Rap pioneers, slangily / SAT 1-20-24 / Jazz trumpeter Woody / Cousins of sirens / Plant-based protein brand / Nonkosher Wendy's offering / Beverage with an oxymoronic name / Initialism for a pleasant tingling on the scalp or back of the neck / Onetime source of toothbrush bristles / Dead-tree edition

Constructor: Caitlin Reid and Matthew Stock

Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium

THEME: none 

Word of the Day: Woody SHAW (20D: Jazz trumpeter Woody) —

Woody Herman Shaw Jr. (December 24, 1944 – May 10, 1989) was an American jazz trumpeter, flugelhornist, cornetist, composer, arranger, band leader, and educator. Shaw is widely known as one of the most important and influential jazz trumpeters and composers of the twentieth century. He is often credited with revolutionizing the technical and harmonic language of modern jazz trumpet playing, and to this day is regarded by many as one of the major innovators of the instrument. He was an acclaimed virtuoso, mentor, and spokesperson for jazz and worked and recorded alongside many of the leading musicians of his time. [...] By the late 1980s, Shaw was nearly blind from retinitis pigmentosa, an incurable degenerative eye disease. A user of heroin throughout his adult life, Shaw was in poor health when he returned to the U.S. in early 1989 from a lengthy stay in Europe—he needed a wheelchair at the airport. On the morning of February 27, 1989, Shaw was struck by a subway car in Brooklyn, New York, which mangled his left arm and caused other injuries including head trauma; doctors were forced to amputate his arm. The night before the accident, Max Roach sent a limousine to Newark where Shaw was staying, to take Shaw to the Village Vanguard to listen to Roach play. After the set, Roach put Shaw into a taxicab at around midnight with enough money to get back to Newark. Shaw did not go to Newark; it is unclear what led to the accident later that morning. During his hospital stay at Bellevue, Shaw suffered kidney failure, was put on a respirator and lost consciousness for more than a month. He died from kidney failure on May 10, 1989, at the age of 44.(wikipedia)

• • •

A very Bay Area, very "meaty" puzzle. Sorry to call yet another puzzle "Easy-Medium" but it plays how it plays and that's how it played. Really a story of single squares today. I got three individual squares circled on the printed-out version of my solved puzzle today. The first trouble square was the "M" in INCOGMEATO, a name I have never seen before. That was the one answer keeping the NW from being a breeze, so I hacked at it until I *thought* I figured out the pun! "AHA! It's a pun on 'incognito'! And 'Neato!' INCOGNEATO! Clever." I guess that's more "portmanteau" than pun. Anyway, it was wrong. If your fake meat purports to look and act like real meat, then your fake meat might be said to be 'incognito," ergo INCOGMEATO (which sounds like a truly terrible superhero, TO BE HONEST). I later got doubly slowed up by single squares in the NE, where I couldn't remember which of several possible animals belonged to the order Chiroptera (it's BAT, not CAT, not RAT), and I thought a [Mélange] was a MASH (it was a HASH). The BACONATOR took care of my Chiroptera problem pretty quick, but the "M" was peskier. Luckily, MATEWATCH, while it *sounds* potentially intriguing, is not a plausible thing. So, "H," HATEWATCH, there we go. 

I predict that a couple initialisms are gonna flummox a few people today. ASMR has appeared once before, a little over a year back and it was my "Word of the Day" then (12D: Initialism for a pleasant tingling on the scalp or back of the neck). I still can't remember what it stands for, but if I really want to remember, I can just look back at the December 3, 2022 write-up and find out (which I just did: it stands for "autonomous sensory meridian response"). I guess there are sounds that trigger this feeling ... and people watch videos that feature these sounds ... on YouTube or something? Seems like maybe it helps some people sleep? I really don't get it, but I did *remember* it, which is the important thing, puzzlewise. The other initialism likely to trip some solvers is OGS (5D: Rap pioneers, slangily). The term is used widely (if sometimes ironically / facetiously) to refer to elders in any field, but technically, if memory serves, an "OG" is an "Original Gangster." And by "memory" I mean "memory of that song from the '90s by crossword elder ICE-T":

The hardest part of the puzzle for me was the very end, the SE corner, where the puzzle decided to do that thing that is always terrible: double successive clues. I've written about this a lot, how Every Time the puzzle thinks this will be a cute move, at least one of the clues feels forced as hell for its answer, and that was sure enough the case today for [More golden, say]. It works fine for PURER, but for RARER, oof, not as good a fit. I guess the reference there is supposed to be to the phrase "golden opportunity," which is an ideal moment, which would by inference be "rare," I suppose. But you're making me go all over hell and gone to try to justify that clue in my mind. I got AVAST easy down there but did not trust it at all, since AVAST is a command, not a "direction." ABAFT, ASTERN, ALEE, those are directions. AVAST just means "stop." It was only after I'd finished the puzzle that I realized that "direction" can, in fact, mean "command." That is, it's not an orientation-type direction, it's an instruction-type direction. If you say AVAST, you "direct" someone to stop. Fair enough. I also had no idea what the siren-newt connection was and had to look it up. Sure enough, sirens are a type of amphibian, like unto NEWTS. Here's a picture—this little guy is a lesser siren, but I'm sure if he tries hard he'll be an OG siren someday:

