Rex Parker Does the NYT Crossword Puzzle: Jeff Jerome

Constructor: Jeff Jerome and Andrea Carla Michaels

Relative difficulty: Medium, maybe a little tougher (solved Downs-only)

THEME: BUNK BEDS (59A: Camp sleeping spots ... or a hint to this puzzle's circled letters) — BED appears over BED in three pairs of sequential circled letters:

Theme answers:

DISROBED
SUBBED (18A: Prepared to bathe + 23A: Filled in (for), for short)

HOBNOBBED
STUBBED TOE (24A: Schmoozed (with) + 28A: Slight injury from tripping)

DUBBED FILM
BEDAZZLED (46A: Foreign-language movie that you don't have to read subtitles for / 52A: Enchanted)

Word of the Day: NTSB (25D: Crash-investigating org.) —

The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) is an independent U.S. government investigative agency responsible for civil transportation accident investigation. In this role, the NTSB investigates and reports on aviation accidents and incidents, certain types of highway crashes, ship and marine accidents, pipeline incidents, bridge failures, and railroad accidents. The NTSB is also in charge of investigating cases of hazardous materials releases that occur during transportation. The agency is based in Washington, D.C. It has three regional offices, located in Anchorage, Alaska; Aurora, Colorado; and Federal Way, Washington. The agency also operated a national training center at its Ashburn facility. (wikipedia)

• • •

[Henri de TOULOUSE-Lautrec]

The revealer is completely anticlimactic. If you solve top-down, you can see that there is BED over BED, three times, so BUNK BEDS comes as no real surprise. There's no wordplay, no cute turn of phrase. The revealer just tells me what is pretty obvious. I was thinking "double bed," but BUNK BEDS, yes, that's better, but not exactly a surprise. The concept seems solid but not particularly clever or exciting. 5/6ths of the "BED"s are past tense verbs (even if two are being used adjectivally), which gives the themer set a kind of monotony. BEDAZZLED is the best themer by far, and it's the only one that bucks the "-BED"-as-past-tense trend. The adjacent double letters necessitated by the theme results in some of the grid's less pleasing fill. Mostly, the results are boring (DDE, DDAY), but you also get into murky proper noun territory (esp. with TUBB—not a name I'd expect to see on a Monday ... I'm not 100% sure who he is, though the name is familiar), and then there's FLEEK, which ... has anyone said "on FLEEK" since 2017? (11D: On ___ (looking great, in slang)). "Eyebrows on FLEEK" was a social media phenomenon for a hot second in the mid '10s, and then poof, gone—like so many hyper-brief faddish expressions. Remember "6-7." It's already dead. No adult had even heard of it before this past summer, but by October it was getting all kinds of press—some short-sighted dictionary even made "6-7" its Word of the Year. But now ... pfft. The entire life cycle of that non-expression was less than six months. Anyway, I guess maybe "on FLEEK" is still around somewhere, being used unironically by someone, but it feels real dated. Like, prehistoric, as social media-inspired slang goes. Constructors would be well-advised to yeet FLEEK (YEET has a strange staying power, don't ask me why). To give you an idea of how old FLEEK is ... it started with a Vine. Remember Vine? LOL. Wow.

Note: The phrase on fleek originated in a posting to the video-sharing platform Vine on June 21, 2014, by Kayla Lewis, a sixteen-year-old girl with the user name Peaches Monroee. In later interviews Ms. Lewis said that she had made up the word fleek on the spot when the video was shot. However, it has been reported that fleek appeared prior to 2014 on the Urban Dictionary website: in 2003 a contributor defined fleek as "smooth, nice, sweet," with the example sentence "That was a fleek move you pulled on that chic[k]." Another contributor entered the word in 2009, defining fleek as "awesome," as in "That was a fleek game." For background see "How 'on fleek' went from a 16-year-old's Vine to the Denny's Twitter account," by Constance Grady, posted on the website Vox on March 28, 2017; and "Geeking Out On 'Fleek,'" by Neal Whitman, posted on visualthesaurus.com on February 23, 2015. (merriam-webster.com)

Apparently Ariana Grande also did a Vine (is that what you do? Do a Vine? Is that the lingo?), where she basically sang the text of Monroee's original Vine, and that sent the phrase into pop culture stratosphere ... for a while. I can pretty much pinpoint the moment that "on FLEEK" started to die. It's right ... here:

If there's currently a FLEEK Renaissance afoot, I am unaware.

