Sink-or-swim competition? / TUES 4-28-26 / Part of a piano or loom / Kid-lit girl with a blueberry pail / Greek goddess of the earth / Some cantina fare

Hello, everyone, it’s Clare for the last Tuesday of April! Hope everyone has been enjoying it, as spring has (mostly) sprung, and we’re yet to get the most stifling heat possible. I got to hike yesterday with my pup midday without dying from the heat. She loved it and got exhausted and absolutely filthy and tried to refuse a bath. I’m crossing my fingers for my Penguins (now down just 2-3 in the series against the hated Flyers) and have been going to Washington Spirit NWSL games here in DC. I also started watching the F1 documentary on Netflix and have gotten very invested in the outcome of this season, so I may be watching come racetime here in the US in a few days. Not a whole lot else going on with me… but my sister is currently on day three of walking the Camino de Santiago via el Camino Francés (French Way). She’ll be walking about 15 miles a day for over 30 days to reach Santiago, Spain. So join me in wishing her a Buen Camino! 

Anywho, on to the puzzle…

Constructor: Hal Moore

Relative difficulty: Average for a Tuesday

THEME: SEEN AND NOT HEARD (58A: Like children, ideally, in an old adage … or a hint to a four-letter word hidden in 17-, 32- and 40-Across) — The word “seen” can be, well, seen in each of the three theme answers but isn’t pronounced in the phrases 

Theme answers:

• TIES UP LOOSE ENDS (17A: Handles a few unresolved issues)
• CLOSE ENOUGH (32A: Not perfect, but acceptable) 
• MISE EN PLACE (40A: Station set up in a kitchen)

Word of the Day: EDNA (57D: ___ Lewis, the "Grande Dame of Southern Cooking") —

Edna Regina Lewis (April 13, 1916 – February 13, 2006) was a renowned American chef, teacher, and author who helped refine the American view of Southern cooking. She championed the use of fresh, in-season ingredients and characterized Southern food as fried chicken (pan-, not deep-fried), pork, and fresh vegetables – most especially greens. She wrote and co-wrote four books, which covered Southern cooking and life in a small community of freed slaves and their descendants, including The Taste of Country Cooking and In Pursuit of Flavor… In 1979, Craig Claiborne of The New York Times wrote The Taste of Country Cooking "may well be the most entertaining regional cookbook in America". Food & Wine in 2025 said it was "widely regarded as one of the most important cookbooks of the 20th century." (Wiki)

• • •

Clever enough theme for a Tuesday puzzle, for which your enjoyment may have depended on how well you know — or at least how quickly you could get — MISE EN PLACE (40A). I know the phrase well, but it did take me a little bit to see it just because it looks so horrible (and confusing) when written out like MISEENPLACE. I think I had MISEExPxxx and just couldn’t see it. Luckily, the downs weren’t too hard, but I expect some people might’ve felt stuck there. The other theme answers were fine. That you don’t hear “seen” pronounced in any of the theme answers is interesting and adds a dimension to the NOT HEARD part of the revealer. I suspect SEEN could have appeared in any number of possible answers, though I may be overstating the range of potential theme answers. I’d always thought of the phrase as SEEN but NOT HEARD, though a Google search tells me the phrases are interchangeable. Regardless, while the theme didn’t help with the solve, the revealer was nice. 

There just weren’t a lot of answers that popped, which made the puzzle feel somewhat boring. My favorite was definitely WATER POLO (15A: Sink-or-swim competition?), and I love the use of TEA (21A: Gossip, slangily) to describe gossip. PAPAYAS (47A: Ingredients in some tropical smoothies) is fun. And I suppose CONTINUITY (10D: Script supervisor's concern) is a good long word. But I can’t drum up excitement for AXIS POWERS (29D: Coalition that opposed the Allies in W.W. II) or CANST (43D: "___ thou not minister to a mind diseased …?": Macbeth) or ARREAR (48D: Overdue debt) or GRAMMAR (27A: Linguist's concern) or… Looking back, it was hard to find much to describe about the non-theme answers because it all blended together in one ball of meh in my head. 

I didn’t like how vague 24A: Welcome at the door, say was. I originally had “let in” and then “see in,” and it turned out to be ASK IN. YES I AM as 4D: Emphatic confirmation doesn’t seem to fit because it isn't inherently an emphatic phrase. Phrases like ADD TO (22A: Build on) and AT IT (36A: Bickering) also don't inspire much interest. 

There seemed to be more proper nouns than usual, such as: SOSA, KROC, RUN DMC, OPI, ROSA, IAGO , PEETE, SAGAN, and EDNA. I learned today that Calvin PEETE and Rodney PEETE (49D) were cousins. The puzzle also had a sort of mini theme with words with their origin in another country: PAOLO, CIAO, TACOS, PESOS, SEÑOR, SERAPE, MISE EN PLACE, LOX, TRE, and SUNNI.