Is FIREWATER a "beverage"? (31A: Beverage with an oxymoronic name). Really? I mean, yes, you drink it, but "beverage," la di dah, that sounds like something on a restaurant menu, and I've never seen slang like this on a menu. This is like calling HOOCH a "beverage." Strange. Also strange, PRINT ISSUE (46A: Dead-tree edition). More wrong than strange. No one says PRINT ISSUE. The term is PRINT EDITION. Yes it is. That is the term. Please be honest, the term is PRINT EDITION. The WSJ, the NYT, they all refer to it as the "PRINT EDITION." PRINT ISSUE is some made-up &^#% your bloated wordlist convinced you was real. You gotta fight back in those situations, constructors, please. As for ATTAWAY ... I don't know what to day about ATTAWAY. ATTA BOY! ATTA GIRL! Those sound right, and crosswords have, over the years, convinced me that people still say those things. ATTA WAY!? That sounds like someone's last name. Or someone's full name ("... well if it isn't Miss Atta Way!"). Or like you elided a "th" sound in a cliché chase-scene expression: 'They went ATTAWAY!" Does Bugs Bunny say that? Sounds like something Bugs would've said. Possibly to Elmer FUDD (Sexiest Cartoon Hunter Alive, 1937-present). I feel like there was a '90s band called ATTAWAY? Maybe a singer? Who am I thinking of, it's killing me. OMG I just did it! I pulled a memory out of my head in real time, literally as I was typing these last sentences. I just started adding random consonants to the beginning of ATTAWAY and bam, HADDAWAY! Amazing. Well, *I* feel better, anyway.

What else? Loved remembering "STAR SEARCH," and EURIPIDES, and HATEWATCH is very good, esp. as clued (15D: View with disdain). None of the tricky clues seems very much in need of explaining. CIDER might be "hard to drink" because the CIDER might be "hard CIDER" (wordplay!). [Tried to take a seat?] is RAN because the "seat" you're trying to take is in Congress (or on the school board or city council or whatever), and you have to "run" for office in order to get that seat. The EAVE is on the house because that's where EAVEs are, literally. EAVEs aren't free! "But you said it was on the house!" "It is! Look at it there, on your house! Now pay me for my EAVE installation!" Has this happened to you? Probably not. The thing that made me happiest today, in that it literally made me laugh, was the clue on THEN (23A: Not now!). Sometimes, it's the little things ... See you next time.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

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Religious exodus / FRI 7-1-22 / By all means in old parlance / It's kneaded to make naan and roti / Song featuring up to 176 verses / Classic sketch comedy show from the '60s and '70s / Modern-day Brava! / Bygone Supreme Court inits / Quit slangily

Constructor: Christina Iverson and Caitlin Reid

Relative difficulty: Medium-Challenging (though I made some awful dumb mistakes)

THEME: none 

Word of the Day: ATTA (1A: It's kneaded to make naan and roti) —

Atta/Ata (Urdu: آٹا; Hindi: आटा, Bengali: আটা, romanized: Āṭā) or chakki atta is a wholemeal wheat flour, originating from the Indian subcontinent, used to make flatbreads such as chapati, roti, naan, paratha and puri. It is the most widespread flour in the Indian subcontinent. (wikipedia)

• • •

This was slowish for me. At first, it was the puzzle's fault. Later on, it was most definitely (mostly) my fault. Let's start with the puzzle's own, built-in difficulty, and for me, it came right away, first clue: 1A: It's kneaded to make naan and roti (ATTA). Four letters, Indian food, mental rolodex [whirrrrrrrr] well, two of those four-letter words are in the damn clue, so they're out. DAAL can be four letters, but it's usually three and anyway involves lentils ... what about DOSA?! But no, that's a finished food, not a dough or FLOUR. And that was that. Stumped. No hope for 1-Across. And I could not get a grip on anything in the NW without it. No idea which 3-letter tribe I was dealing with at 22A: Tribe known for ranching and oil and gas operations (UTE). Never use the term REFI or see it much out of crosswords, so I couldn't come up with anything much there besides ... I don't know, RENT? (26A: Take advantage of low A.P.R., perhaps). It was bad. Oh, worst of all, I had SAW IN instead of LED IN (16A: Brought through the door). Not sure how I can tell the difference without crosses. Nobel Prize winner, also a mystery for a bit (4D: Nobel Peace Prize winner from Ghana => ANNAN). And then there's TODIEFOR, which was always going to be hell to parse, but with everything else up there not working, it was nearly impossible (I wanted GOD-something (2D: Absolutely divine). I think I managed to claw my way toward clarity with the IN from the incorrect SAW IN, and then TWIG FLOWN ANNAN. In the end, ORIGAMI helped a lot, but FLOUR, yeesh, that clue—super hard (14D: Grocery bagful). Anyway, looks like if you knew ATTA right away, that corner was probably easy, but if not, uh, not. I'm not thrilled that the mystery answer ended up just being old-school crosswordese in new clothing, but if A(T)TA is indeed "the most widespread FLOUR in the Indian subcontinent" (as the wikipedia definition, above, claims), then I, and any of you who also didn't know that answer today, would be well advised to learn this definition of ATTA immediately. Hard to question the validity of a term with that kind of clout. 

