Architect who lived to be 102 / WED 9-13-23 / Suffix with cyclo- / Little wonder?

Constructor: Guilherme Gilioli

Relative difficulty: I didn't think it was hard... but my time was slow (11:02)

THEME: Paradoxical answers — The response to a question is a classic way to say "I'm not sure," but the way it's phrased actually answers the question correctly

Theme answers:

• Paradoxical answer to "What is 'Golf' in the NATO alphabet?" — GEE I DON'T KNOW ("Golf" is GEE)
• Paradoxical answer to "Can you say what 'nyet' is Russian for?" — NO LET ME THINK ("Nyet" is NO)
• Paradoxical answer to "Where does oil come from?" — WELL YOU GOT ME (Oil comes from a WELL)
• Paradoxical answer to "What isle is located between Ireland and Great Britain?" — MAN THAT'S HARD (It's the Isle of MAN)
  

Word of the Day: JOANNE, clued as Woman in a Lady Gaga song and album title (2016) —

Musically, Joanne is a stripped-down, dance-pop, soft rock and Americana record with country elements, with a focus on Gaga's vocals. Lyrically, the album delves into the theme of family and life's emotions; the death of her aunt, Joanne Stefani Germanotta, deeply influenced the record. [Wiki] 

One of my favorite playlists that I've made is called "songs where the name of the song is the name of a girl" and it features this song. (Along with many others!) You can listen here if you like. --Malaika

• • •

Good morning, squad! It's Malaika here for another Malaika MWednesday. I solved this puzzle on the subway home from my volleyball game, which was so close that it ran 20 minutes long. (We won!) My phone screen was slow to respond to my sweaty fingers, so maybe that explains my slow-ish time.

Actually, looking back over this grid, I'm seeing what may have slowed me down. First of all, there were several short entries that had multiple words, like SPY ON, EAT UP, and ON END which slowed me down. (My brain doesn't start thinking about two-word answers unless the entry is six letters.) Then there was the crossing of WENDS (a word I have never heard before) and WMDS (an abbreviation I'm not familiar with, please don't call me uneducated for being unfamiliar with something, I'm very smart I promise but I don't know War Things) that took me a little while to get.

This type of theme is so impressive to me. It is something I would simply never think of! It's word play, but it's not a pun I don't think.... (I have low tolerance for puns.) It's giving Who's On First vibes. My least favorite of the bunch is the NO themer (using "no" kinda feels too easy) and my favorite is the WELL one. I tried to think of some more but like I said, my brain does not really work like this. My only hope when I make themed puzzles is to use a very straightforward with theme with a cute revealer. What about: [Paradoxical answer to "What's a synonym for smite?"] for DAMN, I DON'T KNOW.

lol that's truly horrible 😭😭

Finally, let's talk about the entry RIPEN, which had a cute little clue to go along with it-- Change from green to red, maybe. The reason we are talking about this is because it gives me an excuse to talk about my tomatoes, which, I don't know if you know by now, but I have been growing on my fire escape all summer. I know what you are thinking! "She's talking about her tomatoes?? Again?? When will it end! Girl, we are here to talk about crosswords! Stay on topic! Please stop foisting pictures of your tomatoes upon us!!!!" To you I say: No <3 Please look:

Cheesy grits (Serious Eats recipe) topped with scallions, homemade chimichurri sauce, bacon, and blistered cherry tomatoes

I think that's all my rambling for now. Bullets below!!

Bullets:

• [Start or end for Alexa?] for SCHWA — This is a hard clue, because if you don't know what a SCHWA is then you simply have no hope. It's the linguistic term for the sort of "uh" sound that A's sometimes make in English, like in the name "Alexa." I only know about SCHWAs from the excellent teen novel The Schwa was Here. I like it because it has a gentle twinge of sci-fi, but it's basically just a realistic fiction book. Buy it as a present for your 12 yr old friends and relatives!
• [Little wonder?] for ATOM — I don't understand this... please explain to me. I get that ATOMs are little, but that's all. Are they... wondrous?? Not to me lol.
• [Overhead light?] for HALO — Very good clue 👍
• [London transport, with "the"] for TUBE — I am going to London (and Florence and Rome) tomorrow and am so excited I can hardly breathe. Please let me know if you have visited these places and if you had favorite things you did there!
• [Where two barrel vaults intersect, in architecture] for GROIN — Very funny to me that they went with a tame definition here when five entries earlier we had THONG, but I guess they like to mix it up!

