Rex Parker Does the NYT Crossword Puzzle: Jackson Janes

Constructor: Jack Joshi and Jackson Janes and Adam Aaronson

Relative difficulty: Medium

THEME: Fruit ... units? — I have no idea, there's no revealer or clever phrase or nothin'. All I see are themers that start with a fruit and end with a unit of measurement [the indicator for which appears in brackets at the end of the clue]:

Theme answers:

LEMON BARS (17A: Tart snacks [pressure])
TOMATOMETER (28A: Movie scale with a "Certified Fresh" tier [length])
BANANAGRAMS (44A: Scrabble relative played without a board [mass])
FIG NEWTON (59A: Longtime Nabisco cookie [force])

Word of the Day: bars (see 17A) —

The bar is a metric unit of pressure, but not part of the International System of Units (SI). It is defined as exactly equal to 100,000 Pa (100 kPa), or slightly less than the current average atmospheric pressure on Earth at sea level(approximately 1.013 bar). By the barometric formula, 1 bar is roughly the atmospheric pressure on Earth at an altitude of 111 metres at 15 °C.
The bar and the millibar were introduced by the Norwegian meteorologist Vilhelm Bjerknes, who was a founder of the modern practice of weather forecasting. (wikipedia)

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The puzzle appears to be winking at someone—possibly the constructors themselves (63A: The constructors of this puzzle, e.g. => TRIO)—but whatever the concept is supposed to be here, whatever the joke is, it seems to have mostly missed me. I see that those are fruits and I see that those are units and I don't know what's holding the theme concept together. Normally there'd be some snappy phrase. Maybe I'm supposed to guess it? Maybe it's a meta puzzle and there's a bigger answer I can't see? But then the puzzle would *probably* tell me if that was the case. I haven't spent this long trying to make sense of a Tuesday theme in ... ever? I didn't even get the "units of measurement" thing for a while because I was like "ugh they're doing some STEM thing that's beyond me" but it ended up being not that complex, actually. The one flaw with the theme execution is that BARS and GRAMS are in the plural but the others are in the singular. Elegance would have them be one or the other. But "desperation for symmetrical answer length" would have this. Not really a big deal, in terms of the actual solving experience. The puzzle feels more like a Wednesday when I talk about it and look at it, but it solved in a reasonably Tuesdayish fashion. The grid itself seems fine. The only time I winced was ICED IT (that IT is just awkward; cull the wordlist!) (11D: Treated a sprained ankle, say). I didn't groan once, except at myself when I wrote in GROAN at 26D: Question after a poorly delivered joke ("GET IT?!") (a GROAN isn't even a question! the GROAN / bad joke affinity is just so strong that I couldn't help myself ... also, I had the "G" in place, so that probably just encouraged me). ICED IT, GET IT, SNAP TO IT ... maybe dial IT back? Or are the three "IT"s some kind of TRIO joke?

CILANTRO is delicious and I don't eat pizza rolls any more but I remember thinking TOTINO'S were delicious when I was a kid, so throw in FIG NEWTONS and LEMON BARS (the best!) and you've got a very tasty puzzle. I am noticing now, though, that the puzzle defruited (or defooded) only half the theme fruits. That is, you can eat the first and fourth, but you can't eat the second and third (well, you could eat BANANAGRAMS, but those tiles would probably be pretty uncomfortable going down). I needed several crosses to get George LUCAS (16A: He sold his namesake company to Disney for over $4 billion)—most Tuesdays you'd probably get a first name in the clue to help you out. My initial errors included SLIDE for SLOPE (4D: It may be slippery), NO SALE! for NO DEAL! (46D: "I refuse your offer"), and ... hmm, looks like that's it. We've already been over GROAN for GET IT!? Nothing too tricky going on with the cluing today. DOT is the answer to the "Fiji" clue because of the DOTs over the "i" and "j" and "i" in "Fiji" (34A: One of three in Fiji?). I am grateful for the PALIN clue today (64A: Michael of Monty Python). And the Twitter bot account @nytxw_checker will surely be grateful for TIT (27A: ___ for tat) (can bots experience gratitude? probably a can of worms I don't wanna open ...)