Rex Parker Does the NYT Crossword Puzzle: Dave Bardolph

Constructor: Dave Bardolph

Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium

THEME: Shakespearean cookout — famous phrases from Shakespeare, clued as if they referred to a "cookout":

Theme answers:

THE POUND OF FLESH (17A: 16-ounce sirloin that Shylock brought to the cookout?)
LEND ME YOUR EARS (27A: Mark Antony's request to the farmer when he realized he didn't have enough corn for the cookout?)
AY, THERE'S THE RUB (48A: Cry from Hamlet when he spotted his favorite spice mix at the cookout?)
WHAT'S DONE IS DONE (64A: Lady Macbeth's declaration upon checking the steaks at the cookout?)

Word of the Day: Las Vegas RAIDERs (51D: Las Vegas player) —

The Las Vegas Raiders are a professional American football team based in the Las Vegas metropolitan area. The Raiders compete in the National Football League (NFL) as a member club of the league's American Football Conference (AFC) West division. In 2020, the Raiders will play their home games at Allegiant Stadium in Paradise, Nevada.
Founded on January 30, 1960, and originally based in Oakland, California, they played their first regular season game on September 11, 1960, as a charter member of the American Football League (AFL). They moved to the NFL with the AFL-NFL merger in 1970. The team departed Oakland to play in Los Angeles from the 1982 season through the 1994 season before returning to Oakland at the start of the 1995 season. On March 27, 2017, NFL team owners voted nearly unanimously to approve the Raiders' application to relocate to Las Vegas. Nearly three years later, on January 22, 2020, the Raiders officially moved to Las Vegas. (wikipedia)

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These are the kinds of corny (!) puns that I expect from the NYTXW on a Tuesday. Dadpuzz, for sure. I appreciate the timely late-summer vibe of the "cookout" premise. The only real objection I have comes from my ears, who do not like the THE in THE POUND OF FLESH. Unlike the other themers, that one exists as a pretty common metaphor in English, and in the context it's "A" pound of flesh, not THE. I'm sure the quotation is accurate, though I don't remember it precisely, hang on ... OK, wait *hang on*!!! Portia literally says, at one point, citing the contract, "The words expressly are 'a pound of flesh'" ... Like ... the play itself is literally telling you exactly how the quote should go. Yes, the phrase "pound of flesh" gets repeated a lot in the play, but I feel like Portia's words are basically the play rendering its ruling on what the proper wording of this phrase should be. I find for the "A," against the "THE," the theme is rendered invalid. Man, you have no idea how happy I am that my ears recoiled *justly*, and not just idiosyncratically or unfairly, as maybe perhaps sometimes occasionally happens. Vindication for my ears! Huzzah! But yeah, The THE is bad, and now that it's been disproved by the text, ruinous.

Puzzle felt easy overall, but my time was actually slightly *above* average. I really do solve more slowly in the early morning, for whatever reason. I feel alert and clear-headed enough, but things ... like, all the things ... just aren't up to full speed yet. My entire body just wants to cchhiillll in the early morning—it's such a glorious, slow time of day—so I think I'm unapt to break any speed records when I do an early-morning solve, and I have to adjust my difficulty rating accordingly. Looking the puzzle over, I actually made a bunch of mistakes, or just blanked out initially at a bunch of answers. I truly could not process RANT (6D: Chew someone out, maybe), since you REAM someone out, not RANT them out, but I get that RANT here doesn't require the object, it's an intransitive verb, yadda yadda. Oh, and I also don't play Yahtzee at all so PAIR was weird to me—sounds like cards, not dice (15A: Unexciting Yahtzee roll), which I guess is sorta the point of Yahtzee, but whatever. PAIR is not a word I know from that game.

Then I got really stuck at RAIDER, as my brain had apparently not processed, or cared in any way, that the Oakland Raiders moved (again). I know that Las Vegas has hockey now (!?), but that's as far as I got, or am apparently willing to go, on my Las Vegas sports knowledge. My brain really only has enough room for UNLV (4), to be honest. Life was better when that city had no major pro sports teams. Slightly stunned that Serbia has the DINAR as its unit of currency, but yes, it's one of two European countries using that denomination (the other being North Macedonia, which I sincerely did not know was a country). Here are the rest:

Not sure how to spell the LEA in LEA & Perrins, so that hurt with RAIDER as well. I sincerely assumed a "Las Vegas player" was a ROLLER for a little bit there. Had STAR before SEAL (59D: Member of an elite team) and, without the Neil Diamond context, or any musical context at all, had no idea what 70A: Adjective for Caroline could possibly want (SWEET). Still came in well under 4. That's all for today. See you tomorrow.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

P.S. this blog got a nice mention in the NYT yesterday (8/24), in a very unexpected place: Wesley Morris's reflections on the 2004 (!) movie season. Specifically, in a discussion of M. Night Shyamalan's "The Village."