Full of vivid detail, as memory / THU 9-24-26 / The two most valuable Scrabble tiles / Slang for an Italian dish / "Same here," more stiffly / From one tone to the next adjacent tone, in music / American architect who invented Scrabble while unemployed during the Great Depression / Scrabble's name prior to its acquisition by James Brunot in 1948 / Verizon competitor, informally

Constructor: Jeff Stillman

Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium (the "Medium" is solely for the theme trivia)

THEME: Scrabble — some Scrabble trivia

Theme answers:

• ALFRED BUTTS (21A: American architect who invented Scrabble while unemployed during the Great Depression)
• CRISS-CROSS WORDS (37A: Scrabble's name prior to its acquisition by James Brunot in 1948)
• FIFTY POINTS (53A: Bonus score for a bingo (using all seven of one's tiles) in Scrabble)
• 'ZA (1A: Slang for an Italian dish ... or along with QI, the highest-value two-letter word in Scrabble)
• [two blank squares] (67A: The two most valuable Scrabble tiles)

"BLANK" square crosses:

• WENT [BLANK] (51D: Forgot what you intended to say)
• LEFT [BLANK] (52D: Didn't fill in, as a field on an application) 

Word of the Day: EIDETIC (42A: Full of vivid detail, as memory) —

adj.

Of, relating to, or marked by extraordinarily detailed and vivid recall of visual images. (thefreedictionary.com)  

Eidetic memory (/aɪˈdɛtɪk/ eye-DET-ik), also known as photographic memory and total recall, is the alleged ability to recall an image from memory with high precision—at least for a brief period of time—after seeing it only once and without using a mnemonic device.

Although the terms eidetic memory and photographic memory are popularly used interchangeably, they are also distinguished, with eidetic memory referring to the ability to see an object for a few minutes after it is no longer present and photographic memory referring to the ability to recall pages of text or numbers, or similar, in great detail. When the concepts are distinguished, eidetic memory is reported to occur in a small number of children and is generally not found in adults, while true photographic memory has never been demonstrated to exist.

The term eidetic comes from the Greek word εἶδος (pronounced [êːdos], eidos) "visible form".

• • •

OK, looks like we get the Stevie Wonder puzzle and the anti-Stevie Wonder puzzle in the same week (if you missed Tuesday's puzzle, go back and see how lovely a tribute puzzle is done). Tuesday's puzzle was an anniversary puzzle; this puzzle commemorates nothing. Tuesday's puzzle: an iconic album, two widely-known and beloved #1 songs, incredibly smooth grid. Today's puzzle: iconic game (I'll give it that), random / obscure / arbitrary trivia, a grid so rough I stopped to document the moment I knew it was all going to go sideways:

When you get AROAR RETAG and GAEL before you've even fully exited the tiny NW corner ... that's an ill wind that blows no good. Bodes no good? (looks it up). Proverbially, "an ill wind that blows nobody any good." Shakespeare's got it (in HVI, Part 3) as an "ill wind that profits nobody," and it seems there are many acceptable variants. Anyway, the wind was ill out of the NW, that's for sure, and it didn't get too much less ill (ASDOI ITT ATT INF ONCLE ... the always-repulsive TASE). HOARY stuff. Even longer fill was leaving me cold today: WTATOUR, EIDETIC, STEPWISE ... knew it, heard of it, no idea (respectively), but none of it has real zing. But the real problem here is how inside-baseball the theme is. Those three long themers fit symmetrically, sure, but otherwise, I don't know why they're here. Truly random trivia. This puzzle's sole reason for being appears to be the nonstandard elements, namely the two-letter words and the two blank squares. And for that, I give the puzzle credit. And a full star more than I was actually inclined to give it. But when you've got four good squares to thirty-seven yawners that are just taking up space ... that's not a good balance. I know there are lots of crossword solvers who enjoy Scrabble, but that Venn diagram overlap does not include me. If it includes you, maybe you enjoyed this. Me, I just wanna go back and stare at that Stevie Wonder puzzle some more.

