Gradually develop literally / THU 1-26-23 / Southwest city in 1947 news / Trademarked coffee holder / Opposite of dry to a vintner / Punished for the weekend maybe / Developing phenomenon literally depicted three times in this puzzle

Constructor: Dan Ziring and Quiara Vasquez

Relative difficulty: Challenging

THEME: SNOWBALL EFFECTS (33A: Developing phenomena literally depicted three times in this puzzle) — three Across answers unfold gradually, box by box, with letters accruing in each box, one letter at a time, so instead of GROW, written in the grid at 1A: Gradually develop, literally, you get "G" and then "GR" and then "GRO" and *then* "GROW"—so it's a kind of rebus, with multiple letters in all non-initial boxes for all related theme answers:

Theme answers:

• GROW (G/GR/GRO/GROW)
• Downs = GRAMPS (1D: Pop-pop) / GRANARY (2D: Farm storehouse) / GROUNDED (3D: Punished for the weekend, perhaps) / GROWLERS (4D: Beer containers)
• FORM (F/FO/FOR/FORM)
• Downs = FAKER (10D: Total phony) / FORCEPS (11D: Some surgical tools) / FORTUNES (12D: Enormous amounts to spend) / "FOR MY PART..." (13D: "As far as I'm concerned ...")
• SWELL (S/SW/SWE/SWEL/SWELL)
• Downs = ETS (47D: Fabled visitors to 49-Down, in brief) / SWEET (55D: Opposite of dry, to a vintner) / SWEATY (56D: Evidencing physical exertion) / SWELTER (57D: Suffer in the summer heat) / ROSWELL (49D: Southwest city in 1947 news)

 Word of the Day: CAPRI SUN (40D: Big name in juice pouches) —

Capri Sun (UK: /ˈkæpri/, US: /kəˈpriː/, stylized as CAPRISUN in the United States and Capri-Sun internationally) is a German brand of juice concentrate drinks owned by Capri Sun Group Holding in Germany, which is a privately held company of Hans-Peter Wild. It was introduced in 1969 and named after the Italian island of Capri. Capri Sun has been distributed in the United States since 1981. [...] The standard box is filled with ten 200-millilitre (7 US fl oz) pouches of liquid. In the U.S., Capri-Sun pouches are now 180 ml (6 US fl oz); previously they were 240 ml (8 US fl oz). The pouch is trapezoidal in profile when filled and rectangular when flat, with a flared bottom that makes the pouch able to stand upright when placed on a horizontal surface. A straw is supplied with each individual pouch. [...] In 2014, after continued pressure to fix what consumers described as worm-shaped food mold in Capri Sun pouches, Kraft released a clear bottomed pouch to allow consumers to better inspect the product before consumption. Additionally, the non-recyclable packaging has spurred environmental groups to pressure Kraft into redesigning their iconic pouch.

• • •

Oh, wow, it is too e ea ear earl early for this, man. Hell of a puzzle to throw at me on the morning when I have the least amount of time to solve & write! I guess my wish for "harder puzzles" finally came true in a not-gradually-developing way. Just bam, here's the hardest puzzle you've seen in months, enjoy! Well ... I did enjoy it, so there. I would've enjoyed it more if I hadn't felt the tick tock of my morning solving/blogging window fading away as I was solving, but that's not the puzzle's fault. The one thing this puzzle did provide was a genuine "aha" moment that was so long-coming and pent up that I think it came in the form of a semi-audible "oh my god" moment. This moment, right here:

[LOL 51-Across, "LEO" doesn't even fit, my god I was out of it]

I actually filled in this corner and then erased back to this initial moment so I could screenshot it. I wanted to capture the precise moment of revelation. so that you will understand why ... I didn't actually understand the theme completely, even after the "oh my god!" I just assumed that the "snowball effect" had to do with the Downs—that is, I thought that with where the theme answers were concerned, each subsequent Down cross picked up one more letter on its front end. So ... essentially, the Across was just rounding the corner a bunch of times. I was not cramming multiple letters into squares, I was assuming that the letters just flowed from the start of the Across and dropped down. It never occurred to me to put multiple letters in a square. Here, I'll try to demonstrate what *I* thought the theme was doing using arrows:

