THEME: "RE" "FUSE" — The letter string RE is "fused" between two words
Theme answers:
[Was worth another mention] for BO[RE]PEATING
[Travel discount] for FA[RE]DUCTION
[Not inflammatory?] for FI[RE]SISTANT
[Sanctuary like Yellowstone] for NATU[RE]SERVE
Word of the Day: MII (Customizable Nintendo avatar) —
A Mii is a customizable avatar used on several Nintendo video game consoles and mobile apps. The name Mii is a portmanteau of "Wii" and "me", referring to them typically being avatars of the players. Miis were first introduced on the Wii console in 2006 and later appeared on the DS, 3DS, the Wii U, the Switch, and various apps for smart devices such as Miitomo. Miis can be created using different body, facial and clothing features. [wiki]
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Hey friends, and welcome back to Malaika MWednesday! First and foremost, happy new year! This is my second-favorite holiday of the year. I do not typically like "resolutions" but I like to set goals. This year, my goals are to become a notary, get my Canadian passport renewed (easier said than done for dual citizens), make at least one data visualization using R Shiny, and attend thirty yoga classes. Please let me know your goals or resolutions below!
This played easy for me, until I got to the six boxes in the upper right of the puzzle, B-L-A alongside B-O-X. The corner is not the cleanest fill that's possible up there, but it's totally fine and it's clear the constructor wanted this puzzle to have every letter in the alphabet (Puzzle Heads call this a "pangram"), so he needed the X and the Q. It was the clues that struck me as extremely unnecessarily hard-- I spent over four minutes on those six squares alone, before ultimately resorting to "check puzzle." Referencing AXE as a verb is tough, and "informally" to me (in the clue for BBQ) is a really subtle indicator for an abbreviation-- NYT sometimes uses it to mean slang.
When I Google the term "The Lou" nothing really comes up for St Louis but the constructor is from there so I trust him
I like this style of theme! I've seen it often with add-a-letter ("attach" "e") or drop-a-letter puzzles, and this one seemed like a slightly cuter and more interesting version. The downside is perhaps that the long theme answers weren't super zingy (BORE REPEATING especially felt a little blah to me). Actually, in this puzzle, the mid-length answers, like MACBETH, BREYERS, MCJOB, and MARACA were some of my favorites. And while there weren't a ton of question mark clues (I thought [Resting place?] for SEAT didn't need one at all tbh), I liked the references to "The Good Place" (DEREK is Janet's boyfriend) and "Monty Python and the Holy Grail" ("TIS but a scratch!").
Rex if this is too risque for this blog please delete it
Bullets:
[Eartha who sang "I Want to Be Evil"] for KITT — I wanted a "Santa Baby" reference! But I guess Christmas is over.
[Rural shindig] for BARN DANCE — Had a rewrite here; initially I put "barn raise"
[Sort of poem not usually pluralized by adding an -s] for HAIKU — This is a cute way of the NYT saying oops for using the entry "haikus" thrice in the past.... although once was as recently as 2022
["___ que sí!" (Spanish "Of course!")] for CLARO — Claro is one of my favorite Special Occasion Restaurants in NYC, although I will say they did the thing where they became popular and raised their prices by 20%. Please tell me y'all's favorites as I have a couple of Special Occasions coming up soon!
Relative difficulty: Medium-Challenging (the "challenging" part is mostly for the extra effort it takes to locate / fill in all the rebus squares)
THEME: AB CRUNCHES (61A: Core exercises .. or a hint to eight squares in this puzzle) — letter sequence "AB" gets "crunched" into one square, eight times (four theme answers, two "AB" squares apiece):
Word of the Day: NYALA (39D: Spiral-horned antelope) —
sexual dimorphism!