xoxo Malaika

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Morty's cartoon pal / THU 7-27-23 / Root in potpourri / Bridge columnist Charles / Actor Werner of Jules and Jim / Designation that's cheaper than vintage usually / Locale of the house depicted in American Gothic / Rea ___ graphic designer who created The New Yorker's typeface and mascot / Showcase Showdown guesstimate / Her first word was Bart

Constructor: Guilherme Gilioli

Relative difficulty: Easy

THEME: addition — four Across answers are clued as equations, where the Across answer in question is the sum of the two answers that precede it in its row: 

Theme answers:

• CORE = EPIC + CENTER (i.e. "epicenter") (19A: 17-Across + 18-Across = 19-Across)
• VERSE = LIME + RICK (i.e. "limerick") (35A: 32-Across + 33-Across = 35-Across)
• FIND = DISCO + VERY (i.e. "discovery") (43A: 40-Across + 42-Across = 43-Across)
• BIND = CONS + TRAIN (i.e. "constrain") (59A: 56-Across + 57-Across = 59-Across)

Word of the Day: Charles GOREN (37D: Bridge columnist Charles) —

Charles Henry Goren (March 4, 1901 – April 3, 1991) was an American bridge player and writer who significantly developed and popularized the game. He was the leading American bridge personality in the 1950s and 1960s – or 1940s and 1950s, as "Mr. Bridge" – as Ely Culbertson had been in the 1930s. Culbertson, Goren, and Harold Vanderbilt were the three people named when The Bridge World inaugurated a bridge "hall of fame" in 1964 and they were made founding members of the ACBL Hall of Fame in 1995.

According to New York Times bridge columnist Alan Truscott, more than 10 million copies of Goren's books were sold. Among them, Point-Count Bidding (1949) "pushed the great mass of bridge players into abandoning Ely Culbertson's clumsy and inaccurate honor-trick method of valuation."

Goren's widely syndicated newspaper column "Goren on Bridge" first appeared in the Chicago Tribune August 30 1944, p.15. (wikipedia)

• • •

I'm writing at a table in the main room of the vacation house ("The Panorama House" in Grand Marais, look it up!). My housemates are playing all kinds of music, loudly, currently "Uptown Girl" by Billy Joel, so it's pretty weird in here right now. Not exactly the best writing conditions. Better than earlier, when they were playing Spin Doctors and Blues Traveler, worse than when they were playing Abba and Pet Shop Boys. Still, I am used to writing in total silence, in the dead of morning, so 10pm party time is throwing me off a little. I'll try to soldier on. I was able to solve this puzzle, under similar conditions, very easily.  Very very easily, the second day in a row where the puzzle didn't really seem to be trying to give me ... anything. The theme is a math-ish theme that definitely came as a surprise, when it finally came, but ultimately it felt slight. Only really involves four short answers, even if it does force us to reevaluate the addends in the equations (i.e. the other short answers in the same row as the equation-clued answers). Definitely got an "oh, cute" out of me, and maybe that's enough. But mainly it felt like a blandish themeless, which is not at all what I look forward to on a Thursday. Now my friends are playing Abba again, "Knowing Me, Knowing You," and I'm kind of bopping in my chair and trying hard to concentrate on this puzzle. OK, that song's over now ... but now it's "Jive Talkin'," so I'm back to bopping. It's going to continue like this. I won't give you any more specifics, but just ... imagine. Anyway, the puzzle is OK, but remedial, once again.

The ugliest part, for me, wasn't the theme (which worked just fine); it was the proper noun pile-up near the middle of the grid. Just a grim name mash-up. EDHARRIS is fine, but he slams into GOREN and IRVIN (!?!), who crashes through RICK, who severs OSKAR. It all felt pretty awful. I knew two of these names, kinda sorta remembered another, but then OSKAR and IRVIN were complete and utter ????? Now, as I've said, the puzzle was, overall, a piece of cake, but even so, this name-iness was unpleasant. Too trivia dense, too know-it-or-you-don't, too proper nouny. Too too. Grease is the word, is the word, that you heard, sorry, the music's still playing and it's hard to tune out. 

