie's release) would in fact want to run around in. (Note: it's ... not really a kids' movie, despite being about a kids' cartoon character and starring that guy who played every 1980 kid's favorite sitcom character, Mork from Ork)

• 56A: "Hang on!" ("HOLD IT A SEC!") — got the "HOLD IT," which seemed a complete answer in itself. My brain wanted only "HOLD IT RIGHT THERE!" 
• 52D: Translation material (RNA) — "Translation is the process by which a protein is synthesized from the information contained in a molecule of messenger RNA (mRNA)" (nature.com)
• 55A: Shares on X (RTS) — “X,” formerly known as Twitter. RTS = “retweets” (because RXS already has a meaning?)

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

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2000s sitcom about a woman with amnesia / SAT 5-11-24 / Environmental writer ___ Leopold / Ring-shaped bone that supports the skull / Meal makeup, maybe / HMO designation, for short / Forerunner of a streaming playlist / East African city whose name means "house of peace" / Pacesetter on a long frigid journey

Constructor: Billy Bratton

Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium

THEME: none 

Word of the Day: ALDO Leopold (26A: Environmental writer ___ Leopold) —

 

Aldo Leopold (January 11, 1887 – April 21, 1948) was an American writer, philosopher, naturalist, scientist, ecologist, forester, conservationist, and environmentalist. He was a professor at the University of Wisconsin and is best known for his book A Sand County Almanac (1949), which has been translated into fourteen languages and has sold more than two million copies.

Leopold was influential in the development of modern environmental ethics and in the movement for wilderness conservation. His ethics of nature and wildlife preservation had a profound impact on the environmental movement, with his ecocentric or holistic ethics regarding land. He emphasized biodiversity and ecology and was a founder of the science of wildlife management.

• • •

Really enjoyed this one, despite a few clunkers in the clues, and despite the grid's having possibly my least favorite shape—the pinwheel with the four *highly* segmented corners. It's like doing five separate puzzles! I want to do one puzzle! With nice flow between the sections! Bah! When you're solving a puzzle with this shape, there's always the looming threat that one of those many, many isolated segments of the puzzle is going to take you out, and you'll be stuck, with no way to come at it from another angle. Real minefield energy. Slightly stressful. But today, the mines were all defused very quickly, or nonexistent, or whatever makes the metaphor work, because at every turn, every time I wanted to enter a new section, the puzzle Let Me Right In. It was weird. Had the usual NW trouble, flailing around for a bit, as one does, but then the puzzle just handed me the keys to the middle of the grid when it asked for the [2000s sitcom about a woman with amnesia], and after a half-second of "How should I...?" I nearly gasped "Oh my god" because I knew it. I knew it cold. 

"SAMANTHA WHO?"! How did I know it? Well, first, I watched it. All of it, I think (it wasn't on the air very long, sadly—just two seasons, '07-'09). The other reason I remembered it so quickly is that I've had a signed promotional photo from that show staring at me here in my office for ~15 years!

One of the weirder moments of my early blogging career was having someone calling themselves "Christina Applegate" turn up in my comments section who turned out to Actually Be Christina Applegate (an accomplished crossword solver who once told a crossword-related story on Letterman, LOL). Anyway, celebrities never send me anything, but she did, and it was thrilling. Oh, I guess Anne Meara did send me a polite correction email once. That was also thrilling. Also also thrilling: having the puzzle open right up. The center is really the highlight of the puzzle, which is rarely the case with a grid like this, where there's so much white space there that you usually see at least one desperate, made-up, awkward, or ugly entry. But not today. OK, maybe LITTLE THING is usually in the plural, whatever, I think it's fine. Plus there's BATTLE SCARS and GOT THE SHAFT and DAR ES SALAAM, a real trove of delightfulness. And then, as I say, all those scary isolated corners actually had a greeter waiting to show me in and make me feel welcome. GOAT YOGA! MIX TAPE! "I WOULDN'T" ... I mean, "I WOULDN'T" sounds foreboding, but nope, that answer ushered me right in, and straight to the finish line. It's not that the puzzle didn't have any Saturday bite. It had some. For sure. But I never got well and truly stuuuuck. Which I appreciate.