My problems rolled on even after I got out of that section. I wanted GRAN for 28A: Many a nanny (GOAT), which had to be an intentional trap. That mistake made APRICOTS really hard to see, and this is where the puzzle started to annoy me. APRICOTS are just ... a fruit. You can find them in the produce section. Why are they being clued as a brand? [Sun-Maid snack]!? I'm sure they ... make them? Process them? Are these dried APRICOTS? Let APRICOTS just be APRICOTS. Sun-Maid, shmun-maid. Once I got into the NE, the puzzle finally got fun for a bit. ATE FOR TWO / POLAR BEAR / ROLL AGAIN is a nice stack, as is its counterpart in the SW—just lovely. But in the SW, I had a hell of a time because one little mistake of mine ended up snowballing and creating enormous havoc. Weird that in the beginning it was a four-letter word that did me in (ATTA), and the later on, the same thing happened. Only with ATTA, that was just pure ignorance, whereas with the next four-letter mistake, I just didn't read the clue right. See, at 42A: One of the six reaction buttons for a text on an iPhone, my brain just saw [blah blah blah blah iPhone], and the letter pattern -A-A. And so my brain went "DATA!" and I wrote that in and wow you would not think a tiny word like that could cause so much damage, but parsing "OH HELL NO!"?? Completely impossible ("OH TELL ... ME? ... TELL IT?") (34D: "Not on your life!"). And the [Religious exodus], HAHA, no. I had DE-I--. Incomprehensible. And then I went and spoiled it more by doing something stupid like completely misreading the clue at 50A: Give a little (SAG), which my brain (really off his game today) read as [Give a title], and so in went DUB (!?!?!). This meant that at 46D: Quit, slangily (BAG IT) I had BUG-- and I actually wrote in "BUGGA" (figuring ... I don't know ... it was some kind of Brit-inflected version of "bugger off" which somehow also meant "quit," I guess). So, HAHA, face-plant number two was self-inflicted. Clumsiness upon clumsiness. I did like those NE and SW corners, as I say, and RIDE SHOTGUN is sweet too. Those parts made bearable an otherwise painful gruesome solving experience.

[wikipedia: "Hijrah or Hijra (Arabic: الهجرة) was the journey of the Islamic prophet Muhammad and his followers from Mecca to Medina. The year in which the Hijrah took place is also identified as the epoch of the Lunar Hijri and Solar Hijri calendars; its date equates to 16 July, 622 in the Julian calendar. The Arabic word hijra means "departure" or "migration", among other definitions. It has been also transliterated as Hegira in medieval Latin, a term still in occasional use in English." (my emph.)]

Bullets:

• 25D: Nowheresville (PODUNK) — I think of the clue as a noun and the answer as an adjective, although I guess the clue *can* be an adjective or the answer a noun if you slang hard enough.
• 54D: Org. whose history is profiled in the 2015 best seller "To Make Men Free" (GOP) — the book sounds great, actually, but at this fascist moment in time, turns out there are No circumstances, no clues that are going to make me happy to see GOP in the puzzle, or anywhere. It's largely a white supremacist death cult now. No values but "liberal tears." If you still have an "R" after your name ... I don't know what to say. You don't have to have a "D," that's for damn sure, but ... yeesh. Get out.
• 39D: "By all means," in old parlance ("PRAY DO") — Wow they weren't kidding about "old parlance." I like that PRAY crosses PSALM (39A: Song featuring up to 176 verses). I also think that  PRAY-DOH would be a good name for a religious-themed Play-Doh. You could use it to sculpt cathedrals and Bible scenes and stuff. Surely someone has already beaten me to this idea. Ah, look. Urban dictionary, comin' through:

• 40D: Sedan : U.S. :: ___ : U.K. (SALOON) — absolutely floored by this. Not sure how I got to be this old without ever learning this bit of Britishness. I guess when I've been in the U.K., I've hardly ever been in a car, let alone thought about purchasing one, so it hasn't come up, but still. Boot, lorry, lift, flat ... you absorb a lot of these over time. But I did not absorb SALOON. We drink in our SALOONs. I hope that Brits don't in theirs.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

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Nubian museum locale / FRI 4-8-22 / Mononymous singer of Alive 2015 / Tiny seeds of green fruits technically / Toddler's eruption / Popular leafy perennial / Nuclear unit nickname / Musical based on a comic strip / Setting for a few good men informally

Constructor: Caitlin Reid

Relative difficulty: Medium-Challenging

THEME: none 

Word of the Day: Tracee ELLIS Ross (15D: Actress Tracee ___ Ross) —

Tracee Joy Silberstein (born October 29, 1972), known professionally as Tracee Ellis Ross, is an American actress, singer, television host, producer and director. She is known for her lead roles in the television series Girlfriends(2000–2008) and Black-ish (2014–present). She owns Pattern Beauty, a hair-care line for curly hair.

