Akbar's tomb locale / SUN 3-12-23 / Stereotypical name for a female poodle / Brit's clothespin / Emulate Rockin' Robin in a 1958 hit / Many a 21st-century liberal / Dance move used to teach children how to limit spreading germs while sneezing / Start of many a T-shirt slogan

Constructor: David Tuffs

Relative difficulty: Easy

THEME: "This and That" — familiar phrases that contain shaded letters and circled letters that (respectively) complete a familiar "___ AND ___" phrase (i.e. "[shaded squares] AND [circled squares]"):

Theme answers:

• GIRL SCOUT LEADER (22A: One in charge of Brownies and cookies? / Easy to understand) ("LOUD and CLEAR")
• FOLDING THE LAUNDRY (31A: Post-dryer chore / splendid) ("FINE and DANDY")
• WEDDING CRASHER (45A: One whom the bride and groom didn't invite / Steal a meal) ("DINE and DASH")
• HEAVEN ON EARTH (62A: Utopia / Occasionally, poetically) ("EVER and ANON")
• BLACK FOREST HAM (82A: German deli meat / Discussion) ("BACK and FORTH")
• LAST PLACE FINISHES (96A: They might result in booby prizes / Physical discomforts) ("ACHES and PAINS")
• TABLOID MAGAZINE (109A: Issue featuring celebrity issues / Repeatedly) ("TIME and AGAIN")

Word of the Day: MARY I (112A: "Bloody" English monarch) —

Mary I (18 February 1516 – 17 November 1558), also known as Mary Tudor, and as "Bloody Mary" by her Protestant opponents, was Queen of England and Ireland from July 1553 and Queen of Spain as the wife of King Philip II from January 1556 until her death in 1558. She is best known for her vigorous attempt to reverse the English Reformation, which had begun during the reign of her father, Henry VIII. Her attempt to restore to the Church the property confiscated in the previous two reigns was largely thwarted by Parliament, but during her five-year reign, Mary had over 280 religious dissenters burned at the stake in the Marian persecutions.

Mary was the only child of Henry VIII by his first wife, Catherine of Aragon, to survive to adulthood. Her younger half-brother, Edward VI, succeeded their father in 1547 at the age of nine. When Edward became terminally ill in 1553, he attempted to remove Mary from the line of succession because he supposed, correctly, that she would reverse the Protestant reforms that had taken place during his reign. Upon his death, leading politicians proclaimed Lady Jane Grey as queen. Mary speedily assembled a force in East Anglia and deposed Jane, who was ultimately beheaded. Mary was—excluding the disputed reigns of Jane and the Empress Matilda—the first queen regnant of England. In July 1554, Mary married Prince Philip of Spain, becoming queen consort of Habsburg Spain on his accession in 1556.

After Mary's death in 1558, her re-establishment of Roman Catholicism was reversed by her younger half-sister and successor, Elizabeth I. (wikipedia)

• • •

Hello and a Happy Daylight Saving Time to you all (it's the worst, I hate it, but I still wish you happiness on this miserable day). The first thing I should say about this puzzle is that my software doesn't do "shaded squares," which is why you can't see them in the posted grid, above. I just had to ... intuit that they were there. This wasn't exactly easy, given that CLEAR is a reasonable definition of [Easy to understand], for instance. That is, I had no reason to expect that a "LOUD" was involved as well. See also DANDY, PAINS, and AGAIN, each of which fit the clue just fine without any shaded square nonsense. But DASH, on the other hand, was clearly in need of a "DINE and," so I was left to wonder where the "DINE" was. I could see that the letters for "DINE" were inside the answer WEDDING CRASHER, but since they were not circled (and not shaded), I had no idea what the hook was. Turns out I was just dealing with a software shortcoming. The "real" grid looks like this:

Shaded squares give one half of the "___ AND ___" phrase, circled squares give the other. That "___ AND ___" phrase appears to have absolutely nothing to do with the larger phrase inside which it appears. Nothing "LOUD and CLEAR" about a GIRL SCOUT LEADER, for instance. So I guess I don't get it. I mean, I really don't get these puzzles where there's no real *meaning* to whatever structural / wordplay / letter play trickery is going on. The interest, insofar as there is any, is purely architectural: "Hey, I found these letter-string pairings inside these phrases ..." That's it. I mean, nice finds, but none of this means anything to me. It just seems fussy. I have no idea how hard / easy to find such answers, but I also don't care, since none of it has anything to do with solving enjoyment. The "THE" in FOLDING THE LAUNDRY is awkward, and now I see that it's only there to provide the "E" in the "FINE" part of "FINE and DANDY." But it's not worth it. None of this is worth it. These are structural curiosities, but there's just not enough thematic coherence or truly creative and enjoyable wordplay here to make the endeavor worth it. 