Nothing to slow you down today besides the trivia, and maybe a couple of the longer answers I already mentioned. EIDETIC is ... not exactly an everyday word. I had seen it before, somewhere (maybe a crossword? ... yes, this is the fourth appearance in the Shortz Era). STEPWISE was totally new to me (15D: From one tone to the next adjacent tone, in music). I just built it from the crosses, and inferred the -WISE part. Obscure to me, but maybe common to music folks, I don't know. Aside from the two-letter themers and the blank squares, the only things that gave me pleasure today were WET NOSE (who's a good buddy!?) and WINGSPAN (though ... more birds, less Howard Hughes, please). I also liked the clue on SAMSON (24D: Biblical figure with a notoriously bad hair day?). Oh, and ALFRED BUTTS made me laugh, the way "BUTTS" might make a 10-year-old laugh. This 10-year-old specifically:

Bullets:

• 3D: Ones who have trouble finishing sentences? (ESCAPEES) — I didn't love the wordplay here at first, since you escape because you want to be free, not because you are unable to finish your sentence (as the wording of the clue seems to imply). But I've since warmed to the clue. Perhaps because there was so little to keep me warm today.
• 10D: Belmont entry (COLT) — this threw me, since other kinds of horses (geldings, fillies) can race at the Belmont. I needed the "O" from COLT to get "AS DO I" (ugh), which could just as easily have been "AS AM I" (16A: "Same here," more stiffly).

• 31D: Hamburger connection? (UND) — UND = "and" in German. "And" is a "connecting" word (aka a conjunction).
• 44D: Straight-horned antelopes (ORYXES) — you know you've been solving crosswords way, way too long when you can actually think of two six-letter plural antelopes that start with OR-. Nearly twenty years ago, in the first week of this blog's existence, I discovered there was an antelope called the ORIBI. And so, today: ORIBIS! Back in 2006, my suggestion that ORIBI was perhaps not a well-known word inspired a reader named "grandpamike" to comment "this blog is just a bad idea imho." Sadly, grandpamike seems to have deleted his comment in the intervening two decades;  happily, I seem to have taken a screenshot:

Thankfully, the next comment I got (from good old Anonymous) was this: "This site is one of the best I've seen on crossword puzzles. Good graphics, good references...highly entertaining! If grandpa mike doesn't want to have hints about the puzzle, no one is forcing him to look at your site. I hope you keep it up." I kept it up. But I remember grandpamike fondly. 

[ORIBI: in my defense, those horns are pretty straight]

That's all for today. This blog turns 20 tomorrow. Hope to see you then.  

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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Swahili for "journey" / WED 3-25-26 / Suffers no damage / Sea urchin, to a sushi chef / Something a commuter might need to catch / Sedative in a zookeeper's dart, informally / Cocktail made from gin, vermouth and Campari / Longtime U.K. record company

Constructor: Jeff Stillman

Relative difficulty: Easy (possibly harder, depending on your familiarity with the movie titles)

THEME: Sequels — four movie sequel subtitles, hinted at by reference to the "grid art" (black squares that form the Roman numeral "II"):

Theme answers:

• FREDDY'S REVENGE (3D: A Nightmare on Elm Street [see grid art])
• HERE WE GO AGAIN (15D: Mamma Mia! [see grid art])
• LOST IN NEW YORK (7D: Home Alone [see grid art])
• BACK IN THE HABIT (11D: Sister Act [see grid art])

Word of the Day: Jules VERNE (34A: Captain Nemo's creator) —

Jules Gabriel Verne (/vɜːrn/; French: [ʒyl ɡabʁijɛl vɛʁn]; 8 February 1828 – 24 March 1905) was a French novelist, poet, and playwright.

His collaboration with the publisher Pierre-Jules Hetzel led to the creation of the Voyages extraordinaires, a series of bestselling adventure novels including Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864), Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas (1870), and Around the World in Eighty Days (1872). His novels are generally set in the second half of the 19th century, taking into account contemporary scientific knowledge and the technological advances of the time. [...] 