Misc.:

• I might’ve gotten the most excited today over SAL (33D: Kid-lit girl with a blueberry pail) in the puzzle. I hadn’t thought of “Blueberries for Sal” in so many years, but that was one of my favorite books growing up. 
• Seeing LOX (31A: Bagel topping) in the puzzle reminds me of how many times I’ve gone to a bagel place near me in DC called Call Your Mother. I moved just a few minutes closer to it, but I’ve already gone probably four times in the last few weeks to get a bagel with cream cheese, capers, and LOX. They’re so delicious. 
• I used to use OPI (5A: Nail polish brand) nail polish all the time. Then I started rock climbing, and my nails would chip after climbing just once. So I’ve barely had my nails painted at all in years. 
• For National Independent Bookstore Day this past Saturday, I went to a couple local bookstores and managed to snag a print from a special edition Inciardi print. The machine to get the print requires four quarters, and when I put mine in at one point, I realized it wasn’t working because I was trying it with three quarters and one PESO (46A: Coins of Cuba) I apparently brought back with me from Mexico. Oops! I also got the book “Lost Lambs” by Madeline Cash, which comes highly recommended from my sister, and “Weavingshaw” by Heba Al-Wasity, a fantasy book I’m already halfway into and loving! 
• In other very important news, BTS is now on tour!! I’m counting down the days until I get to see them in Baltimore in August and get to see something like this. 
• I’m feeling a little ACHY (1A: Sore) after my hike yesterday. And Red might be, too, after our many miles…
• 

(and a bonus

(a bonus pic from when Red wanted some of my happy hour TACOS (8A))

And that's all from me, folks! Have a great month of May.

Signed, Clare Carroll, who's always both seen and heard :)

[Follow Rex Parker on BlueSky and Facebook and Letterboxd]
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Food item, quaintly / WED 7-10-24 / Device identifier, in computing / Tuscan red wines / Three-week bike race / Literature Nobelist born in French Algeria / Hard patterns to break / Box filled with bags / Prez's proxy

Constructor: Hal Moore

Relative difficulty: Medium

THEME: Tour de France? I think? — Bunch of bicycle race terms, as well as a couple of mountain ranges (on diagonals, in circled squares), which appear to be related to the Tour de France. I guess it's a long race up mountains, and so it's grueling, and so that's why the (punny) revealer is VICIOUS CYCLES (40A: Hard patterns to break ... or a punny description of the climbs up the circled letters):

Theme answers:

• TIME TRIAL (8D: Segment of this puzzle's race)
• CHAMPS-ELYSÉES (16D: Typical ending point for this puzzle's race)
• GRAND TOUR (48A: Three-week bike race, such as the one featured in this puzzle)

Mountain ranges:

• ALPS 
• PYRENEES

Word of the Day: IP ADDRESS (3D: Device identifier, in computing) —

An Internet Protocol address (IP address) is a numerical label such as 192.0.2.1 that is assigned to a device connected to a computer network that uses the Internet Protocol for communication. IP addresses serve two main functions: network interface identification, and location addressing.

Internet Protocol version 4 (IPv4) defines an IP address as a 32-bit number. However, because of the growth of the Internet and the depletion of available IPv4 addresses, a new version of IP (IPv6), using 128 bits for the IP address, was standardized in 1998. IPv6 deployment has been ongoing since the mid-2000s. [...] The IP address space is managed globally by the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA), and by five regional Internet registries(RIRs) responsible in their designated territories for assignment to local Internet registries, such as Internet service providers (ISPs), and other end users. IPv4 addresses were distributed by IANA to the RIRs in blocks of approximately 16.8 million addresses each, but have been exhausted at the IANA level since 2011. Only one of the RIRs still has a supply for local assignments in Africa. Some IPv4 addresses are reserved for private networks and are not globally unique.

Network administrators assign an IP address to each device connected to a network. Such assignments may be on a static (fixed or permanent) or dynamic basis, depending on network practices and software features. Some jurisdictions consider IP addresses to be personal data. (wikipedia)

• • •

[Best Director, Cannes 2024: Miguel GOMES] 

If it's not TOUR DE FRANCE, then I really don't know what we're talking about, cycling-wise. TIME TRIAL? Did not know that a "trial" was just a leg of the race. GRAND TOUR? That's something young rich guys take through Europe in order to become "cultured" or whatever. A longish European voyage. See the great art and architecture, etc. It was a thing. A "finishing school for young aristocrats." I associate it with Henry James, for some reason. But a cycling term? I mean, if you say so, OK, but it's bizarre not to have the words "DE" or "FRANCE" in this puzzle, and to have the revealer, instead, be this punny whatever it is. The theme answers feel arbitrary. That is, they seem like a random bunch of Tour de France-related terms, but they appear to be picked solely because they would fit symmetrically in this grid. It's not a tight set. And the mountains, yeesh. The problem here is location and proportion, which is to say, those ranges are neither oriented toward one another that way on a map (unless the Alps moved to the NW of the Pyrenees and I didn't hear about it), nor do they appear to scale in this grid (last I checked, the Alps were the much bigger range). The mountain ranges do convey ... slope, I'll give them that. But all in all this feels like a first draft, a valiant attempt to get a concept down on paper, but with none of the kinks worked out. It's trying to do a lot, but it's a mess. 