She is the daughter of actress and Motown recording artist Diana Ross and Robert Ellis Silberstein. She began acting in independent films and variety series. She hosted the pop-culture magazine The Dish on Lifetime. From 2000 to 2008 she played the starring role of Joan Clayton in the UPN/CW comedy series Girlfriends, for which she received two NAACP Image Awards for Outstanding Actress in a Comedy Series. She also has appeared in the films Hanging Up (2000), I-See-You.Com (2006), and Daddy's Little Girls (2007), before returning to television playing Dr. Carla Reed on the BET sitcom Reed Between the Lines (2011), for which she received her third NAACP Image Award.

Since 2014, Ross has played the starring role of Dr. Rainbow Johnson in the ABC comedy series Black-ish. Her work on it has earned her three NAACP Image Awards and a Golden Globe Award for Best Actress – Television Series Musical or Comedy. She has also received nominations for two Critics' Choice Television Awards and five Primetime Emmy Awards for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Comedy Series. In 2019, she co-created a prequel spin-off of Black-ish titled Mixed-ish. In 2020, she starred in and recorded the soundtrack album for the musical film The High Note. (wikipedia)

• • •

It's a very solid puzzle, but way more slog than thrill-ride for me. The only thing I (predictably?) genuinely got excited by in this puzzle was NUDE SCENE (good answer, well clued — 54A: Raw footage?). It's a very choppy, highly segmented grid, so the flow is not great. Felt like I was seeping through this puzzle more than zoom-zooming through it. And the longer answers never really come together to produce a strong effect. There are pairs in all the quadrants, but (aside from NUDE SCENE) none of the involved words are sensational, and at least one of every pair kind of lands with a thud. Hard (for me) to get excited about MATHLETE or SEMITONE or TWO POINTS or (esp.) A-LISTERS. Some of the shorter connecting stuff is actually really strong, in a low-key sort of way—I'd like to give some love to GET REAL and CHATS UP in particular. But because the fill rarely sizzles, and the clues try so so hard to get cute (more on this below), the overall vibe was a bit plodding. The central answer is solid enough ... but because its clue duplicates a clue type that already got used earlier in the grid and really should only be used once in a puzzle (that is, the "literal clue with an exclamation point" clue type), I wasn't so taken with it. Some clues are meant to be used only once—going back to the well just deadens the effect. And 16A: That's the spirit! already used up the "literal!" clue type, so OPTICAL ILLUSION's clue just made me think "again?" rather than "ah, cool."

The thing where you repeat a clue, or nearly repeat a clue (today: 41A: In and of itself + 44A: In and of itself?) almost always yields terrible, cringey results, and one of them is always hard because the clue just Isn't Right. I don't know why this kind of echoing is thought to be clever or enjoyable. Unless both clues are Dead On, it's actually awful. You've wasted an attempt at an original clue in order to make some kind of "joke." And when both clues are in the same section (as they are today, right on top of each other), ugh, huge pleasure drain. I don't even really get how META works here. PER SE was easy, but META ... I mean, it means self-referential, in a way, but the "?" in the clue is doing a lot lot lot of work. This section was already a drag because of SHO, which I had as HBO because I barely know what "Shameless" is and it just sort of floats free of any particular channel in my mind (33A: "Shameless" airer, for short). And HBO made me think the "leafy perennial" was BASIL (instead of HOSTA). Also, I don't really know what a SEMITONE is, not specifically, so basically everything east of and including SEMITONE in the middle there was just a chore. Which is sad, because SIREN SONG is a very nice answer. Too often (for my taste) the clues got super vague and misdirective. Good clue on SPF, but very Saturdayish (63A: Letters on some foundations). I had PETS for REVS (51D: Makes purr, purrhaps), perhaps because I just fed the cats. Diamonds are pretty awful so I've never purchased them and know nothing about the cuts, ERGO OVAL meant zero to me (60A: ___ brilliant (diamond cut)). These last three answers all cross each other. This is what I mean when I say the puzzle was more slog than whoosh for me. 

Thought A-LISTERS were STARTERS (50A: Biggest stars). Thought SUNSETS (??) were STREETS (27A: Subjects of Monet paintings "in Venice" and "at Lavacourt"). Like diamonds, SeaWorld is awful, so why would I know its "rollercoaster" names? (MANTA). Had SO SMALL for NOMINAL at one point, which I thought was a very creative wrong answer (48A: Hardly worth mentioning). I thought PEAS were legumes which I thought were separate from "fruits" but apparently no, alas (19A: Tiny seeds of green fruits, technically). Hardest answer in the puzzle for me had a very clever clue, but sadly the answer itself was just meh, which made the struggle feel not quite worth it. I'm talking about TWO POINTS, which was just about the last thing I wrote in the grid. 3D: Safety net? refers to the number of POINTS you "net" (gain) on a "safety" ... in American football. You net TWO POINTS. It's a confusing clue because "safety net" suggests trapeze and TWO POINTS + "net" suggests basketball ... but no. It's football. Wish this one had more snap to it. But as I say, the grid itself is solid throughout; no actual weak parts, nothing actively off-putting. Just not as lively as I would've liked, I think. And the clues ... I wish they'd missed ... less. OK, see you tomorrow.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