Jules Verne has been the second most-translated author in the world since 1979, ranking below Agatha Christie and above William Shakespeare. He has sometimes been called the "father of science fiction", a title that has also been given to H. G. Wells and Hugo Gernsback. In the 2010s, he was the most translated French author in the world. In France, 2005 was declared "Jules Verne Year" on the occasion of the centenary of the writer's death. (wikipedia)

• • •

I really want to like this one, and I guess I do, but with reservations. I really enjoyed figuring out what the hell was going on, and this was one of the very few times that "grid art" ever did a damn thing for me. The "art" was simple, apt, and (ultimately) self-evident, and I actually used it! After trying to make Freddy Krueger stretch to fit the space by spelling his name FREDDIE KRUEGER (in my defense, Freddy can be pretty stretchy), I realized the KRUEGER part was never going to work, so eventually I got it to FREDDY and thought "what the hell?" Then I looked at the "grid art," saw the "II," and immediately realized I was going to be dealing with sequels. Now, that didn't give me REVENGE right away, but it helped me infer REVENGE pretty quickly from crosses. This brings me to one of two big problems I have with the theme execution today, namely that three of the subtitles have "sequel"-ness built into them, but one does not. That is, FREDDY'S REVENGE, HERE WE GO AGAIN, and BACK IN THE HABIT (the one subtitle I actually knew) all suggest a "return" to something ("revenge," "again," "back"), whereas LOST IN NEW YORK ... pfft. That just fits the space. Nothing particularly "sequel"-y about it. Why is this important? Well, two reasons. One is, not everyone (not even close to everyone) is going to know these subtitles off the top of their heads. The originals, sure, they're all famous (probably why they got sequels), but the sequel subtitles? No. Having some word indicating "sequel" in the subtitle is a giant help to solvers, who can then infer what they don't know. It also gives the themer set a sense of cohesion, the lack of which is the other big problem I have. The grouping here is totally arbitrary. Why these movie subtitles? Because they fit symmetrically is the only answer I can come up with, and that's not enough. Having "sequel"-ness baked into the subtitle at least gives the themer set *some* kind of unifying principle, however slight. With LOST IN NEW YORK in there, though ... now you've just got four random subtitles. Far less elegant.

Speaking of elegance, you've got a movie theme, so ideally (for me) you'd ditch all other explicitly movie stuff, all the stuff that's not part of the theme. No KATNISS, no MIRREN. And you'd need a new clue for MEL (54D: Brooks of film). Of these three film answers, only KATNISS was the outright distraction (since KATNISS was not just in The Hunger Games but in the sequels as well). I'm looking for a sense of careful construction, of theme cohesion, of execution that makes the theme really pop against the background of the fill. Movie content in the fill today feels like ... leakage. I was more dismayed by ugliness like DOTER and SLEEKEN, though. And OMAHANS. That's one of those words like UTAH(A)NS that is never gonna look right to me, only ... at least UTAH(A)NS applies to a whole state full of people. OMAHANS feels like it's missing a letter of syllable. Why not OMAHANIANS? You know, like Bahamas / Bahamians. Otherwise... how do you even pronounce "OMAHANS?" "O-MAH-hans"? "O-muh-HANS?" Do you sneak a little extra syllable in there when no one's looking?: "O-muh-HA-uns?" Truly, the awkwardest demonym. OGREISH is an OK word but it looks insane written out, like an Irish name (O'GREISH!). As for LAST BUS ... I wavered on it for a bit, but now I think I like it. It's no LAST TRAIN (to Clarksville or elsewhere), but it's a real phenomenon, and the "need" in the clue really sells it (7A: Something a commuter might need to catch).