The pun also didn't quite land for me. Are "bike rides" called "cycles" in bike jargon? "That was a good cycle today, team!" This puzzle is asking me to know cycling terminology that ... well, as I say, I know the term TOUR DE FRANCE, and after that, my cycling vocabulary gets very wobbly. Yellow jersey, that's a thing, right? Palme d'Or? No, that's Cannes. Oh well. I'm sure cycling enthusiasts felt seen, and that's nice for them.  There were some high points (!) in this puzzle's fill, specifically STEP CLASS, SAT SHIVA, and Cloris LEACHMAN (34D: Cloris ___, Emmy-winning actress on "The Mary Tyler Moore Show"), who is the best. Just the best. In everything she ever did. From the opening scenes of Kiss Me, Deadly (1955!) to her Academy Award-winning performance in The Last Picture Show, to Mary Tyler Moore, she was never not great. Underrated, undercelebrated, legitimately great. Eight Emmys! Eight! With 22 nominations! Those are Julia Louis-Dreyfus numbers! I think I showed this clip from MTM before, but I don't care; her total commitment to this totally non-plot-related performance, all while Mary and Rhoda are half-ignoring her and half-looking-at-her-like-she's-nuts... it floored me. I have watched it too many times to count.

There's also this (her line readings, her gestures, every little thing, right on the money):

But after LEACHMAN and a few other answers, the fill quality drops off, sometimes precipitously. I've got two sections of my print-out that are particularly ink-covered today. The first is EELED ADE NED. Actually, ADE and NED are pretty innocent, but when you hang out with a (very) bad element like EELED, well, you're bound to be implicated. EELED! In the olden days, you used to have to be familiar with so much eel terminology. I know way more eel vocabulary than I do Tour de France vocabulary. Did you know that you catch eels in an EELPOT and that eeling is also referred to as "sniggling"!? If you solved puzzles before, say, 2010, then you definitely do know those things. EEL(S) EELING EELER(S) EELED EELPOT ... it's all redolent of ... a time. Bygone. Yore. (This article on glass eel fishing in Maine appeared in The New Yorker just last month and is actually pretty fascinating ...  though I don't think you'll find "EELED" or "EELPOT" or "sniggling" anywhere in it)

Hey, are EELS considered a VIAND? (40D: Food item, quaintly) (Segue!). Because I like EELED and VIAND about the same amount (i.e. naught, no amount, none). Also TINA'S in the ... possessive? ... not familiar to me (46A: "Tony n' ___ Wedding" (Off Broadway hit)). This is the same area of the puzzle with VICIOUS and GRAND, both theme answer parts that were not intuitive to me at all (CYCLES and TOUR, sure, those made sense, but the words that came before them, ????). And then running through (and near) alllll that, the VIAND and Tina and the front ends of the themers, was TEA CADDY (32D: Box filled with bags). Sigh. TEA CADDY. It's a thing, I know, but you know what else is a thing, a thing that is also much more "box"-like than a "CADDY"? A damned TEA CHEST, that's what! CHEST, also five letters, also starts with "C," bah humbug to CADDY. So anyway .... yeah, that section was a combination of ugly and difficult. As for the rest of the puzzle—besides the theme, I don't really remember it. See you next time.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld 

P.S. best error of the day was my complete misparsing of the answer at 3D: Device identifier, in computing. I had IPAD up front and assumed that I was looking for some kind of IPAD equivalent to the "Find My iPhone" app. And then I ended up with an IPAD [space] DRESS and wondered if maybe people were "dressing" their IPADs (!?) and that's how they "identified" them??? Anyway, the IPAD DRESS—there's a money-making idea for some enterprising soul. You're welcome. 

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

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Manet called him the painter of painters / FRI 5-20-22 / A sumo wrestler's is called a mawashi / Velvet-voiced Mel / Status on a conservationist's "Red List" / Italian nickname that omits Al- / Only one-word country that contains all five vowels / Astronomer Thomas for whom a comet is named

Constructor: Hal Moore

Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium

THEME: none 

Word of the Day: GONZO journalism (44D: Highly exaggerated and subjective, as journalism) —

Gonzo journalism is a style of journalism that is written without claims of objectivity, often including the reporter as part of the story using a first-person narrative. The word "gonzo" is believed to have been first used in 1970 to describe an article about the Kentucky Derby by Hunter S. Thompson, who popularized the style. It is an energetic first-person participatory writing style in which the author is a protagonist, and it draws its power from a combination of social critique and self-satire. It has since been applied to other subjective artistic endeavors.

Gonzo journalism involves an approach to accuracy that concerns the reporting of personal experiences and emotions, in contrast to traditional journalism, which favors a detached style and relies on facts or quotations that can be verified by third parties. Gonzo journalism disregards the strictly-edited product once favored by newspaper media and strives for a more personal approach; the personality of a piece is as important as the event or actual subject of the piece. Use of sarcasm, humor, exaggeration, and profanity is common.