I wanted LACTASE to be LACTOSE but the latter is a sugar and the clue wanted an enzyme, so ... fine (4D: Enzyme in dairy pills) (no one in this house knows what a "dairy pill" is ... why would you take a "dairy pill"?) (we just figured out that it's just a "lactose intolerance pill"; "dairy pill" is a weird, misleading formulation that none of us has heard of). Not a great word, but a word nonetheless. UPC CODE (10D: Bars for checking people out) is awful since the "C" in UPC stands for ... CODE. Somebody call the Department of Redundancy Department. Not sure why this strikes me as worse than "PIN NUMBER," but it does. Haven't seen ORRIS in a million years and I hope it's a million more years til the next time (29D: Root in potpourri). Extreme crossword vibes. (Update: "Cracklin' Rosie" by Neil Diamond ... '70s flashbacks ... my dad ... earth tones ...). I had some PIE tonight (from Betty's Pies, Northern Minnesota's pie mecca). If there's more to say about this thing, I'm sure you'll say it in the comments. Peace out!  

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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Display of mentalism / TUE 12-21-21 / Ingredient in perfume and potpourri / Long thin strip used in building construction / Developer of the game Breakout / B or C of the Spice Girls

Constructor: Guilherme Gilioli

Relative difficulty: Medium-Challenging (that one part in the SW really slows things down ... the rest is very easy)

THEME: SPOON-BENDING (48A: Display of mentalism ... or a hit to this puzzle's shaded squares) — the word "spoon" appears "bent" five times (see grid, above)

Word of the Day: SPLINE (46D: Long, thin strip used in building construction) —

noun

1. 1. 

   a rectangular key fitting into grooves in the hub and shaft of a wheel, especially one formed integrally with the shaft which allows movement of the wheel on the shaft.
2. 2. 

   a slat. (google)

• • •

The problem with this theme is that it doesn't yield any interesting answers. In fact, it ends up compromising the fill so badly that it's directly responsible for what is clearly the roughest, weirdest, most un-Tuesdayish part of the grid: ORRIS ROOT (!?) alongside SPLINE (!?!?!?!?!). The "spoons" are clearly to blame for that travesty. I mean, look at the rest of the grid ... and then look at ORRIS ROOT / SPLINE. Back to the rest of the grid ... back to ORRIS ROOT / SPLINE. You see how those two adjacent words are on a completely different planet, familiarity-wise, from everything else in the grid. Those are words you only go to out of desperation. And here they're *adjacent*—on a Tuesday, when everything should be reasonably smooth, and somewhat obscure terms are OK within reason, but not right up next to each other like this. It was like the rest of the puzzle was a 1/5 difficulty and the ORRIS ROOT / SPLINE part was 4/5. It was made somewhat more difficult by the KRISHNA crossing, which had a (clever) bear of a clue (45A: Hare ___). I wrote in BRAINED! But back to the "spoons"—there they are. And they do "bend." But not in any kind of way that is going to add enjoyment to the solving experience. Also, SPOON-BENDING is not a "display of mentalism," it's a con. 

The plural of "elk" is ELK. The ELKS are members of a fraternal order (you used to see them in the crossword, in days of yore, as the BPOE). There's NE'ER any reason to clue ELKS as a plural of the animal. He who does so ERRS (I mention NE'ER and ERRS because they compound the unloveliness of ELKS corner). YETTO is among the ugliest partials I've ever seen. Looks like I have my friend Mike Nothnagel to blame for introducing that one into the NYTXW and from there into the crossword wordlist ecosystem. But that was ten years ago, and it's only appeared one time between then and today. Here are some alternatives. They're not all great, but they're all YETTO-free, and that ain't nothin':

I see now that some of these have duplications elsewhere in the grid (SON, YEN), but, I dunno, make it work. 

What else? Oh, I wrote NOTABLY before NOTEDLY, mostly because I can't imagine saying NOTEDLY, ever (29A: With special importance). That's all I have to say about this puzzle. Good day.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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