Bullets:

• 1A: Swahili for "journey" (SAFARI) — should've been a gimme, I think, but I had DAS instead of AGS at 2D: Chief prosecutors, in brief, which put a "D" in the second "SAFARI" position :( I also had TAD before SOU up there (1D: Paltry amount). SOUs are the official currency of Crossworld, as decreed by OOXTEPLERNON, the God of Bad Short Fill (hallowed be His name). I have to remember to celebrate OOXTEPLERNON Day on October 30, for that is the day (in 2009) when OOXTEPLERNON revealed himself unto us, in grid form. How to celebrate? Simple. You sacrifice an Oreo (if you sacrifice it by feeding it to a NENE, even better ... for you. Probably not for the NENE)

• 20A: Sedative in a zookeeper's dart, informally (TRANK) — wrote in the TRAN- and then waited on the cross. Thought it might be a "Q" (both TRANK and TRANQ had five NYTXW appearances in the Modern Era ... before today. Now TRANK's ahead. Stay tuned for further information on the great TRANK/Q wars as it becomes available.
• 58A: Cocktail made from gin, vermouth and Campari (NEGRONI) — mmm. It's almost NEGRONI Season. When is NEGRONI Season? No one really knows. That's the beauty of NEGRONI Season.
• 47D: Suffers no damage (IS OK) — hoo boy, if any answer in this puzzle gave me trouble, it was this one. ISOK? ISOK?! Talk about four letters that do not look ... OK. ISOK??? Didn't she write Out of Afroca? You know, ISOK Dinoson!? The NYTXW once (maybe more than once) tried to convince me that I should know a Dilbert character (!?) named ASOK. ISOK makes me almost miss ASOK.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on BlueSky and Facebook and Letterboxd]
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Series of steps in Spain / SAT 11-25-2023 / Something often containing a single parenthesis / Qatar left it in 2019 / Ending with hot or honey / Legal checks / Illinois city near St. Louis / To us, in Latin

Constructor: Jeff Stillman

Relative difficulty: Hard

THEME: None

Word of the Day: CHER (54D: Singer whose likeness was the highest-selling doll of 1976, surpassing Barbie) —

Cher (/ʃɛər/; born Cherilyn Sarkisian; May 20, 1946) is an American singer, actress and television personality. Often referred to by the media as the "Goddess of Pop", she has been described as embodying female autonomy in a male-dominated industry. Known for her distinctive contralto singing voice and for having worked in numerous areas of entertainment, as well as adopting a variety of styles and appearances, Cher rose to fame in 1965 as one half of the folk rock husband-wife duo Sonny & Cher before launching a successful, six-decade-long solo career.

• • •

Hi everyone, it's Rafa back for another guest blog. Hope you enjoyed my puzzle yesterday, and Eli's guest post about it. Rex should be back tomorrow in case you are tired of us!

The license plate does say TREASURE STATE

I've always thought that blogging about a puzzle you disliked is a lot harder than blogging about a puzzle you loved. This is going to be a difficult post to write because this puzzle was absolutely not for me in any way! I think the best format here is to just have some bullet points going over some of the aspects here that didn't work for me:

