The Scales, zodiacally / MON 9-28-26 / Store, as ashes / ___ Guofeng, successor of Mao Zedong / Tropical tree whose product is sometimes used as a meat substitute / Coconut Girl Scout cookies / City NE of Oklahoma City

Constructor: Helen Chen

Relative difficulty: Medium-Challenging (solved Downs-only)

[67A: Kylo ___ of "Star Wars"]

THEME: LEAD-OFF / HOME RUN (38A: With 41-Across, ball hit out of the park by the very first batter for either side ... or a hint to the starts of 18-, 27-, 46- and 60-Across) — theme answers are phrases that start with a word that is baseball slang for a "home run":

Theme answers:

• BOMBSHELL (18A: Complete shocker)
• TATER TOTS (27A: Alternative to French fries)
• BLAST ZONE (46A: Detonation region)
• JACKFRUIT (60A: Tropical tree whose product is sometimes used as a meat substitute)

Word of the Day: HUA Guofeng (41D: ___ Guofeng, successor of Mao Zedong) —

Hua Guofeng (born Su Zhu (苏铸); 16 February 1921 – 20 August 2008; also spelled as Hua Kuo-feng) was a Chinese politician who served as chairman of the Chinese Communist Party and the premier of China. As the successor of Mao Zedong, Hua held the top offices of the government, party, and the military after the deaths of Mao and Premier Zhou Enlai, but was gradually forced out of power between December 1978 and June 1981, and subsequently retreated from the political limelight, though still remaining a member of the Central Committee until 2002. [...] While Hua ended the Cultural Revolution's most notorious policies, such as the constant ideological campaigns, he remained generally committed to a command economy and the continuation of the Maoist line. Between December 1978 and June 1981, Deng Xiaoping and his supporters forced Hua from his position of paramount leader but allowed him to retain some titles. Hua gradually faded into political obscurity, but continued to insist on the correctness of Maoist principles. (wikipedia)

• • •

Nearly had a Downs-only DNF today. The whole central-southern part of the grid—from the FRUIT part of JACKFRUIT over to ZENITH—was mostly empty for what felt like a good while there at the end. Things started to go south with HUA, a name I don't remember ever seeing. Every letter of that was a mystery to me. Trying to move down from there, I guessed BOX SET, but neither ALL TIED nor TRAGIC (47D: Like the fate of Ophelia) nor ZENITH (48D: Peak) were at all clear to me. All these Down fails left BLAST hard for me to infer despite the fact that by that point I was fully aware of the theme and how it worked. In addition to my total ignorance of HUA, there were two other major problems for me today. The first was that, when presented with JACK F---T, I just assumed the answer would be JACK FROST. The second problem was that I couldn't find any connection between BANANA and the letter pattern I was getting at 50D: See 37-Across (37-Across being BANANA). BANANA ... BREAD? BANANA ... SPLIT? I just assumed I was dealing with a two-part phrase. I had BANANA --R--, and ... no idea. As of this very second, I still haven't looked at the clue for 37-Across, so ... let's do that now, SHALL we? 37A: "Time flies like an [50-Down]; fruit flies like a ___" (BANANA). Jeez louise, no wonder I couldn't intuit the connection between BANANA and ARROW. That's the most tenuous connection I've ever seen! Unintuitable, I say! Eventually, I realized JACK F[ROS]T could also be JACKFRUIT, which allowed me to see BLOUSE (46D: Top to accompany a skirt). Somehow I was also able to come up with ALL TIED, and from there, I got BLAST ZONE, which took care of my TRAGIC ZENITH problems. The end. After a considerable amount of stumbling around, finally, The End.