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Ciudad official / SAT 1-29-22 / Bygone Japanese coin / Kid-lit authors Margret and H.A. / Nonhuman host of a talk show on HBO Max / Gambling venues with portmanteau name / Habitat for the addax antelope

Constructor: Andrew Ries and Caitlin Reid

Relative difficulty: Medium (mostly on the easier side, but with a few terms I didn't know that held me up)

THEME: none 

Word of the Day:  ALCALDE (12D: Ciudad official) —

Alcalde (/ælˈkældi/; Spanish: [alˈkalde]) is the traditional Spanish municipal magistrate, who had both judicial and administrative functions. An alcalde was, in the absence of a corregidor, the presiding officer of the Castilian cabildo (the municipal council) and judge of first instance of a town.  Alcaldes were elected annually, without the right to reelection for two or three years, by the regidores (council members) of the municipal council. The office of the alcalde was signified by a staff of office, which they were to take with them when doing their business. A woman who holds the office is termed an Alcaldesa.

In New Spain (Mexico), alcaldes mayores were chief administrators in colonial-era administrative territories termed alcaldías mayores; in colonial-era Peru the units were called corregimientos.

Alcalde was also a title given to Indian officials inside the Spanish missions, who performed a large variety of duties for the Franciscan missionaries. (wikipedia)

• • •

This is a very nice grid, though the only challenges it presented came entirely from words / names I'd never seen—three, to be exact: ALCALDE, REYS, and HELISTOP. These things happen, of course, when you're solving a Saturday puzzle (or even a Monday puzzle, sometimes, if we're being honest), but I much prefer the kind of difficulty that comes with tricky clues to the kind that comes from words / names / term not commonly known (I won't get in an argument about how well known ALCALDE or the REYS are, but let's just say far far far far far less universally known than, well, look at almost all the other answers: GOLD MEDALS? Everyone knows that term. LOADED DICE, same. ELMO, ROLL, etc. ... you see how "hard" grids aren't really filled with "hard" answers—it's primarily the cluing that makes the puzzle hard, or it should be). It's the unevenness of the difficulty that really highlights how much this puzzle is offering up only one kind of difficulty. It took a little time to think my way through some reasonably toughish stuff in the NW—[Power forward] made me think basketball, rowing, and that clue on APB was a wacky (and tough) delight (19A: Catchy communication, for short?) (get it? ... "catchy" ... 'cause an APB is a "communication" they send out when they're trying to "catch" a criminal)—but after I got out of the NW, I went whoosh over the top, whoosh down the west side. The only struggles: every letter of ALCALDE (hard to see the RIDE part of FREE RIDE because of this), and then the STOP part of HELISTOP and the "Y" part of REYS. My blogging software is underlining HELISTOP in red, and I feel its pain. Woof. I of course wrote in HELIPORT, which is a word. HELISTOP is one of those words that makes me think "maybe there's such a thing as wordlist that's *too* big." The upshot of all this is that it was really hard for me to see NANCY PELOSI until I got the whole pre-"Y" part of her name. POOH Bear before PAPA Bear messed me up in there too, but even after I figured that problem out, I had trouble with the congresswoman. I spelled REES thusly at one point. It was all a bit of a mess. But not too much of a mess. I don't have a problem with ALCALDE or REYS as answers; I'm just hyper-aware of how "being unknown to me" is a far less satisfying form of difficulty than "being cleverly hidden from me," and there just wasn't enough of the latter for me today. But again, that's a cluing problem. The grid itself looks OK (though not nearly as snazzy as grids I've seen from both of these constructors before). [LOL I'm only realizing *just* now, after finishing the write-up and starting to put all the formatting in place, that the REYS (plural) are the authors of the "Curious George" books, so ... yeah, I know them, though clearly without the monkey, they're nothing]

It's not that there's not some trickiness in the cluing, here and there—it's just that it's fairly transparent. A "kite" is a bird (39D: Cousin of a kite = OSPREY)—maybe you're supposed to think it's a flying toy, but I never did. A "curler" is a winter athlete (38D: Curlers' equipment)—it's possible it could be a hairstylist, say, but again, even if I didn't know what use these clues were going for right away, I was well aware of the *potential* trickiness, and so neither clue slowed me down. I wanted more tricky clues, like the one on APB, or even more puzzlingly vague clues like [Growth from stagnation] for ALGAE. I just feel like people are mainly going to be stumped by unknown stuff rather than clever stuff. It's possible you knew the things I didn't, but maybe RIN was unknown to you (old crosswordese, nearly a gimme for me), or ALAN Ruck (I know him from "Ferris Bueller," not "Succession," but the point is I know him). Or maybe ROME, NY is unknown to you, or the Karate Kid kid's name (DRE). Hell, I didn't remember DRE, and I saw that movie many times in the theater and on cable as a kid. But crosses were a cinch. I wish the longer answers were more colorful. The only answers that made me really think "Nice!" were "I CAN RELATE" (48A: "We've all been there") and "SO YOU SAY" (35A: "A likely story"). This is not surprising, as I like a living human voice wherever I can find it in a crossword. 