A couple things clunked for me today, but they were LITTLE THINGs (see! plural!). I don't believe "I'M CALM" is a thing (1D: "No, you're the one getting worked up!"). I mean, you might say it, but it really doesn't want to stand alone. If you're saying "No, you're the one getting worked up!" with the stress and the exclamation point and everything, you're not calm. Also, if anything, you would say "I AM CALM," no contraction, as you're obviously disputing someone else's claim that you're not. Got a big "NO" written next to that answer. Another big "NO" written next to FISTS (43D: "Rocks"). I assume this refers to the game "Rock Paper Scissors"—you'll note how the game is not called "Rocks Papers Scissors." Putting "Rocks" in quotation marks like that is especially egregious since no one says "Rocks" in the context of the game. Maybe a game recap? ("I played four rocks, three papers, and a scissors!"). But no. "Rocks" is ice. "Rock" is FIST, singular. Boo to this answer. 

Hardish getting started today since no idea re: ATLAS or MRS. Meyer's whatever it is or random 5-letter boy's name. Also had some TEND/LEAN confusion (23A: Show bias). The other confusion up there was actually the answer that got me started: 5D: Many are Persian (RUGS). Of course CATS works too. Luckily both answers occurred to me before I committed to either, so I tried the neighboring answer to see which of RUGS v CATS worked best alongside it. This led to the hilarious moment at 6D: Gross home? where I went "Oh, Ari Gross! He's on NPR!" (brain, to me, five seconds later: "Uh, no ... Arye Gross co-starred on the sitcom Ellen. You're thinking of ARI Shapiro. He's on NPR. As is, famously, Terry Gross ... how you make it through a Monday let alone a Saturday is beyond me"). Who cares how I got there; I got there. NPR! That meant RUGS not CATS, and then INTERN, and then I was off and running.

Wrong answers: yes! I had some. "THAT'S IT!" for "THAT ONE" (34D: Comment with a point, say); "SAME HERE" for "SAMESIES" (good answer, but cringe thing-to-actually-say) (50A: "OMG, me too!"); SLED DOG for LEAD DOG (11D: Pacesetter on a long, frigid journey). I think that's it! That's plenty! My favorite clues were probably 15A: Asked for the fish, say (MEOWED) and 47A: Mythical rock singer (SIREN). And while I didn't exactly like 24A: Cheerios alternative, I have to respect it, because it sure as hell got me ("I thought I knew all the five-letter cereals! What the hell!?"). Not the cereal but the farewell(s). That is one way to turn TATAS (!) into an acceptable answer—distract me with the clue! I like how the puzzle later taunted me, like "hey, remember how you thought "Cheerios" was a cereal? That was fun. You were thinking of something with ... OATS, weren't you?" (40A: Meal makeup, maybe). Shut up, puzzle.

Last notes:

• 18A: "Path" of progress (INROAD) — As with ["Rocks"], I have no idea what the quotation marks think they're doing here. Take them away, in this case, and the clue works fine.
• 55A: Line around the Equator? ("IT'S HOT") — just imagining the millions of people who inhabit the equatorial portion of the globe walking around all day going "IT'S HOT" literally all the time. But I guess I'm supposed to imagine a North American traveling to the Equator, someone who would find the absolutely normal heat remarkable.
• 36A: Ones that are tired before they even move? (NEW CARS) — saw right through this one because I know the puzzle's tendency for the dumbest of puns. No one would say that their car was "tired" (in the sense of "possessing four tires") ... except some puzzlemaking nerds, they would definitely say that.

TATAS, everyones!

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

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TV drama about anarchist hackers / TUE 4-2-24 / "Dramatic" literary device / Goofy assent that precedes "artichokie" / French river where two W.W. I battles took place / Choices in a sleepover game

Constructor: Billy Bratton

Relative difficulty: Easy (oversized at 16x, so solving times may not be faster than avg.)

THEME: "HOLD IT!" (39A: "Stop right there!" ... or a hint to the first words of 17-, 23-, 47- and 59-Across) — first words of theme answers are things you might "hold":

Theme answers:

• DOORBUSTERS (17A: Black Friday offer, e.g.)
• LINE OF CREDIT (23A: Something extended to a borrower)
• FLOOR ROUTINE (47A: Gymnastics sequence involving tumbling)
• MAYO CLINIC (59A: Expansive medical center headquartered in Rochester, Minn.)