The theme here is perfect for a Monday, and it's timely as well, given that the regular season of Major League Baseball ended just yesterday. Congrats to the Phillies and the Astros, who clinched the final playoff spots on the last day of the season. Playoffs start tomorrow. Baseball has lots of words for "home run," and these are four of them, and they all "lead off" their respective answers, so ... yeah, what more do you want? Besides good fill, I mean. I could've used more of that. The theme is very dense, which means there's not a lot of room for any other snazzy entries; in fact, nothing at all over seven letters long (and only two of those). The short fill gets pretty icky in places, most notably at INURN (100% pure crosswordese) (33D: Store, as ashes) and URE, an answer so bad I thought for sure I had an error over there in the west (35A: Suffix with fail or forfeit). I thought, "No way they let Midge URE into a Monday puzzle. That's crazy." And in fact, they did not let Midge URE into a Monday puzzle. Worse—they let in an ugly suffix. Who is Midge URE, you ask? Aside from co-writing and producing "Do They Know It's Christmas?," he was, among other things, the leader of the band Ultravox from 1979-1987. Look, I told you he wasn't a Monday answer. But now you are armed against his eventual appearance on some future Saturday. Other UREs (according to former NYTXW clues) include a Yorkshire river, a chemistry pioneer Andrew, and an actress Mary (Academy Award-nominated for Sons and Lovers (1960)). Go back far enough, and you'll get [Old Orkney land unit] (1973), [Mist, in Scotland] (1972), and [Ounce in Shetland] (1948). I doubt you'll be seeing any of those ever again. 

Bullets:

• 17A: Solid baseball hit (LINER) — with baseball as the main theme idea, it's maybe better to go a different direction here. See also the clue for ALL TIED (43D: Like the score going into extra innings). Or else, really lean into it—change the TEAMS clue from N.H.L. to MLB, for instance (29D: The N.H.L. has 32). There's another baseball clue opportunity at GIANT*, and, if you really want it, BANANA:

• 66A: Helper for computer problems, informally (I.T. GUY) — had the -GUY part and all I could think of was:

• 9D: The Scales, zodiacally (LIBRA) — we are currently in the LIBRA BLAST ZONE (Sep. 23-Oct. 23). Also, "zodiacally," top-tier adverb invention, thumbs up.

That's all for today. See you next time.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld 

*Whoops, looks like GIANT actually did get a baseball ⚾️ clue (63A: San Francisco ballplayer) and I just didn’t notice, sorry

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Japanese fried cutlet / THU 9-22-22 / Camera brand with a red circle logo / Chewy chocolaty morsel / Max Academy Award-winning composer of Now Voyager / Has a wash at the casino / Creatures on an Escher Mobius strip / Sue at Chicago's Field Museum

Constructor: Helen Chen

Relative difficulty: Easy

THEME: BLACKJACK (34A: *Casino game associated with the sum of this puzzle's shaded squares) — "cards" totaling "21" are found inside casino-related phrases: 

Theme answers:

• PLACES A BET (17A: *Wagers at the casino (11))
• AMOUNT WON (25A: *Profit at the casino (+2 = 13))
• FACE CARDS (48A: *They're worth 10 points at the casino (+1 = 14))
• BREAKS EVEN (56A: *Has a wash at the casino (+7 = 21!))

Word of the Day: Max STEINER (13D: Max ___, Academy Award-winning composer of "Now, Voyager") —

Maximilian Raoul Steiner (May 10, 1888 – December 28, 1971) was an Austrian composer and conductor who, threatened with internment in Germany during WW1, fled to England before emigrating to America in 1914 and became a celebrated composer for film and theatre. He was a child prodigy who conducted his first operetta when he was twelve and became a full-time professional, proficient at composing, arranging, and conducting, by the time he was fifteen. // Steiner worked in England, then Broadway, and in 1929, he moved to Hollywood, where he became one of the first composers to write music scores for films. He is referred to as "the father of film music", as Steiner played a major part in creating the tradition of writing music for films, along with composers Dimitri Tiomkin, Franz Waxman, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Alfred Newman, Bernard Herrmann, and Miklós Rózsa. // Steiner composed over 300 film scores with RKO Pictures and Warner Bros., and was nominated for 24 Academy Awards, winning three: The Informer (1935); Now, Voyager (1942); and Since You Went Away (1944). Besides his Oscar-winning scores, some of Steiner's popular works include King Kong (1933), Little Women(1933), Jezebel (1938), and Casablanca (1942), though he did not compose its love theme, "As Time Goes By". In addition, Steiner scored The Searchers (1956), A Summer Place (1959), and Gone with the Wind (1939), which ranked second on the AFI's list of best American film scores, and is the film score for which he is best known. (wikipedia)