What else?:

• 17A: Vuvuzela, for one (HORN) — my memory is that these were common noise makers at a recentish Men's World Cup ... maybe in South Africa? (Yes). I just remember that "vuvuzela" really seemed to burst into my consciousness all at once. Now that I look, that World Cup was in 2010, which ... wow, I have no idea what's "recentish" any more. 2010 feels like it just happened and also like it happened a million years ago and also like it never happened. What was 2010, even? Aging is a trip.
• 45D: Local borders? (ELS) — textbook "letteral" clue, where the "?" is an indication to treat one of the clue words in terms of its physical make-up rather than its meaning. Today, we are supposed to look at the "borders" (i.e. the edges, i.e. the first and last letters) of the word "local," which means we're looking at an "L" and another "L," so ... ELS. This is a cluing convention borrowed from cryptic crosswords.
• 27D: ___ artist (film professional) (FOLEY) — these are the sound people, the people who create the non-dialogue sounds in movies (the "reproduction of everyday sound effects" added to film in post-production, according to wikipedia). I don't know how I know this. I can imagine this answer tripping up some solvers quite badly.
• 
  29D: Nonhuman host of a talk show on HBO Max (ELMO) — my first thought was ALIG (who is, in fact, human) and my next thought was MAX HEADROOM (who wouldn't fit). I can't imagine watching even a single second of an ELMO-hosted talk show without wanting to tear my face off, but maybe it's for kids? I hope? Anyway, I remembered that the show existed, eventually, thankfully.
• 52A: Court feat of 2003 and 2015 (SERENA SLAM) — this is where you win (she wins) all four major tournaments in a row, but not in the same calendar year.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

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Lyre holder in classical artwork / SAT 12-19-20 / Title woman in 1975 R&B hit by The Spinners / Eponym of European capital by tradition / Callisto's animal form in Greek mythology / Creature whose name comes from Tswana language / Sensationalistic opinion informally

Constructor: Caitlin Reid and Andrew J. Ries

Relative difficulty: Easy to Easy-Medium, I think (untimed)

THEME: none 

Word of the Day: OTIS Williams (1A: Williams who was one of the original Temptations) —

Otis Williams (born Otis Miles Jr.; October 30, 1941) is an American baritone singer. Nicknamed "Big Daddy", he is occasionally also a songwriter and a record producer.

Williams is the founder and last surviving original member of the Motown vocal group The Temptations, a group in which he continues to perform; he also owns the rights to the Temptations name. (wikipedia)

• • •

This was a really nice puzzle. It was built like a Friday but clued like a Saturday, or at least like a semi-Saturday. A Friday/Saturday. A Friturday. Grid has room for a slew of 7+-letter answers but also has an interconnectedness and *flow* that means (for me) never getting truly bogged down anywhere. You can really hack away at a puzzle like this. It's true that part of the cost of having a hackable grid is having a lot of short fill, but if your longer fill is nice and your short fill is inconspicuous, i.e. not spit-in-your-face bad, you'll do fine. It's a very sassy, youngish grid, with a colloquialism that, bless its heart, is almost actually very current. Yesterday we got LIT, and today we get Gen Y 102: TURNT (24D: Excited, in modern slang). Pretty sure this refers to inebriation most of the time, but "excited," sure, by extension, I'm sure that works too. It has a party context. Or so I'm told by my Youth Translator. Speaking of my Youth Translator, I woke to a very excited (but not TURNT ... I don't think) text from my daughter this morning, who had very important news for me:

If I'd been fully awake, I would've cried :) So, parents, if you want your kids to share your interests, the key is a. make it seem awesome (or delude yourself into believing that you make it seem awesome!) and b. never ever push it. I would get her kids crosswords when she was little and she would do a few, but the whole crossword bug never really caught her. Then she went to college, and she started finding different ways to waste time, then her friends got into doing crosswords too, sometimes together, then COVID hit and shutdowns hit and she had a lot more "free" time on her hands ... and anyway, here we are. I have a feeling the pandemic, which has been a mismanaged disaster in so many ways, is going to end up having been very good for people's crossword skills. You take the good where you can find it. Anyway, congrats to the girl, and to everyone who got over the Saturday (or Friday, or Thursday, or Wednesday...) hump during this terrible year.