This grid is fine, if not particularly on FLEEK. Lots of cheater squares* today—two of them in each of those Utah-shaped blocks of black squares (the two black squares above PIBB and below FALA), and then the black squares above TBAR and below KIDD. With that many cheaters, I'd expect a cleaner grid—not so much ARTOO ARESO ARI NTSB ENYA TBAR ASA RES INE (!?) IMO DAS THO action. TERM LIMIT feels strange in the singular. There are TERM LIMITS, and a governor / president / etc. might be TERM-LIMITED, but TERM LIMIT isn't as common. "IT'S ABSURD" is colorful but also a bit absurd, in that the clue (3D: "Ridiculous!") is really just a clue for "ABSURD!" The "IT'S" part feels completely tacked on. Plus, "THAT'S ABSURD!" feels like the better, more familiar phrase.

Solving Downs-only, my biggest fail today was forgetting (and I mean forgetting—spectacularly, catastrophically forgetting) how to spell the name of TOULOUSE-Lautrec. When I look at it now, I can't imagine why I wanted to spell it any other way than the correct way. And Yet. TOLOUSSE. TALOUSSE. TALLOUSE, TOLLOUSE. Between that, not being certain of ARESO (2D: "You ___ right!"), and the difficulty parsing "IT'S ABSURD," the NW was certainly the most challenging part today. Elsewhere, I thought FALA was LALA (as in, "FA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA"), and utterly blanked on Tim WALZ, LOL. That was fast. VP candidate one moment, gone from my brain the next. I actually wrote in KANE, thereby misspelling Tim KAINE's name, forgetting that KAINE was a senator (although he had also been governor), and putting KAINE on a presidential ticket eight years after the fact. Triple fail! I also wrongly imagined that a SEDAN and not a COUPE had two doors (50D: Two-door auto). And I thought TUBB was WEBB (38D: Ernest in the Country Music Hall of Fame). Surely there's a WEBB in the Country Music Hall of Fame ... yep, here we go, looks like WEBB Pierce (1921-91) was inducted posthumously in 2001. And then there's Jimmy WEBB, who, despite winning a Grammy in 1986 for Best Country Song ("Highwaymen"), and despite being in the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame, does not appear to be in the Country Music Hall of Fame. Dude wrote "Wichita Lineman" and "By the Time I Get to Phoenix" and "Galveston"!? And "MacArthur Park"!? That's range.

As for Ernest TUBB—well, among his many accomplishments, he was the first singer to record a hit version of "Blue Christmas."

That's all for today. Let's move on to 🌲🐈Holiday Pet Pics🐕🌲! First up is Koko, seen here rooting for my "local" team (nevermind that Buffalo is ~4 hours away—you still see Bills gear everywhere). You can tell this is a "Holiday" photo because Koko is staring down the word "Christmas" like it's a sausage.

[Thanks, Anne!]

Then there's Riley, seen here chewing on a toy, which was the price of getting Riley to pose for this photo in the first place. At least I think it's a toy. Could be a mouse, I guess. Or a meatball, though I doubt a dog would hold a meatball in its mouth that gingerly.

[Thanks, Laura!]

Here's Willow, enjoying the Ithaca snow. She's wearing a GPS collar because she apparently likes to go on little "side adventures." Rescuing avalanche victims, no doubt.

[Thanks, Adam!]

We've got kind of a "Where's Waldo?" situation going on here with Lulu. It's like she wandered into a Home Goods photo shoot and got lost among the Holiday cheer. Where's Lulu? Oh, there she is, on the bed, where you'd expect.

[Thanks, Bonnie!]

Astro does not appreciate your holiday sense of humor one bit.

["Is this a joke? Is this supposed to be funny?"]
[Thanks, Amanda!]

And lastly, there's Moose. Moose knows how Astro feels. Actually, I think Moose just wants to go out and play with the other very handsome dog who would surely be his friend. Poor Moose.

[Thanks, Pamela!]

See you next time.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

*Cheater squares are black squares that do not add to the overall word count, usually added to the grid solely to make filling the grid easier for the constructor(s).

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