Word of the Day: "Forget You" (34D: CeeLo Green's "Forget You," notably => RADIO EDIT) —

"Fuck You" (stylized as "Fuck You!" or "F**k You!"), known as "Forget You" or "FU" for the clean versions, is a song by American recording artist CeeLo Green. It was written as a collaboration among Green, Bruno Mars, his production team the Smeezingtons, and Brody Brown. It was released on August 19, 2010, as the first single from Green's third solo studio album, The Lady Killer (2010). "Fuck You" received acclaim from music critics, and was an international commercial success, making the top-10 in thirteen countries, including topping charts in the United Kingdom, and number two on the Billboard Hot 100. // In an interview with NME, Green said that, in addition to being about a heartbreak, the song was also about the music industry itself. [...] Several versions of "Fuck You" have been released: the original recording, censored copies of it, and newer versions that include other performers or significant changes to the lyrics. // The original has twice been edited to remove swearing: the first of these, which is broadcast in the music video on UK television stations and played on US radio, is called "Forget You"; the second, for UK radio use, is entitled "FU". These two are essentially identical to the original except in their treatment of profanity; "Forget You" replaces the profanity with sound effects (other than "fuck you", which is changed to "forget you" per the title), and "FU" censors words by simply silencing them except replacing "fuck you" with "eff you" - also as its title suggests.

• • •

A puzzle that would've been right at home on Monday any other week, but the Wednesday-type puzzle took the Monday slot (April Fools!), so the Monday type gets bounced to Tuesday and lord knows what we're getting tomorrow. The theme type (the "first words do X" type) is very Monday/Tuesday, and while this played like a Monday for me, it was oversized, so my time was probably more like a Tuesday. The theme itself is completely ordinary—just fine, totally familiar and normal, not showing you anything new, not horrifying you with bizarre thematic overreach or tin-eared clunkery. As many ups and downs, and none of them taking you very far off the midline. The definition of a placeholder. I didn't really process the theme until I was done, and then ... well, there's not that much to process. You do indeed hold the door (for someone), hold the line (love isn't always on time!), hold the floor (when speaking at a meeting) and hold the mayo (why? Mayo rules. Maybe you have an egg allergy). All the themers are familiar. I thought DOOR BUSTER was a relatively recent coinage, but according to the OED... 1893!

I will confess to slight hesitation when trying to think of the second word in both FLOOR ROUTINE and MAYO CLINIC; "exercise" and "center," respectively, were lodged in my brain and needed a second or two, or a cross or two, to come loose, but otherwise, the theme part of this was a cinch, the answers themselves all perfectly appropriate to the theme and solid as a rock.

Pitchfork thought "Jesus, ETC." was the 64th best song of the '00s, if that helps? If you don't know what Pitchfork is, then you definitely aren't the right demographic for this clue. Wilco was a major band and Yankee Hotel Foxtrot was a major album, but this clue still felt kind of self-indulgent to me. Not everybody knows every song in your favorite band's catalogue.  "Jesus ETC." is no "God Only Knows" or "Wouldn't It Be Nice," is what I'm saying (57A: "God Only Knows," vis-à-vis "Wouldn't It Be Nice" => SIDE B). Popular songs used to be in the air. You couldn't avoid hearing them. I was never a Beach Boys *fan* and I was born after their heyday, but I know so many of their songs just because I was breathing air in the '70s and '80s and every decade thereafter, when those songs were on the radio, in movies, ads, etc. Whereas I have never heard a Wilco song in the wild. Pop culture continues to get increasingly ensiloed, so that if you're not actively into something, you can't even see it. There's no real public square, no shared space in which to encounter it. Too many outlets, too many choices, too many places to hide from each other and nurse our identities and fandoms. Algorithms have funneled everyone into valleys, so things that are massively popular in one valley aren't even discernible in another. This is why pop culture answers of all times can feel (increasingly) exclusionary. Now, it's Tuesday, no one's going to dislocate their solving bone wrestling with "Jesus, ETC." But "MR. ROBOT," maybe. I watched the first two seasons of that show and still struggled with the answer at first. Totally forgot it existed / what it was about. I only remember Rami Malek was the star. Had the "-BOT" and thought "whot?" I had a way easier time, pop culture-wise, with RADIO EDIT ... but then "F**k You" ("Forget You") was a legitimate (#2 Billboard) hit. Anyway, this puzzle did nothing wrong in terms of how it handled the pop culture answers, but it reminded me that puzzlemakers have to be Careful with proper nouns, esp. those of a pop cultural variety, if they don't want to lock out solvers from the "wrong" demographics.