Thompson, who was among the forefathers of the New Journalism movement, said in the February 15, 1973, issue of Rolling Stone, "If I'd written the truth I knew for the past ten years, about 600 people—including me—would be rotting in prison cells from Rio to Seattle today. Absolute truth is a very rare and dangerous commodity in the context of professional journalism." (wikipedia)

• • •

[Las Meninas (1656)]

This one was a bell curve experience, or something close to it. Started and ended in pretty bad places, but it did have a kind of high point toward the middle, when all the "Z"s and "Q"s got involved (OK just the one "Q," but one "Q" goes a long way). I'm never that impressed by Scrabbly letters in a grid, but in this case those letters just happened to be in the most interesting fill. But back to the beginning—this one had real trouble getting off the ground. OMNI OLD MOOS ABUT UTERO are all tolerable if there's gonna be some kind of long-answer payoff, and while LOIN CLOTH was promising (-ish), INNUMERATE is such a dull technical term that I couldn't even retrieve it from my brain storage house, and DOGNAPPER, yeesh, way to start things off on a depressing, miserable note (16A: Spot remover?). And with a cutesy "?" clue? You're really trying to make dognapping cute?. I love dogs. Put all the dog stuff you can think of in your puzzles, all the dog breeds and toys and activities—just don't hurt them. Hurt the dog and I am out. Your puzzle is no longer my friend. THREATENED and PRESCIENT are solid but offer nothing in the way of sizzle, which a Friday puzzle always needs, and which this puzzle definitely needed after that clunky downer of a beginning. But then, as I say, things pick up. Once we get inside the SUPERSONIC / CURRY FAVOR sector, it's like we've entered a completely different puzzle. Lots of bounce. A RIFF here, a GONZO there, and then the real knockout combination of MOZAMBIQUE and VELAZQUEZ. Maybe "knockout" is an exaggeration, but they're a very strong pair. I really want to reach into this section, grab DOGMATA, and throw it bodily from the puzzle, so uncharacteristically unpleasant is it (43A: Doctrines). There's DOGMA, and there's STIGMATA, but DOGMATA, pfffffft. Raspberries. Still, though, the longer answers here made me forget about DOGMATA pretty quickly. Such is the power of great marquee fill. Don't waste it!

Once you leave the SUPERSONIC / CURRY FAVOR quadrant, though, things once again go to seed. I kinda like seeing crosswordese Hall-of-Famer (Hall of "Fame"-er?) IRENE CARA here in her full-name form, but the other two longer answers of the SW really bring the room down. SOFT TARGET just makes me think of carnage. Of non-combatants dying in large numbers. Here's the opening line of the wikipedia entry for "soft target":

A "soft target" is a person, thing, or location that is easily accessible to the general public and relatively unprotected, making it vulnerable to military or terrorist attack.

The term makes me think of human beings shot or blown to pieces. Even under normal circumstances, I'm not gonna like this answer, but Ukraine + Buffalo makes it a very hard "No" at the moment. The puzzle finally peters out, fittingly, at the very bottom, or nadir, of the grid, as we hover for a second over SURF THE ___, wondering what dated '90s term for The World Wide Web is going to go here. Web? Net? Web? Net? "Web" seems like the better option, but neither one is gonna brighten your day. And so NET lands with a thud, and we round things off with a crosswordese cross of the highest order, where ESTA meets NENA. 

Speaking of crosswordese, I don't particularly like this trend of dressing ugly or aggressively common fill up in newish technical or trivial clothing. ABRA will never be good. Better to not put it in the grid at all then to try to convince me it's a Pokémon (36A: Pokémon that ultimately evolves into Alakazam). And NTH is NTH is NTH. Making it some "calculus concept" adds about as much joy to the grid as INNUMERATE did (45A: ___-term test for divergence (calculus concept)). I am, however, highly in favor of really getting GONZO with your crosswordese clues, like the clue for OAHU today (23A: U.S. locale that, when said quickly, sounds like a cheer). Make me see the word in a weird new light! Make me whisper-shout the word as I'm solving! Wahoo! The clue here basically says "yeah, you've seen this one a million times before, but we're gonna have some fun with it." I appreciate that. [Stock exchange?] for MOOS, also good. Overall, this puzzle could've used more verve. I did enjoy roughly one third of it, though. See you tomorrow.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

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Onetime Mughal capital / SAT 12-11-21 / Food often served with plastic grass / 1991 platinum debut album by a female singer / Small-batch publication / Grp. with much discussed amateurism rules

Constructor: Hal Moore

Relative difficulty: Easy

THEME: none 

Word of the Day: ERIKA Alexander (49D: Actress Alexander of "Get Out") —

Erika Rose Alexander (born November 19, 1969) is an American actress, writer, producer, entrepreneur and activist best known for her roles as Pam Tucker on the NBC sitcom The Cosby Show (1990–1992), and Maxine Shaw on the FOX sitcom Living Single (1993–1998). She has won numerous awards for her work on Living Single, including two NAACP Image Awards for Outstanding Actress in a Comedy Series. Her film credits include The Long Walk Home (1990), 30 Years to Life (2001), Déjà Vu (2006) and Get Out (2017). (wikipedia)

• • •

Well this one was a journey. On the first part of the journey, I ran into three "Q"s on a diagonal and thought, "Oh ... no ... what fresh hell is this?" I braced myself for some kind of high-value Scrabble tile indulge-a-thon, where "Z"s and "J"s get splattered around the grid in either symmetrical or random ways, all to the massive and inevitable detriment of fill quality. Getting cute with the "Q"s set off loud alarm bells, but, at least initially, the fill was holding up, so I took a deep breath and pressed forward ... and it didn't take long to realize that all my fears had been needless. I was put at ease pretty quickly with a beautiful grid-spanner descending the west side of the grid:

And after I worked a lot of the crosses and put a lot of the shorter stuff together, all I saw was cleanness. Instead of descending into awkward darkness, this one floated up, at least a little if not well above average NYT grid quality. Everything was just working, and not just working, but bouncy. Tasty. Good like a CHEAP QUESADILLA from a RAD TAQUERIA. Or a RAD QUESADILLA from a CHEAP TAQUERIA. One of those. The moral of the story is, set your expectations to "Dread" and then you too can occasionally get the rush of being pleasantly surprised! 