The colloquialism of the puzzle went beyond TURNT to "BE LIKE THAT" and HOT TAKE and "I'LL BITE" (my fav) and all the way to the so-old-it's-new tweenfluencerspeak of "ADIEU!" and "TATA!" (seriously, kids, please pick these up and run with them, I will love you for it). OTIS / SADIE could've been a dangerous cross, but OTI- can really only be an "S," so Natick averted. Here were the only struggles I had, all of them brief:

Struggles:

• 
  AHEM (5A: Audible nudge) — PSST! went in first, "confirmed" by PLAY at 5D: Preschool recital (ABCS). I played Billy Goat Gruff in my preschool PLAY
• ROLL (25A: Dinner ___) — I had the -LL and went with BELL
• ROMULUS (29D: Eponym of a European capital, by tradition) — hilarious that I had trouble here, since I teach the Aeneid every year, which is all about "where did Rome come from!?" I thought ROMULUS just *was* the eponym. I don't get the "by tradition" here. I mean, if he's not really a historical figure, wasn't suckled by a she-wolf, etc., he can still be the eponym, right?
• BOOMERS (36D: Male kangaroos) — LOL, really? If you say so. I got a strong suspicion that this one was reclued so as not to infuriate a certain (giant) segment of the NYTXW solving audience
• ABOUT THE AUTHOR (35A: Common material for a jacket) — had ABOUT THE A-T- and thought "ooh, good one" ... and wrote in ABOUT THE ARTIST!
• COHOST (40D: Running mate?) — still not sure I get the "?" joke here. Like ... a show "runs" on television / radio ... and if two+ people host that show, they are "running" ... mates? Needs work.
• TUSSAUD (20D: Wax figure?) — I should've gotten this immediately. Instead, I had -SSA- and at one point definitely tentatively wrote in MASSAGE, which ... I'm just gonna assume that a hot-wax MASSAGE is a real thing and not ask any further questions

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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Turquoise or Topaz / TUES 11-24-20 / Henna and others / Bobs and weaves / Billboard magazine feature

Hello, it’s Clare for the last Tuesday in November! Hope everyone has been staying safe and will be over Thanksgiving. I’m done with classes for the semester (it seriously flew by — even on Zoom U), which means I’ve only got one semester left of law school. That is seriously mind-boggling (and terrifying) to me! Maybe when I graduate I’ll just move to South Korea and become a full-time BTS fan. (Dad, if you’re reading this, I’m kidding. Mostly.) For your dose of holiday cheer (BTS-related, of course), I recommend this new article from the cover of Esquire about them (and how amazing they are)!

Constructor: Caitlin Reid

Relative difficulty: Medium

THEME: Sea animal wordplay

Theme answers:

• WHALE ILL BE DARNED (19A: "An Orca is actually a dolphin?!")
• OH THE HUGE MANATEE (37A: "Wow, that's a giant sea cow!")
• GREAT COD ALMIGHTY (55A: "This is the best fish I've ever had!")

Word of the Day: AHAB (7A: Husband of Jezebel in the Bible) —

Ahab was the seventh king of Israel, the son and successor of King Omri and the husband of Jezebel of Sidon, according to the Hebrew Bible. The Hebrew Bible presents Ahab as a wicked king, particularly for condoning Jezebel's influence on religious policies and his principal role behind Naboth's arbitrary execution. (Wikipedia)

• • •

I don’t have a ton to say about this puzzle overall. I found the theme to be groan-inducing (literally), though I could appreciate how it might be sort of halfway maybe funny to some? Maybe…? But even if you liked the theme, the middle themer — OH THE HUGE MANATEE — did not really work. Sorry, but that is just too much of a reach to be a play on “Oh, the humanity.” The other two involved a slight change in a word to fit a pun (well → whale and god → cod), but for some reason the theme answer smack dab in the middle of the puzzle involved dropping two letters (the “ge”). That one made me annoyed and may have colored my whole view of the puzzle (or maybe I”m just tired and hangry; yeah, that’s probably it). 

The puzzle took me longer than a usual Tuesday takes me, and I’m not entirely sure why. I thought it was decently challenging but not a ton more than a normal Tuesday, so I was a little surprised when I saw my time. It just somehow felt like things I usually get immediately took way longer to click for me. 

The long downs were nice, for the most part — I especially liked BLIND DATE (10D: It may be a setup) and BAT SIGNAL (36D: Summons in Gotham City), though I’m not sure the clue for AVALANCHE (3D: Deluge) quite works, does it? I think of a deluge as a severe flood, and that doesn't quite match up with AVALANCHE. Overall, my favorite clue/answer was 24A: Column with an angle as OPED. 57A: Light wind? as OBOE was also pretty clever. 

The rest of my thoughts on the puzzle are just a jumbled mess of things I didn’t particularly like (maybe I should go make myself some food or something). 41A as TUDE is pretty ugly and not really something people say. I don’t love split clues, and having SASHA (1D) be so far away from OBAMA (61A) seems random to me. I originally put “grasp” instead of CLASP for 17A: Hold on tight, which threw me for a bit. UHUH (33D) and NYNY (54D) seem kind of lazy to me. Also, I had a weirdly hard time coming up with LAWN for 13D: What a sprinkler may sprinkle, even though, looking back, it seems very obvious now. I also had a hard time coming up with SALADS (47D: Make-it-yourself dishes from bars) for some reason — though maybe it’s because salad bars just don’t exist in a time of COVID. 