Loved the energy in the clue for OKIE DOKIE (11D: Goofy assent that precedes "artichokie") but that's giving away way too much "okie"—but the "artichokie" bit is probably the only way you can justify that alt-spelling of "OKEY DOKEY!" (the industry standard) (11 appearances in the NYTXW, vs. just two now for OKIE DOKIE, both in the last two years ... is this gonna be like "woah" where kids have no idea how to spell but it doesn't matter and eventually the wrong spelling becomes the norm? I want to say "I hope not," but I also don't really care—although "woah" definitely looks idiotic to me 100% of the time). There are no [Choices in a sleepover game]; or, rather, there are, but those choices are Truth or Dare. "Dare" is one choice. It's not Truths or Dares. Forced cluing like this jars my ears in unpleasant ways. 

[Warning: this is not the RADIO EDIT]

As for difficulty, there wasn't much, although the ORAL EXAM "?" clue held me up (as it was likely designed to) (55A: In which you might talk through your problems?), as did my lack of German—I can never remember the EINS/EINE distinction, so briefly entertained EINS / SEES before EINE / EYES (56D: A, in German / 66A: Checks out). Had SWEET before SWELL (43D: Peachy keen) and SEINE before MARNE (gotta read the whole clue!, he yelled to his earlier self) (10D: French river where two W.W. I battles took place). But otherwise this went down fast and left no real impression. See you next time.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld 

P.S. UIES—still terrible (30A: Highway no-nos, for short)

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One getting pwned often / WED 7-19-23 / Dynamite hitmakers 2020 / Stringed instrument in some psychedelic music / Event often in caps on a syllabus / 2006 animated film that really should have starred Adam Driver and Parker Posey?

Constructor: Billy Bratton

Relative difficulty: Easy

THEME: Figure it out! — Themers are familiar colloquial expressions that take the form of imperatives (commands) with "it" in them; answers are the "it," if you take the expression as a pun. Basically this is a common clue type (the "!" clue) turned into a theme:

Theme answers:

• DECK OF CARDS (17A: Deal with it!)
• ADHESIVE TAPE (28A: Stick with it!)
• BOARDING PASS (43A: Get on with it!)
• BOWLING BALL (58A: Roll with it!)

Word of the Day: Leonhard EULER (51D: Pioneer in calculus notation) —

Leonhard Euler (/ˈɔɪlər/ OY-lər, German: [ˈleːɔnhaʁt ˈɔʏlɐ] [...] ; 15 April 1707 – 18 September 1783) was a Swiss mathematician, physicist, astronomer, geographer, logician and engineer who founded the studies of graph theory and topology and made pioneering and influential discoveries in many other branches of mathematics such as analytic number theory, complex analysis, and infinitesimal calculus. He introduced much of modern mathematical terminology and notation, including the notion of a mathematical function. He is also known for his work in mechanics, fluid dynamics, optics, astronomy and music theory. (wikipedia)

• • •

In everyday crossword solving, the "it!" clue is basically a variation on the "?" clue—you take a familiar expression (e.g. Step on it!) and instead of getting a verb or verb phrase (e.g. SPEED UP), you get an example of a thing you might step on, i.e. an example of the "it!" Normally, clue and answer have to agree in terms of what part of speech they are, and the "!" in this type of clue indicates that the clue is going to violate that norm. Today's theme is just that ... writ large. Doesn't strike me as that inventive, and yet the effect is kinda fun. Light, breezy. OK. What's more remarkable today is the quality of the grid as a whole. It's like the constructor knew the theme was a little on the light side, conceptually, and so made sure that there were interesting non-thematic features, and that the grid was very clean and polished overall. I always want to shoot the words BIOME and BIOTA into the sun (they exist for me only in crosswords), but nothing else except maybe OHMS gave me that "ugh, not again" feeling, and those longer answers in the NE and SW are real lookers. Maybe the "OH" on "OH, WOE IS ME!" feels a little tacked on / redundant, but still, the emotional energy of that answer alongside the insistence of "I MEAN THAT!" is very nice, and THREEPEAT next to BOOKMAKER! I mean, I hate sports gambling, particularly the way sports gambling has taken over sports coverage, sports advertising, etc., but putting the betting term next to the sports term here, and having them both be so colorful? Mwah! And then you've got SURE-FIRE and PINE AWAY tucked in to the middle as bonus longer answers. You expect to find those showy long Downs in the corners, but here you get two more in the bargain. It's a very nice grid, and the extreme easiness makes it, well, easy to appreciate and enjoy. So, thematically, it's fine, cute, but it's the kind of wordplay you see every day in the crossword, so not exactly special. And yet the solve never felt ho-hum because the "it!" examples are solid and the overall quality of the grid is so high. 