The grid is really open, so there's nowhere to get well and truly stuck, and lots of opportunities to get toeholds from 3- 4- and 5-letter answers (I always try to attack the short stuff on late-week puzzles before I ever even look at the long stuff). As I said above, the "Q"s in this one gave me some concern about where the puzzle was headed aesthetically, but they proved to be a launching pad, making those long Downs very easy to get and thus sending me sailing into the middle and bottom of the grid, right from the jump. Not only is the grid not packed with odd, whimsical "J" and "Z" arrangements, but the "Q"s end up being really the only place you see those Scrabbly letters flaunting themselves ostentatiously. There's one "Z" there in the EUROZONE ZINE ("Siri, what is the world's most boring ZINE?"), and a couple of stray "K"s, but otherwise we stay in the realm of colorful fill with relatively common letters. PENCIL SHARPENER, RUMOR MILL, MELATONIN, all winners. HI-TOP FADES was a fantastic way to close things out—really lucky that that was my final long Down, because it put an emphatic "hell yeah!" exclamation point on a puzzle that I thought was gonna plod and sag. I nearly spun out at the end when I wrote in LENIENCE rather than LENIENCY, but luckily I checked the cross instead of just looking at ETD and being satisfied (60D: Paycheck abbr. = YTD). Very pleased with this one. Taste of Friday's puzzle, absolutely gone from my mouth. All I taste now is QUESADILLA. It's nice. 

Other things:

• 23A: Promulgate (ISSUE) — I guess they both mean "send forth" or "put out," but I think of "promulgate" as something you do with an idea generally and ISSUE as something you do more as a discrete act ... I'm not explaining this well, but they feel somehow not quite lined up. But close enough, I suppose.
• 16A: "Rumors are carried by ___, spread by fools and accepted by idiots" (old saying) ("HATERS") — no, sorry, I challenge. You are not going to convince me that "HATERS" is "old." "Old saying" is such a hedge. Someone said it, or they didn't. Give me an actual quotation or get lost. How "old"? What is "old" here? 2014? "In my day, we had a saying ... 'HATERS gonna hate'"—me in forty years to a bunch of befuddled children at some kind of family gathering, if those still exist, probably
• 
  53D: Card games are played in it (MLB) — sometimes it pays to do a lot of puzzles, particularly hard ones—I just saw a variant of this clue last night, as I was solving my way through a puzzle backlog of titanic proportions. It was a "Fireball" crossword, I think. The answer was MLBGAME and this "Card" misdirection was part of the shenanigans ("Card" being short for (St. Louis) Cardinal, and MLB standing for "Major League Baseball," of course).
• 24D: Tender union? (EUROZONE) — I get that they share a currency in that "zone," and so they have a "union" of (legal) "tender," but what is "tender union" even punning on? What's the wordplay? Is it supposed to evoke marriage or something? When I google it in quotation marks, the first hit is the NYT's own puzzle site. That doesn't suggest that the phrase has much ... currency.
• 51D: Name for a Dalmatian (OREO) — first I'm hearing of this, but if you say so
• 25A: Food often served with plastic grass (SUSHI) — yesterday, CHIRASHI; today, SUSHI. It's a raw fish extravaganza! Tasty! Doesn't exactly *go* with my mole chicken QUESADILLA, but whatever, I'll make do.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

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Pagliacci baritone / WED 4-28-21 / One greeting others with the shaka sign / Two concentric circles on golf scorecard

Constructor: Hal Moore

Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium

THEME: OPEN-AND-SHUT CASE (58A: Easy-to-resolve situation ... or a hint to the progression found in 20-, 23- 43-, 46- and 58-Across) — the letter string "CASE" moves, over the course of five theme answers, from the front of the answers to the back of the answer; so "CASE" "opens" the first answer, "shuts" the last answer, and I guess does both (?) in the middle answers:

Theme answers:

• "CASEY AT THE BAT" (20A: Poem subtitled "A Ballad of the Republic Sung in the Year 1888")
• CAST ASIDE (23A: Discard)
• CANADA GEESE (43A: Some winter travelers to the U.S.)
• "CHECK, PLEASE!" (46A: Restaurant request)
• OPEN-AND-SHUT CASE 

Word of the Day: shaka sign (27A: One greeting others with the shaka sign = SURFER) —

The shaka sign, sometimes known as "hang loose", is a gesture of friendly intent often associated with Hawaii and surf culture. It consists of extending the thumb and smallest finger while holding the three middle fingers curled, and gesturing in salutation while presenting the front or back of the hand; the hand may be rotated back and forth for emphasis. While the shaka sign has spread internationally from its Hawaiian cultural roots to surf culture and beyond, the hand gesture also bears a variety of meaning in different contexts and regions of the world. [...] The word shaka is also used as an interjection expressing approval, which may predate its use for the shaka sign. According to The Oxford English Dictionary the origin of the word is uncertain, but it may come from Japanese, where it is a byname for the Buddha. (wikipedia)