• • •

I have to admit that I don't quite understand this one. Admittedly, I can't think of very many places I'd less like to be than a casino, so there's an inherent topic aversion, but even so I can usually appreciate or at least understand a basic card theme. But here ... I mean, to be clear, I understand the BLACKJACK concept perfectly. The cards total 21, the highest score in the game, so presumably you "win" in the end, but it feels like there must be some element that I'm missing, since merely putting four cards that total 21 in some phrases doesn't seem ... tricky enough. Thursday enough. I see that those phrases are themselves gambling phrases, so that makes the theme somewhat tighter than a normal "hidden words"-type puzzle would be (usually such "hidden words" appear in completely non-thematic phrases). But whatever is gained by having the theme be tighter in that way is surely lost by the fact that the phrases themselves just aren't that strong, particularly the first two: PLACES A BET (arbitrary 3rd-person verb phrase, à la  "EATS A SANDWICH") and AMOUNT WON, which feels really flaccid and weird. Zero strong associations with the casino. You have "winnings" for sure, but AMOUNT WON feels like a line on some imaginary receipt. Bizarre. Further, the "cards" aren't particularly well embedded, in that only two of them (TWO and SEVEN) break across two words, the way a "hidden word" should, ideally. And then there's the unnecessary remedialness of the parenthetical parts of the theme clues. I guess those clues are trying to create some narrative energy, but ... the revealer has already told me the game I'm playing, and the "cards" are highlighted inside their answers so I can see them and ... I can count, so ... whatever drama the parentheses were supposed to be creating felt oddly condescending. Like the game was being taught to a child. Also, the climactic "21!" is kind of undercut by occurring in the clue for the very non-triumphant phrase BREAKS EVEN. Again, casinos are not my milieu. I have had to walk through them a couple times to get to concerts, but I have never voluntarily spent time there. So maybe I'm not the right audience for this puzzle. But I can't imagine even an inveterate gambler would find this theme that compelling, let alone challenging. If there is an element of the theme that I have failed to appreciate, please, let me know.

There's much better news where the fill is concerned. I really liked how SNAPPY and wide-ranging it was. From Max STEINER to RuPaul ("SASHAY Away"), from VELVETY KATSU to highlighted CHEEKBONEs, this puzzle had a lot of fun things going on. Widespread memes! ("Sir, this is an ARBY'S!") YUPPIE satire! MILK DUDs (underrated candy!), CAT POSE, even stupid GPS voice saying "ARRIVED," all of it made the grid feel very alive and lively. The puzzle was very, very easy (maybe too easy for a Thursday), so my struggle points weren't many, but I definitely had some (unpleasant) trouble trying to suss out the odd phrase AMOUNT WON, and then some more (much more pleasant) trouble in the SE, trying to make sense of T-REX over CTRL-P. Totally forgot there was a T-REX named "Sue" in Chicago, so I thought I was looking for an athlete (something about the "Field" in "Field Museum" was saying "sports?" to me). And I have a MacBook, so when I print it's "Command-P," not CTRL-P. So it was fun / slightly challenging to make sense of that mischievous pair of answers. Otherwise, everything felt very straightforward today. 

A few more things:

• 29A: Certain buckwheat pancake (BLIN) — the singular of the much more familiar BLINI. Always looks weird to me in the singular.
• 4D: Fleece (SHEAR) — oh, this also caused me trouble. You SHEAR sheep to *get* "Fleece" (n.) ... but I guess "Fleece" (v.) is also a synonym of SHEAR (though I've only ever heard it used in the metaphorical sense, i.e. if you get overcharged or scammed or otherwise fraudulently separated from your money, you've been "fleeced").
• 1A: Part of the deck from which a dealer deals (TOP) — you hope. The puzzle tries to throw a little bonus thematic content your way here, and at ANTE (19A: It goes in the middle of a table). I'm more interested in getting *away* from the theme and back to eating MILK DUDs while watching "Now, Voyager" (w/ score by Max STEINER). Sounds like a good plan for this rainy day. See you tomorrow.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld 

P.S. I think this is the constructor's NYTXW debut. Given how strong the grid is, I'm looking forward to seeing her byline again.

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