OBAMACRAT? Ugh, is that a thing? Who identifies that way?? [Many a 21st-century liberal]?!? Many!?!? I don't know one, and virtually everyone I know voted for Obama, so ... that's weird. Does the word just mean "anyone who voted for Obama?" Like, I'm deeply suspicious of this dumb terminology. I voted for Obama, but you must be HIGH AS A KITE if you think that makes me an OBAMACRAT. I refer you to this random quote I just found from a 2014 article in the Journal of Politics in Latin America:

Barack Obama received about 51 percent of the popular vote in his 2012 reelection – a far greater percentage than there are self-professed Democrats among US voters. In the United States, however, no one speaks of “Obamacrats.” Obama's votes came from his partisan base and from independents who nonetheless chose him over Mitt Romney. (my emph.)

Not all "words" you come across in life belong in your Wordlist. I'm looking around for things to love in this grid and after HIGH AS A KITE (66D: Three sheets to the wind), I don't see much. I don't think I'd spell TUSHY that way. To be (loud and) clear, I would spell TUSHY at all, normally, or use it, ever, but if I had to, I'd go TUSHIE. That seems to be the preferred spelling of most dictionaries, but lots of, uh, rear end-oriented products / sex stuff seems to prefer the "Y" spelling, for whatever reasons. TUSHY is a brand of bidet, it seems, and then ... well, there's some porn stuff out there you probably don't wanna hear about that has the "Y" spelling as well. Speaking of "Y"s, not a huge fan of the alleged contraction "Y'HEAR"—it's "YA HEAR"; that apostrophe is a lie; nothing is being elided. You still say the "A" so you may as well be honest and write the "A." A true contraction / elision would be "Y'EAR," and that's just silly. Also not a huge fan of I-BARS crossing "I HEART" at the "I" (not a fan of "I HEART" at all, frankly). And what the hell is up with that "CAN'T I?" clue (20D: "Pleeease"?). It looks like a plea from a kid, and no kid is going to say "CAN'T I!?" They'd say "CAN I?" Better clue would've been some more compact version of ["You doubt my ability to do so?"]. "I RULE" gives us god knows how many "I"s now, I'm tired of counting.

There are no tough parts to this grid. I solved it easily, and I didn't even have the shaded squares to help me out (did they really help that much, though?). I had trouble with MARY I despite teaching 16th-century English literature (for the next few weeks, in fact) (112A: "Bloody" English monarch). I wanted it to be MARY, of course, but MARY is four letters, as you can see, and I never ever think of her as MARY I, though, yes, she is. I don't think of her as MARY I because I never think of MARY II as MARY II either—she's just the MARY part of "William & Mary" (co-regents of England from 1689 until her death five years later). So I had some hesitation there, but that's all it was. I had one wrong answer that I can recall: DAP for DAB (30A: Dance move used to teach children how to limit spreading germs while sneezing). DAP is the fist bump, DAB is the crook-of-the-elbow-to-your-face move:

Not sure I've ever seen AKON and AKRON in the same grid before, so that's ... something. My wife's last name is in the puzzle. I'll let you guess what it is. Hint: it's not E-FILE. (though "Penelope E-FILE" does have a certain ring). I'll leave you with this brilliant card that one of my more creative readers sent me last month. It really speaks to me, and all of us, I presume:

See you next time.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld 

P.S. here's a picture of ALFIE and IDA, just because:

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

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Mattel acquisition of 1997 / WED 11-9-22 / Prophetess in the Torah / 1987 thriller featuring the same characters as TV's "Californication" / 1990 action film featuring the same characters as the film "Collateral"

Constructor: David Tuffs

Relative difficulty: Easy

THEME: "same characters" — famous movies are clued as having the "same characters" as some other movies (or TV shows), only in this case the clues (obviously) mean "characters" as in "letters (in the titles),," not "roles (in the shows themselves)"

Theme answers:

• "FATAL ATTRACTION" (17A: 1987 thriller featuring the same characters as TV's "Californication"?)
• "SISTER ACT" (23A: 1992 comedy featuring the same characters as the film "Secretariat"?)
• "TOTAL RECALL" (39A: 1990 action film featuring the same characters as the film "Collateral"?)
• "DAREDEVIL" (54A: 2003 Marvel movie featuring the same characters as TV's "Riverdale"?)
• "SINGIN' IN THE RAIN" (61A: 1952 musical featuring the same characters as TV's "Stranger Things"?)