It's nice when a very easy puzzle is also very good. I love the whoosh-whoosh feeling of flying through a grid, but it's a lot more thrilling when the scenery that's flying by is varied and interesting and when you change elevation, swoop around curves ... when the view out the window isn't entirely monotonous. You can do 90 or 100 in the middle of the Utah desert, but while the scenery is occasionally beautiful, it doesn't change for long periods of time. Speed becomes almost meaningless. And some easy puzzles can feel this way. "Well, the speedometer says I'm flying, but ... am I really moving at all?" I had my customary trouble getting out of the gate today, with DUG IN instead of HAD AT at 1A: Began devouring, say. I do not associate HAD AT with food. It's more ... dueling? Fighting in some way, anyway. Extremely Shakespeare. So my first step was a bad one. And then I had a little trouble coming up with FISH (18D: Rummage (around)), which seemed likewise obliquely clued. I had MESS / MUSS / FUSS / god knows what else. But once that answer got sorted, and once I saw what the theme type was going to be, I took off. And I mean, Took Off. Got blocked trying to descend via the long answers in the SW, but just reversed and went the other way and did not stop until I'd circled all the way back to those same long answers, filling them in from below to finish things off. I no-looked the last two themers. Just ... didn't need the clues. Parsed them on sight. BOARDING PASS, bam. OK, I did muff the last one a little, writing in BOWLING PINS instead of BOWLING BALL, but crosses made that error disappear quickly (DILLY got me out of the pickle!), and I still never saw the themer clue. Blazing fast. Fast-Monday fast. Hard to knock a puzzle that makes you feel all-powerful. FEEL ME? (26A: "Ya dig?"). I hope so.

A few more things:

• 40A: Not be square, say (OWE) — this is what stopped me from coming flying down the west side of the grid early on. I figured if I could just get the next short cross to work, I could see enough of the opening letters in at least one of the two long Downs to solve at least one of them. But no. Even with "O" I couldn't get OWE. So I went another direction and the "W" in this answer ended up being the last letter I filled in. I thought this clue was related to 9D: Not even (ODD) when I first saw it. In fact, I thought "square" meant "even" in this clue. Processing failure. No big deal in the end.
• 51D: Pioneer in calculus notation (EULER) — I was reading one of my very earliest write-ups, one from late '06 (!) (please, have mercy on me and do not do this, it's quite embarrassing). In that write-up, I complained loudly about the obscurity of this particular mathematician, only to have the armies of mathematicians in my audience (so, probably four mathematicians, at that point) pelt me with rotten fruit and say "boo to this man!" as they impatiently explained that EULER was not, in fact, obscure. So I have never forgotten the name. It was years later, however, before I figured out I was pronouncing it wrong in my head (it's "oiler" like "boiler," not "yoo-ler" like "Ferris Bueller"). 
• 25D: 2006 animated film that really should have starred Adam Driver and Parker Posey? ("CARS") — I had the "CA-" and my brain absolutely seized up as both "ENCANTO" and "COCO" tried to fight their way out at the same time. I really should've read the clue to the end. Or taken the year more seriously. This clue is corny as hell and I love it. 

See you tomorrow.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld 

P.S. it appears many of you don't know "pwned." This bit of gaming slang is so old by now that I figured it had entered general solver consciousness, but I guess not. Anyway, let Merriam-Webster show you the way....

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