From where I was standing / solving, those Downs (above) all started at the "F" and then proceeded across and *rounded the corner*, dropping and finishing where they finish. There was no question of multiple squares in a box, just a matter of walking that Across answer over and Down. Turns out my understanding of the theme works perfectly ... and then suddenly, one time, doesn't. That time: ROSWELL (49D: Southwest city in 1947 news). I ended up, at the very end, staring at ROL and wondering how on god's green earth that was supposed to work. Never occurred to me that it was a themer. And when, finally, it *did* strike me as a themer, I couldn't make it square with the rest of the Down themers, *all* of which followed the drop-down pattern I was seeing in my head (and on my screen). Only after hitting "reveal all" did I see that my grid was correct enough: I had all the "right" answers, but was entering those three Across themers "wrong." I was supposed to be rebusing the Acrosses, adding one letter at a time to each subsequent box. I never do that with regular rebuses (when I'm actually solving, I just type the first letter and let it stand for the whole, and the app usually accepts that). So ... yeah, it didn't play great on screen, and it's super duper Duper weird that my understanding of how the theme unfolded worked for every involved answer but one (12 out of 13!). Would've been nice (helpful!) to mix it up a bit, have a few more of those Downs that enter from the top. Would've made what was going on clearer (maybe). But I still think that this is a brilliant conceit and that the execution is mostly masterful.

OK, very quickly, as this has taken way too long to solve and explain. The fill was good but they did not ease up on the difficulty in order to offset the theme difficulty. You got hard, vague clues for simple stuff like AIR (7D: Put on) (who wrote in "DON"?). I had ROO instead of SYD (for Sydney, Australia) and SALAD before BASIL (31A: Leaves in the kitchen?) and was really really not sure of the SCALAR / AYS / CHATTER nexus (25D: Quantity contrasted with a vector, in physics / 44A: Shakespearean cries (are they?) / 46A: Chinwagging). There was no part of this grid that I flew through. I was so so grateful to know CAPRI SUN today. It was the end of the solve and it had been such an ordeal and I got to that SE corner and thought "what fresh hell awaits?" and then CAPRI SUN was like "nah, I got you, come on in." And the puzzle was over. Well, I had to hit "reveal grid" to fully understand, but ... yeah, over. Hope you survived!

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

Read more...

One-named former wrestler who twice won the W.W.E. Divas Championship / THU 6-9-22 / Hip-hop subgenre in Lil Nas X's Old Town Road / Creatures whose saliva acts as a blood thinner / Italian sportswear brand named after a Greek letter / Some sleeveless undergarments informally / E-commerce site with a portmanteau name / One wearing a traje de luces suit of light in the ring

Constructor: Dan Ziring

Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium

THEME: SHORT / FILMS (37A: With 39-Across, some Sundance submissions ... or a hint to four squares in this puzzle) — a rebus puzzle where four films with short *titles* are smushed into four squares throughout the grid:

Theme answers (movie titles in red):

• ARETHA / MEET-CUTES ("E.T") (17A: "Queen" of 40-Down / 3D: Rom-com staples)
• RADIO EDITS / AHI TUNA ("It") (18A: CeeLo Green's "Forget You" and the Black Eyed Peas' "Don't Mess With My Heart")
• SUPERSTORM / GROUPON ("Up") (61A: Increasingly common weather event akin to a hurricane / 47D: E-commerce site with a portmanteau name)
• PC USER / SOUL MUSIC ("Us") (63A: One with Windows / 40D: Otis Redding's genre)

Word of the Day: "Us" (see 63A / 40D) —

Us is a 2019 American horror film written and directed by Jordan Peele, starring Lupita Nyong'o, Winston Duke, Elisabeth Moss, and Tim Heidecker. The film follows Adelaide Wilson (Nyong'o) and her family, who are attacked by a group of menacing doppelgängers. [...] Us had its world premiere at South by Southwest on March 8, 2019, and was theatrically released in the United States on March 22, 2019, by Universal Pictures. It was a critical and commercial success, grossing $255 million worldwide against a budget of $20 million, and received praise for Peele's screenplay and direction, Nyong'o's performance, and Michael Abels' musical score. (wikipedia)