• -ENNE is bad fill to me in three (!) ways. It's a suffix, which is gluey, and way less satisfying to fill in than an actual word. But it's also very rare ... what words even use the -ENNE suffix? Comedienne??? Which is a segue into reason number three ... it's weird to have gendered suffixes like this for things that do not have to be gendered! A comedian who is a woman is just ... a comedian! Really I could not be less into this piece of fill.
• EEEE is also really, really, really not great. It feels so goopy, just a string of four Es in the grid like that, somehow worse than an abbreviation or suffix or prefix in my brain. But also, most importantly, is it even a thing, really? I've bought shoes many times in my life and have never seen EEEE out in the wild. EEE (also bad, don't get me wrong!) has been a bit more of a crossword staple ... but a fourth E? No, no, no.
• WOOERS feels like a really awkward -ER form to me.
• DNAS plural is pretty tortured. "DNA samples" sure. But DNAS? I just don't really buy it as a thing.
• This one is probably on me, but I'd never seen HISSY stand alone like that. "Hissy fit" feels very in-the-language to me, but HISSY felt a bit off and, so, not as satisfying (though it has strong dictionary support, so as I said, probably on me).
• The ALTON / MALONE crossing could have plausibly been any vowel to me. ALTON is a city of 25,000 in Illinois ... okay. I know Cheers is a well-known show, but I've never watched it.
• The entire NOBIS / ASTRA / ABEL / SCOTTS / HAUER situation was just a laugh-out-loud Natick-fest to me. Never heard of any of these the way they were clued! ASTRA was inferable, but tough when so many crossings were unknown ... it's pretty rare that I have to look things up but there was just absolutely no way this section (particularly the NOBIS crossings with ABEL and SCOTTS) was going to come together.
• MIS and RES are both super gluey use-only-if-very-desperate pieces of fill, and the clue echo didn't really rescue it as much as make it more visible.
• KOTO was new to me, and I couldn't quite remember BLUTO, so that crossing was also a complete guess. I think KOTO is totally fine fill ... good even! It's fun to learn a new instrument from a puzzle! But it's important to make sure all the crosses are rock-solid.
• This is really the least of our worries here, but ISM and GEO are two more suffix/prefix type entries. (Though I loved the angle on GEO! Have you guys seen the TikTok-famous guy who always knows exactly where he is after seeing a blurry, pixelated, upside-down photo for 0.1 seconds? He's iconic!)
• I get that it's Saturday, and again I love learning things from puzzles, but LAI felt like gluey fill that I didn't find particularly interesting.
• I see it has pretty good dictionary/Google support, but E-CRIMEs do not feel like a thing to me. Some e- things are things! Like e-bike, that's a thing! e-commerce, that's a thing! e-file, becoming less and less of a thing, I think (who *doesn't* e-file their taxes these days? do we really need to specify anymore?) but still, yes, a thing. But some e- things are not things. e-money: not a thing! E-CRIME (IMO): not a thing, etc.
• BAD ONE doesn't really stand alone as a crossword answer. Would [any adjective] ONE work as fill? It just came across as a bit made up.
• X-ray SPEX only really Googles as an English rock band. There is a Wikipedia page for "X-ray Specs" ... but SPEX doesn't really feel super in-the-language to me. (I might be wrong ... does anyone actually use "spex" when referring to glasses? Maybe!)
• ICBMS: don't love nuclear weaponry in my puzzle, but also this acronym is pretty much impossible to infer to someone who might (understandably, I'd say) not have brushed up on their nuclear weapon acronyms recently.
• UGHS is a really weird plural. It doesn't really feel natural to say or write "ughs." Something like "ahas" is way better in my book, because "aha" can be used colloquially as a noun ... something like "what a satisfying aha at the end of that puzzle!" ... but not really with UGHS.
• MILLION MOM MARCH is a wonderful answer, but I think it would have been a stronger marquee closer to when it actually happened, 23 years ago. I really wanted MARCH FOR OUR LIVES here, which feels a lot more recent and relevant, and I was sad when that didn't quite fit!
• CIS labeled as a "modern" descriptor felt a bit weird ... I understand that "cis man" and "cis woman" were a lot less widespread terms in the past but cis men and cis women have been a thing for all of recorded history! Not a super huge deal, but the modifier didn't really work for me.
• And, finally, RECTI: yet another 5-letter (!) uncommon prefix.

Soooooo, with all that out of the way ... there were some very nice longer entries! IMAGE AWARDS, YES I SUPPOSE, THE PLOT THICKENS are all fantastic! But it just really was not worth it for me today.

Neptune is, indeed, an ORB

Oh, and there were two outstanding clues in this puzzle: SIMON (22D: Says who?) and CHER (54D: Singer whose likeness was the highest-selling doll of 1976, surpassing Barbie). Good wordplay! A fun fact! That's what I come to crosswords for.

This is a KOTO

I'm afraid I don't really have much else nice to say about this one, so I'll stop here. I hope you were able to ENJOY this one a lot more than I did!