Word of the Day: "GOTTI" (22A: Travolta film with a 0% rating on Rotten Tomatoes) —

Gotti is a 2018 American biographical crime film about New York Citymobster John Gotti, directed by Kevin Connolly, and written by Lem Dobbsand Leo Rossi. It stars John Travolta as Gotti, alongside his real-life wife Kelly Preston as Gotti's wife Victoria in her penultimate film. [...] Gotti underperformed both critically and commercially; it grossed just $6 million against a $10 million production budget and received universally negative reviews from critics, who lamented the writing, aesthetics and performances, although its use of makeup and Travolta's performance received some praise. It is one of the few films to hold an approval rating of 0% on the website Rotten Tomatoes. (wikipedia)

• • •

As for the theme, I never saw it. That is, as I was filling in the last themer ("SINGIN' IN THE RAIN"), I thought "wait, there's no revealer clue? ... what is this theme?" Then I noticed that the theme clues had information in them beyond "1987 thriller" and "2003 Marvel movie" (which had been all I'd needed to get the answers). So the first themer clue I actually read all the way through was the last one. I of course knew instantly that "SINGIN' IN THE RAIN" and "Stranger Things" don't share any characters, so I knew instantly that "characters" meant "letters." And that was that. I'm kinda glad I spared myself that revelation until the very end because it meant that as I was solving I at least had some *hope* that a clever revealer was on its way. If I'd seen the "character" pun first thing, well, the puzzle would've been even harder to endure than it was, and it was pretty hard to endure, *in spite* of being *exceedingly* easy to solve. Once again (this is happening an awful lot lately), I couldn't even make it out of the NW corner without thinking "that's a lot of subpar fill for one small corner, I hope it's not all gonna be like this." But it was. ADE to ATT to ITT to OER to OBI to ETE to IDA (crossing IDAHO). And I'm leaving a lot of other sad repeaters off that list. The fill was so complacent. So yesteryear. I don't understand the total lack of emphasis on clean grids at this establishment. The theme is (apparently) everything, and all you have to do is get the fill into plausible "yeah I've seen that before" shape. I will say that the SE corner is 10x better than the NW corner, and "I CAN'T SEE!" is an unexpected answer, lively in its urgency (41A: "It's too dark in here!"). But for the most part, filling this grid in was a dreary exercise. I was writing in answers almost as fast as I could read the clues: still dreary.

There's something depressing about wasting one of the longer answers on a cross-reference that sends the solving clear to some other part of the grid for the other part of the answer, which ends up just being bad short fill they're trying to dress up (in this case, the DEE from DEE / REYNOLDS). That's like someone noticed "Hey, we've got this cruddy DEE sitting here, maybe we can spruce it up by tying it to REYNOLDS?"). But you're not "sprucing" anything, you're just making the solve more clunky and awkward (and not fooling anyone: DEE is DEE is DEE, below average). MAPLE / TREE was also a disappointing crossref. I have to go back to my left to get a second word as obvious and semi-redundant as TREE? Come on.

[MIRIAM!]

Back to the theme. I don't know how hard it is to find movie / TV titles that share "characters," let alone find movie titles you can do that with that also fit symmetrically in a grid. But I don't know if it matters. The concept, done once, sort of merits an "oh, cute." But turned into a theme, the cuteness wears off. Or, in my case, you don't even notice it because the movies are so easy to guess without the theme part. I thought the theme was going to have something with "ACT" at first (after "FATAL ATTRACTION" and "SISTER ACT"). Something about ACTing ... in movies ... I dunno. Anyway that's not where it went. It went to "characters." OK. I think using TV show titles is a glaring inconsistency. If TV shows had also been among the theme answers, *or* if all the titles in the clues had been TV shows, I wouldn't have cared, but as is, it looks like your movie theme just wouldn't work so you cheated and went to TV a few times ("Californication," "Riverdale," "Stranger Things"). I like movies, and I like seeing them in my grid, and I like "The Well-Tempered CLAVIER," so maybe I'll try to take whatever joy that offers me and head into my Wednesday. Thanks for reading. See you tomorrow.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

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Baked Scottish snack / THU 8-11-2022 / Like some church matters / 6 + 6

Constructor: David Tuffs

Relative difficulty: Medium, with an oversized grid (31:23)

THEME: TRANSLATED — Two word phrases, where the first word's translation is the second word

Theme answers:

• [Faultless, biblically]-- WITHOUT SIN ("Sin" means "without" in Spanish)
• [Substitute on TV]-- GUEST HOST ("Host" means "guest" in Czech)
• [What's fatefully "cast" in a quote attributed to Julius Caesar]-- THE DIE ("Die" means "the" in German)
• [Bakery container]-- BREAD PAN ("Pan" means "bread" in Spanish)
• [Outspoken agitator]-- FIRE BRAND ("Brand" means "fire" in Dutch)

Word of the Day: CABIN (The Ingalls' family's little house on the prairie, e.g.) —

Rose Wilder Lane (December 5, 1886 – October 30, 1968) was an American journalist, travel writer, novelist, political theorist and daughter of American writer Laura Ingalls Wilder. Along with two other female writers, Ayn Rand and Isabel Paterson, Lane is noted as one of the most influential advocates of the American libertarian movement.