Misc.:

• 5D: CYCLES reminded me of a bike ride the other day where I was feeling so great and fast on the way out, thinking I was just crushing it, and then I turned around to go back and realized I’d been benefitting from a major tailwind… The huge headwind on the way back was not fun at all. 
• NCIS (25A: Long-running CBS drama) is one show where I feel like the spinoff, NCIS: Los Angeles, is actually better than the original. 
• It’s nice that this puzzle mentions a Billboard CHART (5A), because that means I can now return to talking about BTS, who just came out with a new album called “BE” that’s going to debut next week at No. 1 on the chart. BTS also has a song called “Life Goes On” that may debut (fingers crossed!) at No. 1 on the Billboard chart next week, as well — you should listen to it!

And... that's it! Have a great week.

Signed, Clare Carroll, your resident BTS fan

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Mail lady on Pee-wee's Playhouse / SUN 11-15-20 / 1989 Tom Hanks black comedy / Keto adherent e.g. / Republican politico Reince / Small bird with complex songs / Seasonal song with lyrics in Latin / Lipa Grammy-winning pop artist

Constructor: Caitlin Reid

Relative difficulty: Easyish (9:01)

THEME: "Theme Shmeme" — sigh, there is no theme :(

Word of the Day: LIENOR (49A: Bank, at times) —

: one holding a lien against the property of another (merriam-webster.com)

• • •

This is what happens when you're out of ideas. Nothing in the tank. Total admission of defeat. The Sunday themeless is not ... meaningful conceptually. It fills time, but it spits in the face of what a good Sunday is supposed to be, what it often *used* to be—the marquee puzzle of the NYT. The splashy, ambitious, *thematically* clever big-canvas puzzle event of the week. But week after week, the Sunday is a shambles, a faded zombie version of its former glory (when greats like Liz Gorski used to construct for the NYT on a regular basis). And so I guess when the well runs completely dry, we get this: a completely forgettable placeholder of a puzzle. It's not *bad*, to be clear. It's fine. I filled nine minutes of my life. It was a brief diversion. But there's nothing to recommend it. Themelesses this size are meaningless. Against the two themelesses that just preceded it (Friday, Saturday), it seems lackluster, thin. It's so big, that it feels like you can do almost anything, but the achievement means almost nothing. I think my bar for Sunday themelesses is a. please don't do them, and b. if you do them, they should be Startlingly good. And this is just fine. OK. Again, it will occupy your brain for a period of time between roughly 10 and 45 minutes. The end. It's solid throughout, but there's not much here that would make me sit up and cheer in a 15x15, so in a 21x21, yeah, it's just a shrug from me. But it was easy, and lots of people seem to be setting personal records with their solving times, so I'm guessing no one's going to complain too much about this concession to idealessness. Ah well.

There aren't any real low points, except LIENOR, ouch ... and I thought ALIENOR was bad (weirdly, I've seen ALIENOR more than I've seen LIENOR, I'm almost certain). Those three letters between "L" and "OR" were an Adventure, for sure. I had LENDOR (?) and LESSOR (!?) before eventually getting the whole answer from crosses. Otherwise, nothing awful in this puzzle. Also, nothing very exciting. I kinda liked [Barely afloat?] for SKINNY-DIPPING, but that's about the only answer that I remembered fondly after I was done. I'm realizing now why I assumed there'd be a theme (besides, you know, the obvious, i.e. that it's Sunday and the puzzle has a title): two of the long Acrosses have "?" clues. In addition to the SKINNY-DIPPING clue, there's the corresponding, symmetrical clue on COURT REPORTER (27A: Hearing aid?). Speaking of "?" clues, 1-Across gave me more trouble than just about anything in the grid (1A: Round number? = BARTAB). It's a fine clue, just anomalously tough. Also tough for me:

Tough for me:

• 25D: Bring down (LOWER) — got the "L," wrote in LEVEL
• 19D: Mudbug, by another name (CRAWDAD) — got the "CRAW," wrote in CRAWLER (?)
• 41A: First attempt (FORAY) — Had no idea that the concept of "first" was built in. I hear "first FORAY" and "initial FORAY" a lot. Those are redundant? Huh.
• 78D: Golfer Jordan who won the 2015 U.S. Open (SPIETH) — after a while I recognized the name, but I try really hard not to pay the least bit of attention to this exclusionary country-club "sport" that is beloved by some of the worst people on the planet. If you never put a golf clue in a puzzle again, I would not complain.
• 79D: Republican politico Reince (PRIEBUS) — ok this wasn't "tough for me," just hilarious to me, literally laughed and thought "omg that guy ... remember *that* guy?" Is he still someone? What an embarrassment. 
• 85D: Prepare to deplane (UNBELT) —LOL I have never called it that. I unbuckle my seatbelt, but my need to save breath on syllables has never driven me to utter anything as stupid as UNBELT. 

OK, XXOO BYE.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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