The lowland nyala or simply nyala (Tragelaphus angasii), is a spiral-horned antelopenative to southern Africa (not to be confused with the endangered Mountain nyala living in the Bale region of Ethiopia). It is a species of the family Bovidae and genus Nyala, also considered to be in the genus Tragelaphus. It was first described in 1849 by George French Angas. The body length is 135–195 cm (53–77 in), and it weighs 55–140 kg (121–309 lb). The coat is maroon or rufous brown in females and juveniles, but grows a dark brown or slate grey, often tinged with blue, in adult males. Females and young males have ten or more white stripes on their sides. Only males have horns, 60–83 cm (24–33 in) long and yellow-tipped. It exhibits the highest sexual dimorphism among the spiral-horned antelopes. [...] The nyala's range includes Malawi, Mozambique, South Africa, Eswatini, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. It has been introduced to Botswana and Namibia, and reintroduced to Eswatini, where it had been extinct since the 1950s. Its population is stable and it has been listed as of Least Concern by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). The principal threats to the species are poaching and habitat loss resulting from human settlement. (wikipedia) (emph. mine)
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first Premier of China 1949-1976
Big gap here between quality of theme idea (great!) and quality of overall puzzle (less great). As with the Monday puzzle, I felt my confidence flag very quickly after I ran into a lot of short fill that felt very yesteryear, most notably the name partial ENLAI, which used to appear all the time in grids, back when people didn't have software to help them and also didn't have to try as hard for clean grids because competition wasn't nearly as fierce as it is today. You used to see CHOU (or ZHOU) a lot more too. Anyway, either one of that guy's name parts are potential red flags, warnings of "rough fill ahead." Neither name part is inherently bad, and if your overall puzzle were killer, you wouldn't blink at a stray CHOU or ENLAI. But in this grid, with so much other overfamiliar short stuff (e.g. EDAM AVAST NENE NOTA ATON ALOE SYSCO ERIN HUTT (another name part), ENLAI felt not like a necessary compromise, but like a bad omen of what the overall fill quality was going to be like. And what do you call stuff that *used* to be crosswordese but that you almost never see anymore? Asking for a friend. That friend's name is NYALA. I (eventually) remembered NYALA from my various expeditions into the wilds of ... crosswords of yore. The only reason I know most antelopes is from crosswords. I remember ORIBI very, very well from one of my first write-ups. But though the actual NYALA is not endangered, crossword NYALAs have all but gone extinct. So it's crosswordese ... but resurrected crosswordese. Ghost crosswordese. So is it even crosswordese anymore? If crosswordese has been pretty well buried in the past, maybe it's not stale any more. Maybe it's "retro." Can ASTA come back and play now? Anyway, my point ... wow, what was my point? Oh, EN-LAI had me fearing the worst. I didn't get the worst, but I didn't get much of anything good, either. *Except* the revealer, which, as I say, really truly works and is cute. So it's an extremely one-note puzzle, despite having 8 x "AB" = sixteen (musical) notes. If the rebus squares are, in fact, musically playable, and especially if what they play is the theme from "Jaws," which opened 47 years ago this past week, well then, this puzzle is genius. Otherwise, this puzzle is thematically clever but a bit tiresome to work through.
The rebus came swiftly. I wanted ARABS, ARABS wouldn't fit, but the surrounding fill meant that ARABS absolutely had to fit ... therefore "AB" rebus. Didn't get the 2-per-answer dealie with the rebus squares immediately because I had no idea what that first themer was going for, based on its clue. I had GRABBED and figured that since the familiar phrase is "grab and go" and the clue was "eat and run," the answer would be, what, GRABBED AND WENT (!?!). But no, not verb and verb but verbed A BITE. Puzzle is really pushing its luck with the "___ A ___" levels in this part of the grid. GRABBED A BITE x/w IN A BIT and *also* x/w TIE A BOW. None of these reaches EAT A SANDWICH levels of absurdity, but en masse, they're still a lot to take. I find things like INBETA and ADSPACE really dreary, maybe because once an answer gets 6 letters or longer I really expect it to brighten up the place a little. Something about the technicality and ho-hum adequacy of these answers is dispiriting, moreso when the grid is kind of anemic to begin with. I wish the "AB" answers themselves had had more sparkle, but just finding 2x"AB" answers that you can arrange symmetrically at all was probably a challenge. Maybe I'd be more happy about ABOMINABLE SNOWMAN as an answer if a. it had its initial "THE" (it's really awkward to pretend that he's just ... ABOMINABLE SNOWMAN), or b. I didn't see YETI in the grid all the damn time, thus making ABOMINABLE SNOWMAN feel (ironically) like a common sight. I did like "WHAT'S NEW!?" It has this quaint quality, having largely been surpassed in recent years by the more colloquial and somehow less genuinely curious-sounding "WHAT'S UP?" "WHAT'S NEW?" sounds like you really want to hear how a person's been. "WHAT'S UP?" is more formulaic, more of a "hey!" Like "How ya doin?" You ask that, you don't really wanna know. You're just being polite. But "WHAT'S NEW?" actually seems to invite a response. Also, "WHAT'S UP?" can have kind of a "why are you bothering me right now?" that "WHAT'S NEW?" is simply never going to have. "WHAT'S NEW?" is the cry of someone who cares about you and wants to hear how you've been. Whereas "AVAST, NENE!" is the cry of someone who's been at sea way, way too long.
No mistakes today except NIQAB for HIJAB (11D: Muslim headscarf) (NIQAB is a veil, which some women wear as an extension / interpretation of HIJAB). I also got "cor anglais" confused with a French horn and so tried HORN at first for 63A: Relative to a cor anglais (OBOE). I know, you must be thinking, "What a RUBE." But if I'm being *really* honest, my first thought was that "cor anglais" was some type of pastry. And now I'm hungry. Good day.
A long time ago, I was solving this puzzle and got stuck at an unguessable (to me) crossing: N. C. WYETH crossing NATICK at the "N"—I knew WYETH but forgot his initials, and NATICK ... is a suburb of Boston that I had no hope of knowing. It was clued as someplace the Boston Marathon runs through (???). Anyway, NATICK— the more obscure name in that crossing—became shorthand for an unguessable cross, esp. where the cross involves two proper nouns, neither of which is exceedingly well known. NATICK took hold as crossword slang, and the term can now be both noun ("I had a NATICK in the SW corner...") or verb ("I got NATICKED by 50A / 34D!")
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