• • •

Hey beautiful commenters, I'm back for Malaika MWednesday Part 2. (Known to fans as "Thursday.") People seemed to like my "zings" and "dings" yesterday and I liked them too!! So I'll keep that jargon. If you'd like to read this while listening to what I listened to as I wrote it, here is Renee Rapp singing with the voice of an absolute angel.

Renee, I would die for you

My first ding is ARTOO. Upon filling this in, I audibly screeched. I know it was audible because my younger sister was hanging out with me and she said "Is everything okay?" I hate this fill. I hate this fill so much that I feel the need to put in capital letters that I HATE THIS FILL. It is worse than APSE and OLIO which are at least words. It might even be worse than NFLERS. Are you there, Will Shortz? It's me, Malaika. Please stop using this entry. 

Zing time: This theme!! Wow!!!!! I once played around with a theme where one word of an all-English phrase could be translated to a different (e.g. PAINSTAKING --> Stabbing someone with a baguette) but I quickly gave up. This is soooo much more impressive than that, because there's no randomness. Is this a well-known phenomenon, like Kangaroo Words? Does a list of these exist that everyone except me has heard of? Or did the constructor have to just.... think of them? I don't even know where I'd start.

Did y'all mind that there were several across answers (ENLISTEE, MATHLETE, WET NOSES, ADORABLE) that seemed long enough to be theme material? That didn't bother me at all because of how the NYT site will highlight the theme answers. (In fact, it was a zing.) But I know some people solve on paper or with other programs, and it can be hard to keep track of them.

My last ding was the sheer amount of things I don't know. But that's not a ding on whether the puzzle was good, that's just about whether the puzzle was a fun solve for me personally. Things like LAIC [[*steels self for the four commenters that will say "If you are going to solve crosswords, young lady, then you had better get used to the word LAIC!!!!"*]] and REDD and THEO and ODOWD and even BUGBEAR were totally new to me. Plus a tonnnn of words that I learned from puzzles, like ATARI and SOLI and MOT and ADES and ALITO. (And the aforementioned ARTOO.) It would have felt like a slog had I not been having so much fun with the theme.

Bullets:

• [High ball?] for ORB — Does "orb" mean space? Isn't orb just any sphere?
• [The Congressional Black Caucus, for one] for BLOC — I am not a podcast person, but I did really enjoy this podcast that was about (among many things) how the politician Mia Love initially joined the CBC to "infiltrate" it, but ultimately found friends and allies there.
• A TAWA is a cast iron skillet used to cook flatbreads like roti or paratha. I'd never heard this word-- even though my family is Indian, we call this a comal, which is the Spanish word for a similar type of pan.
• I would have loved for a block to be added at square 69 so we could get a BOXCAR Children clue. I must have read fifty of these books when I was younger.

xoxo Malaika

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

P.S. Here is more free constructing rambling from me: When I lay out a grid, I try really, really hard to never have a patch of white that's 5x5 because it's surprisingly difficult to fill elegantly. Ryan McCarty makes grids with wide-open centers that he calls "chasms"-- I don't know that he has any type of quantitative criteria for what counts, but for me, when the center 5x5 section of a grid is all white, that's A Chasm™. It was so wild to see those sections in the corners of today's puzzle-- that means you have to fill that chunky space twice! (Those corners were the last two sections that I solved.)

P.P.S. [[ DON'T read this if you are going to be mean!! ]] This puzzle named seventeen males and three women. That's 15% women, which is on par with the percentage of NYT Thursday puzzles that have been published by women. These are numbers, please do not be mean to me for typing out some numbers.

Males: MATT Damon, MATT Bomer, Frankenstein, Threepio, ARTOO D2, Julius Caesar, BERT, Chris REDD, OTTO, H.P. Lovecraft, ALITO, Romeo, THEO Huxtable, Chris ODOWD, OPIE, Bernie Sanders, ROBIN

Women: Frida Kahlo, Juliet, Elizabeth Warren

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