King of Norway and Sweden from 1844 to 1859 / WED 6-4-25 / Only known warm-blooded fish / Two-syllable woman's name that becomes a one-syllable woman's name if you drop the last letter

Constructor: Danna Rosenberg

Relative difficulty: Easy (11:50 with an oversized (16 wide) grid while at a bar)

THEME: MAKE LEMONADE — What to do when life gives you the proverbial items hidden in the long across answers

Theme answers:

• [Platinum-selling singer who co-starred in the films "Moonlight" and "Hidden Figures"] for JANELLE MONAE
• ["Creature" that might "attack" a small child] for TICKLE MONSTER
• I loved the use of quotation marks here
• [Homing devices?] for ANKLE MONITORS

Word of the Day: LAICS (Pastor's flock) —

From French laïque, from Latin laĭcus (“common people”). A layperson as opposed to a cleric, i.e. not a member of the clergy.

• • •

Hey squad, and welcome to a Malaika MWednesday! I actually can't believe it's already Wednesday. I spent Friday and Saturday at a fantastically beautiful and fun wedding, and have been riding that high through mid-week. I still have the mehndi on my hands and thus it still feels like the weekend.

I thought this theme was very easy for a Wednesday!! Would have worked for a Monday just fine, in my opinion, but I acknowledge that it can be tough when a theme answer is a celebrity-- you either know them or you don't. In this case, I know and love JANELLE MONAE-- I was surprised to see her clued inre the movie Moonlight but I suppose that's the movie that won the awards. (She starred in the newest Knives Out movie which is both commercially successful* and more recent, so I had expected to see that.) (Not that Moonlight and Hidden Figures weren't commercially successful-- but both movies mentioned in her clue came out a decade ago.)

Janelle's fantastic coat + suit from this year's Met Gala

I think you could be a little pedantic and say the wordplay of this theme doesn't quite make sense-- the idiom asks you to make lemonade, whereas the phrases here "make" LEMON out of their letters. But I don't really care about that. The clue of the revealer is phrased such that everything is perfectly clear. And it's really impressive to find three exciting and interesting entries with LEMON hidden inside of them. I wonder in what order Ms. Rosenberg brainstormed these things-- I could imagine finding LEMON inside of JANELLE MONAE and then thinking "Oh man, I have to do something puzzle-y with that."

Putting my constructor hat on, the 16-wide grid is likely because of the frustrating lengths of the theme answers. This is one of the cool things about constructing-- as a solver, you're not likely to notice a difference between an 11-letter theme answer and a 12-letter theme answer. But they make a huge difference while laying out the grid!! 

In a 15-wide grid, if you try to put a 12-letter answer in the third row, it doesn't work because it creates some two-letter words, which aren't allowed.

So if you have a theme answer that's twelve letters long in a 15-wide grid, you have to put it in the fourth row. This makes your theme answers squished together-- four of them are taking up only nine rows instead of being spread over eleven rows.

But if you use a 16-wide grid, now it can go in the third row, and you're back to having eleven rows of space in which to arrange your theme answers.

Okay, Constructing Interlude over now. The roomier grid gave Ms. Rosenberg some room to play with non-theme longer answers, and we got stuff GAVE IT A GO / PLASTERED / OPEN HEART / BACK AT YOU in the corners, plus DETROIT and HALF ASS. I could not parse OSCAR I at all, but got it from the crosses. With LAICS I had far less luck-- I have never heard this word in my whole life. I stuck to LAMBS for embarrassingly long, because I can't read I guess, and eventually had to run the alphabet on the I of ASIAN. (I thought that entry was going to be some biological Latin term that I hadn't heard of.) ET ALII with ALIA and NEIL was another crossing that could have been hard. I actually initially had ET ALIA crossing ALIA and was already to write a paragraph about whether that counted as a dupe before I realized my grid was wrong.

Reflecting on this, I assume the Times slated this for a Wednesday because of the harder fill, even if the theme itself was, uh, easy peasy lemon squeezy.

Bullets:

• [Girl in Jefferson Airplane's "White Rabbit"] for ALICE — I love this style of clue, where even if you don't know the exact trivia (I've never heard of the band or the song) you can puzzle it out based on the context
• [A/C measure] for BTU — I just finished reading the novel Sunrise on the Reaping, set in the Hunger Games Universe. The author likes to give the characters names that echo the industry they work in, and there's speculation that a mechanical engineer named Beetee takes his name from BTU.
• ["Divine medicine," per the Greek physician Paracelsus] for BEER — I just thought this was cute

xoxo Malaika

*Okay, now that the write-up is over, I looked this up. Both Hidden Figures (236mill) and Moonlight (65mill) absolutely clobbered Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery at the box office (15mill), but that might be because Glass Onion was released by Netflix-- the og Knives Out, which was released traditionally, earned 312mill.

[Follow Rex Parker on BlueSky and Facebook]

Read more...