• • •

I like the grid, with its mirror symmetry, and I like the theme answer arrangement, with one stack of two followed by another stack of two. Reminds me of a Big Mac for some reason, which has nothing to do with the theme, but whatever. It's an interesting design, for sure. I don't think the theme quite works. It seems at odds with itself. When I was done, I thought, "oh, so the letters CASE both 'open' and 'shut' the answers, cool." But then I read the revealer clue and looked at the grid more closely, and that's not what's happening. Instead CASE moves, methodically, from the back to the front of the themers. I think the puzzle thinks this is a bonus feature, but for me, it just confuses matters. Makes the theme conceptually muddy. In one case (!), CASE opens an answer. In one case (!!), CASE shuts an answer ... the others are stuck in between, which ... if *all* the answers had been in-betweeners, that would've made sense to me (this is what I originally thought was happening). CASE "opens and shuts" its answer, great. That's what's happening with CAST ASIDE, CANADA GEESE, and CHECK, PLEASE. Conversely, if the themers were all answer pairs where CASE "opened" (in one case) and "shut" (in the other) the answer, that would've made sense too. But the moving of CASE along, one letter at a time, from the front to the back of themers, that doesn't have anything to do with opening or shutting, unless (and this is a stretch), you imagine the movement of CASE across the themers is some kind of visual representation of a door being shut (i.e. it's open ... and then when you close it, it has to swing across an arc ... and maybe the middle themers are the arc?). Conceptually this would have worked if all the answers had had a split CASE or none of them had. In the end, it's certainly interesting, but it just doesn't Snap!

And the fill, oh my, it's pretty crusty and rough and unpleasant (with the twin pillars NO ACCIDENT and FIRE ESCAPE being notable exceptions). At various points I thought the puzzle was trolling me, so comically crosswordesey were its crosses: E'ER x/w ERR? EKE x/w IKE? AREA x/w ARIA!?!? Gruesome. I mean, almost funny if the constructor ended up winning some kind of bar bet about how much of this garbage crossing stuff he could pull off, but otherwise, not that funny. And then there's TONIO x/w TOE AT (What did the log-splitter say after he missed the log? "Hey, where's my TOE AT!?"). There's no real reason so much of this short fill should be so tedious. The SW corner is a scrapheap of the most common stuff (none of it hugely objectionable, but all in a pile ... it smells of mothballs, for sure). 

Not much difficulty today. At one time, TONIO would've caused trouble, but I managed to memory-bank it at some point after seeing it one too many times in crosswords. I know the "hang ten" sign very well, but had no idea it was called a "shaka sign" (27A). That clue on "CASEY AT THE BAT" was tough (20A: Poem subtitled "A Ballad of the Republic Sung in the Year 1888"); I'm at least vaguely familiar with every word of that poem, having read it or heard it recited many times, but apparently I never saw or heard the subtitle, which does not appear to have anything to do with baseball. This puzzle could've used a little more of that kind of difficulty, perhaps, but it was still Wednesdayish enough. 

See you tomorrow.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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Hearst mag founded in 1886 / FRI 7-3-20 / Pitcher's push-off point / De y de sombra isabel allende novel / Singles player in 1950s

Constructor: Hal Moore

Relative difficulty: Easy (4:16)

THEME: none

Word of the Day: "De AMOR y de Sombra" (Isabel Allende novel) (50D) —

Of Love and Shadows (Spanish: De amor y de sombra) is a novel written by Chileannovelist Isabel Allende in 1984. // Irene is a magazine editor living under the shadow of the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile. Francisco is a handsome photographer and he comes to Irene for a job. As a sympathizer with the underground resistance movement, Francisco opens her eyes and her heart to the atrocities being committed by the state. Irene and Francisco begin a passionate affair, ready to risk everything for the sake of justice and truth. // In 1994, this novel was adapted into a film starring Antonio Banderas and Jennifer Connelly. (wikipedia)

• • •

Isn't Hal Moore the Green Lantern? Did we have this conversation? Oh, dang, it's Hal Jordan. Nevermind. I'm surprised it took this long to get ANTHONY BOURDAIN into a NYTXW grid, what with his themeless-friendly 15-letter name and all. He's definitely the highlight today, though there are a handful of other colorful longer answers that keep this one interesting. Stuff like PHOTOCURRENT and FIREIRONS and PIANOTEACHER just kinda lie there, for me, but I like NONSEQUITUR and SCOUTSHONOR and HUMANOID and "I'M IN HEAVEN" just fine. Short fill gonna short fill, for sure, and the SE corner is particularly wobbly (INURES BDAY ECARD EIRE plural SKYES), but it's clean enough. Passably clean. Though there really is a lot of short (5 and under) stuff. It's a good thing the longer stuff is mostly able to carry the load today, because even when it's reasonably clean, sub-5 stuff is hard to take in large doses, esp. on a Friday or Saturday, when your puzzle really should pop and sizzle and not bore. Every LEA and ACRE and AMOCO and ETON and NOTI makes a little deflating sound. But in the end, more good than bad. All credit for the enjoyable solve goes to ANTHONY BOURDAIN (37A: Author/TV personality who wrote "Your body is not a temple, it's an amusement park"). Without him, this thing sputters.