• • •

Really hard not to like this one, but I found a way. Kidding! It was fun, even if the theme was exceedingly easy to pick up. Maybe it was fun *because* the theme was easy to pick up—with some theme concepts, you pick them up and then it's just a dreary march to the end, finding more of the same things you've already found, or performing more of the same "wordplay," or whatever. But SHORT / FILMS!? Sign me up. That is an Easter egg hunt I am happy to go on. If the concept is interesting, then I am happy to go tiptoeing through the rebus minefield, waiting for the completely non-violent and delightful explosions. I still say the late-week puzzles are being excessively defanged, presumably in the interests of being solvable by a broader chunk of the paying public (a motivation which *sounds* noble, but is entirely about $$$). I would like my late-week puzzles to push me around a little, in a fun, consensual way. And this one didn't. But it made up for it with the high entertainment value of the content. I liked that there were other film-related answers in the grid, including one that contained one of the SHORT / FILMS in question (MEET-CUTES). There's also Irene DUNNE (legend—more than just a crossword answer, kids!) and Oscar-winner Rami MALEK (54A: Best Actor winner for "Bohemian Rhapsody"), whose name I managed to spell right on the first try today. And I just spelled his first name right too! I know there is a publisher called TOR, after the [Craggy peak] of crossword fame, but is there a movie, or anything movie-related, called "TOR"? Reason I ask ... 

• TORT
• TORTA
• TORAHS
• TORERO
• SUPERSTORM
• AERATOR

You can also see it backwards in PROTÉGÉ. If you solve long enough, the puzzles will start whispering to you, and then eventually you whisper back, and it's a whole thing. If you're a novice solver, I would say "get out (!) while you can," or at least "never solve more than one puzzle a day"), but you're gonna do what you're gonna do, and honestly, if this is how my Crazy manifests—seeing things in grids that quote-unquote "aren't there," ascribing significance to coincidental letter strings—then I'm OK with that. Congrats to this puzzle for its bite-sized pleasures, and for managing to cram Fritz Lang's "M" into the grid a full seven times! Now that's what I call a bonus answer!

CAMIS ICH SHAHS LEECH—that's how I started, without hesitation, and I was off like a shot. Before long, I had found the first rebus square ("ET tu, rebus!?") and then found my way straight to the heart of the grid, where the reason for the "ET" square was revealed. 

To my great joy, that first rebus square had nothing to do with Latin, and while it did have to do with aliens, I wasn't staring at the prospect of having to find 3-to-god-knows-how-many more "ET"s in my grid. I was, instead, on a short (-titled) film hunt. The game was afoot and I was all deerstalker-capped, magnifying-glassed, tobacco-piped, houndstooth Inverness-caped and ready to go. But at first, and for a long time, no movies turned up. I got this far before the lack of movies got suspicious, so I stopped to take a screenshot:

What I wanted to say was "How have I gotten this deep into the puzzle without encountering a second movie squares!?" But it turns out I already had encountered said square. If I'd realized that  18A: CeeLo Green's "Forget You" and the Black Eyed Peas' "Don't Mess With My Heart" was asking for a plural and not a singular, I would've found the clown hiding under the sewer grate or whatever the hell happens in "It." The remaining movies came pretty easily. Well, "Us" very easily (what else was gonna follow SOUL but MUSIC?). "Up" was a little tougher, since I didn't remember that SUPER was a kind of STORM, so I had to back into that corner via SORORAL (a word my software is angrily red-underlining), and then sort things out from there. IRATE TORTA ENYA, the end.

Notes:

• 56A: Grist for a mill (LOG) — sincerely, probably the hardest thing in the grid, for me. I had LO- and no idea what was going on. "Grist" had me thinking of grains, for some reason (anagram of "grits"?!). Huge tree parts ... never thought of them as grist. Clearly I don't spend a lot of time thinking about grist.
• 10D: What Britain left in 2020, in brief (THEEU) — I love this answer because it just looks so incredibly stupid in the grid. It looks like a minor Lovecraftian monster—maybe something Chthulu feeds upon. THEEU! Anyway, this and PCUSER were today's minor parsing challenges. 
• 69A: Genderqueer identity (ENBY) — Nonbinary => N.B. => ENBY. I don't think this is the first time we've seen the term (my memory is correct—we saw it in the plural (ENBIES) back in January). 
• 60A: Underground N.Y.C. group (MTA) — that's the Metropolitan Transit Authority. In charge of the subway, which is "Underground," don't ya know...
• 22D: Ridiculous introduction? (UTTERLY) — I like this clue a lot, though it is UTTERLY ridiculous that there are so many -LY-ending adverbs in this puzzle (see also BARELY, SLIMLY). OK, not UTTERLY. OK, not ridiculous at all. Just remarkable. Not as remarkable as this puzzle's mysterious TOR-storm, but remarkable nonetheless.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

Read more...