My slowness / errors were all in the dumb short stuff areas. ABASE for ABASH, for instance—ugh, one of those only-yet-somehow-often-in-crosswords dilemmas where even choosing correctly doesn't feel very good. I had BUSSERS before BUSBOYS (24D: Some restaurant staffers) because I thought "oh, the clue is gender neutral, so the answers will be too," wrong. I know too many Los ___ places from having grown up in California, and so I was both unlucky and lucky today. Unlucky in that my first answer was Los BANOS, lucky in that I know Los GATOS and that slid in easily once my initial error became apparent. Had the most trouble deciphering the clue on PRIOR (60A: Record component), for obvious reasons (but I'll tell you anyway: the ambiguity of the meaning of "record"). Dumbest thing I did was not fully read the clue on the Beatles song (52A: Beatles hit about "a man who thought he was a loner"). Got cocky and figured I'd be able to just fill in a Beatles hit from the letters I had in place (the first few, I think). But my mind went blank. Even with "GET..." all I could think of was "GET A JOB" (not a Beatles song). Then I had EVITE instead of ECARD so that screwed with my Beatles mojo even more (48D: Modern party planning aid). Finally worked out "GET BACK" (a song I know well). Then I went back and read the whole "GET BACK" clue (52A: Beatles hit about "a man who thought he was a loner"). Would've gotten the answer immediately if I had just read the whole clue. Of course I would've had to speed-sing the song in my head from the lyric in the clue up to the "GET BACK" part, but that still would've taken less time than whatever the hell I did today. Partial clue reading is one of the dumb things you (I) do when you're (I'm) speed-solving. Whatever. Coulda been faster, but still fast. The moral of the story is take the *probably no more than two seconds* to read every clue to the end, sigh.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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Classic source of damask / FRI 5-22-20 / Marina frequenter informally / Instrumental that might accompany blooper reel / Noted surname among 1973 Yale Law graduates / Cheaper option of tech device maybe

Constructor: Hal Moore

Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium (maybe more Medium) (5:30, first thing in a.m.)

THEME: none

Word of the Day: ROSE ROYCE (49A: Soul group that did the soundtrack for "Car Wash") —

Rose Royce is an American soul and R&B group. They are best known for several hit singles during the 1970s including "Car Wash", "I Wanna Get Next to You", "I'm Going Down", "Wishing on a Star", and "Love Don't Live Here Anymore". (wikipedia)

• • •

Really liked this grid. The "?"-cluing game was way off today—didn't like any of them, felt like there were too many of them (in the south, anyway), and, well, ECOLI is a weirdly bleak answer to get cheeky with (25A: Cause to recall?)—but the grid itself was chock full of fun stuff. I might be riding a little high on knowing ROSE ROYCE and consequently playing ROSE ROYCE in my head for half of the solve. I wonder how hard this puzzle breaks, difficulty-wise, depending on whether you know who ROSE ROYCE are or not. If you *don't* know it, seems like you'd need virtually every letter from crosses. And since one of those crosses is also a not-necessarily-household name from pop culture (DONAGHY), I can see things getting mucky in there (46D: Jack ___, Alec Baldwin's "30 Rock" role). But when you know the proper names, and crash through them, *and* enjoy them irl, then the solving pleasure factor all of a sudden goes zooom. Not even the horrific-on-every-level YACHTIE could completely eliminate the high I got from the better answers in this grid (43D: Marina frequenter, informally).


It was not easy going at first, though. I thought it was going to be a slog after I made my first pass at the Downs in the NW (which is how I typically approach a grid like this, with long Acrosses up top). That first pass yielded me precisely one solid answer: WES Unseld (5D: Basketball Hall-of-Famer Unseld). So yet again I was a beneficiary of knowing a proper name ... sometimes things just fall your way; I would be very sympathetic to any solver who was like "f*** all these names!"—WES Unseld and ROSE ROYCE are both solid '70s answers, and not everyone remembers / was alive during the '70s. Anyway, not sure WES felt like such a huge get early on, since he was all I had. But then I turned to the long Acrosses up there and EVIL EMPIRE was a gimme (another benefit of being oldish and having lived through a bygone era) (15A: The U.S.S.R., to Reagan). With EVIL EMPIRE in place, the NW got a lot easier. Once I got out of that corner, there weren't many serious hold-ups after that. The NW often feels the hardest to me because that's where I typically start, so I have no toeholds. But looking back now, I think it's actually empirically the hardest, today, EVIL EMPIRE aside. The clues on every Down from 6- to 10- is at least ambiguous if not downright tricky. But once out of there, smooth sailing. Oh, hey, I knew "YAKETY SAX" too, and I'm beginning to realize that my age may have something to do with my sailing (if not yachting) through this (26A: Instrumental that might recall a blooper reel). "YAKETY SAX" is familiar to me from "The Benny Hill Show," which aired ... well, a while ago.

["YAKETY SAX" is the closing credits song]

All these pop culture answers are *right* over the plate for me. There's a boomer/Xer quality to the puzzle. I guess I don't think showing your age (whatever your age is) is a bad thing. This one manages to feel very '70s/'80s without, to me, feeling dreary and bygone in that lazy, crosswordese-ish kind of way. Helps that the grid is clean and not ICKY. I enjoyed seeing PATRIARCHY, which, coming from the NYTXW, has a certain aptness to it, but ... at least today, it's crossing DRUG.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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Attire for Bond villain Ernst Stavro Blofeld / SUN 9-9-18 / Bullet 1950s fashion fad / Big name in water filters / Man just after kneeling / Chocolatier since 1845 / Manta ray by another name / Crucible for McCarthyism / Boxer upset in biopic Cinderella man / Dashboard warnings informally

Constructor: Hal Moore

Relative difficulty: Medium (10:30)

THEME: "Mixed Feelings" — a Schrödinger puzzle where two different words inhabit the same square, one (LOVE) for the Across and another (HATE) for the Down. Revealer in the center of the puzzle is: LOVE-HATE RELATIONSHIPS (63A: They involve mixed feelings ... or a hint to four squares in this completed puzzle)

Theme answers:

• SLOVENIA (26A: Neighbor of Hungary) / WHAT ELSE IS NEW? (23D: "Why am I not surprised?)
• BATTING GLOVES (37A: Pair of diamonds?) / CALIPHATE (12D: Islamic state)
• ROLLOVER IRA (83A: Option for moving an investment) / WORDS TO THAT EFFECT (45D: Basically what was said)
• FOUR-LEAF CLOVER (102A: Symbol of luck) / CHATEAU (98D: Fancy French home)

Word of the Day: MAO SUIT (3D: Attire for the Bond villain Ernst Stavro Blofeld) —

The Yat-Sen Suit, also called the Mao suit, Chinese tunic suit or Zhongshan suit, is a style of Chinese menswear associated in China with Sun Yat-sen (better known to mainland Chinese as "Sun Zhongshan"), although it is more commonly associated in the West with Mao Zedong. 

Sun Yat-sen introduced the style shortly after the founding of the Republic of China as a form of national dress with distinct political symbolism. Following the Communist victory in the Chinese Civil War in 1949, Mao and other leaders continued to wear the garment as a symbol of proletarian unity and as an Eastern counterpart to the business suit. It became less popular after the Opening Up of China under Deng Xiaoping but is still commonly worn by Chinese leaders during important state ceremonies and functions.

In the 1960s and 1970s the Mao suit became fashionable among Western European, Australian, and New Zealander socialists and intellectuals. It was sometimes worn over a turtleneck. (wikipedia)

• • •

Hey! This theme was interesting, and the grid was clean, so hurrah. There are lessons to be learned here. First, the theme is tight; the revealer is apt, and the execution of the theme is nicely done—sqauares are spread out but not (predictably) symmetrical, and the squares are surprising, and found inside interesting answers. Further, by having just four squares, i.e. by not trying to cram more theme squares in, the grid is allowed to b r e a t h e, and so the non-theme fill is largely smooth and lovely, as opposed to pinched and awful. HUNTER-GATHERER! THE FAR SIDE! CONDO FEE! IDIOT LIGHTS! And the shorter stuff stays, at a minimum, inoffensive. Sundays often skew toward tedium, with high volume of themers trying to make up for low concpetual value. Give me this puzzle over X puzzle with 10 dumb add- / subtract- / change-a-letter "joke" answers.


I moved through this one pretty quickly but the theme did not reveal itself for a long time. I had moved, in interlocking fashion, from the NW all the way to the SE before I figured out what was going on with the theme (picked it up at ROLLOVER IRA / WORDS TO THAT EFFECT). Unsurprisingly, all the sticky spots in this puzzle were located in and around the theme squares. I especially had trouble in the NW, which is where I started *and* ended. Thought a [No-goodnik] was a CAD. Don't know the Bond villain well or even the movie he's from (weird to omit that?) (it's "Goldfinger"), and MAO SUIT isn't the most familiar term to me, so even if the clue had been clearer, I might've struggled there. And then SNOW UNDER ... something feels slightly off or finagled or jury-rigged there, esp. as clued (22A: Overwhelm). It googles OK ... somehow I'm just having trouble hearing anyone's actually saying it. Sounds like a drunk person trying to say "it's no wonder..." And then you've got the LOVE/HATE square there, so yeah, the NW gave me minor fits. But only minor. My time was pretty dang normal.


Bullets:

• 114A: Certain break point (AD OUT) — wow this one threw me. My brain was translating the clue as "breakING point," so tennis was not on my mind. (Although it's on my mind now—that Serena / Osaka final, damn and dear lord!). Oh, and CIO (104D: Certain tech exec) ... what is that? Chief ... Information Officer? Ah, yes. OK. CEO and CFO I know, other Os I'm iffier on.
• 81D: Bribes (PAYOFFS) — because of the ambiguity of the clue (verb or noun!?) I had PAYS OFF at first.
• 88D: Suffix with large numbers (-AIRE) — ok this is not good. I found a not-good thing. To its credit, the clue doesn't try to get cute. Just keeps it simple and literal so you can Move On (nothing to see here!)

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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