Signed, Rafa

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Pioneering journalist who helped expose McCarthyism / WED 9-28-22 / Margarine whose ads once featured a talking tub / Team that signed to join the Big Ten in 2024 / BTS's V Suga and RM e.g. / Clergy house / Word that commentators may extend to five or more seconds

Constructor: Jeff Stillman

Relative difficulty: Easy

THEME: INITIAL HERE (38A: Contract directive ... or a hint to what's missing from 17-, 20-, 58- and 62-Across) — The "initials" H, E, R, and E are (respectively) omitted in four names

Theme answers:

• WILLIAM [H.] MACY (17A: "Fargo" actor)
• ALFRED [E.] NEUMAN (20A: Mad magazine symbol)
• EDWARD [R.] MURROW (58A: Pioneering journalist who helped expose McCarthyism)
• CHUCK [E.] CHEESE (62A: Rodent with a restaurant chain)

Word of the Day: EDWARD R. MURROW (58A: Pioneering journalist who helped expose McCarthyism) —

Edward Roscoe Murrow (born Egbert Roscoe Murrow; April 25, 1908 – April 27, 1965) was an American broadcast journalist and war correspondent. He first gained prominence during World War II with a series of live radio broadcasts from Europe for the news division of CBS. During the war he recruited and worked closely with a team of war correspondents who came to be known as the Murrow Boys.

A pioneer of radio and television news broadcasting, Murrow produced a series of reports on his television program See It Now which helped lead to the censure of Senator Joseph McCarthy. Fellow journalists Eric Sevareid, Ed Bliss, Bill Downs, Dan Rather, and Alexander Kendrick consider Murrow one of journalism's greatest figures. (wikipedia)

• • •

Many moods for this puzzle. First, annoyance that WILLIAM MACY was in the grid without the damned "H," what the hell? Then, relief upon finding, with ALFRED NEUMAN, that the missing initial was actually a bit the puzzle was doing. Then, excitement upon wondering what these missing initials might spell, and what the revealer might be. Then (and mostly finally), disappointment at finding the revealer phrase so dull and bureaucratic, as well as ever-so-slightly ... off. I think part of the reason my brain is resisting this revealer is the fact that "initial" also means "coming first," which of course none of the "initials" do. I admit that this is not entirely fair—it's my brain refusing to let things just mean what they mean. But when I look at that revealer, all I can do is imagine an entirely different theme where the *first letters* H, E, R, E are missing, for some reason. Mostly the revealer just doesn't snap, both because it's inherently boring (as initially paperwork is boring), and because it doesn't quite describe what's going on, at least not in a perfect, dead-on way. I understand what the revealer wants me to think, but because it's INITIAL HERE and not (the nonsensical) INITIALS HERE, you keep having to back up and repeat the phrase in order to make it make sense: the initial "H" is missing, the initial "E" is missing, etc. So there's a very clever idea here somewhere (spelling something with the middle initials of famous people / spokesrodents), but that idea only gets so-so realization here. 

The bigger, much bigger, problem is the fill, which is consistently weak despite two pairs of cheater squares (these are the black squares that do not change the answer count, the ones added to a grid solely to make filling easier—today, see the black squares after STAR and CARB, before CLAY and ROMP). It's a fairly dense theme, so I give the puzzle a little leeway where shorter junk is concerned, but there's an awful lot. Cheater squares should be used if they get you from iffy to smooth, but these appear only to have gotten the grid to iffy. Not sure why I'm seeing AHME and ALII and UPC CNET SSE, then AHS (when we Already Have an AH in AHME!? Such an easy fix, too ... baffling); then ISAY DAW SYS in one unfortunate clump, then that INLA LAALAA stack, my god, and then NRC YOHO (you use a cheater square and all it gets you is ... YOHO!?). Working my way through this grid was kind of a chore, with very few interesting or even smooth patches to brighten the journey.

I'm not sure about this COMMON SENSE clue (9D: Not standing in an open field during a lightning storm, say). I mean, yeah, that sounds like a bad idea, but I think COMMON SENSE would tell you to seek shelter under a tree and that is *definitely* the wrong thing to do. People died in DC this summer for that very reason. I distrust people's ideas of what COMMON SENSE is. But I suppose on a literal level, yes, COMMON SENSE does say come in (into a building) out of the storm, you weirdo / golfer. Not finding it easy to make LET and [Gave the OK] mean the same thing. That is, I'm trying to find the sentence where I can swap them out. I LET her = I gave the OK *to* her ... hmmm ... "Gave the OK" can just stand on its own, where LET is a transitive verb ... I'm sure there's a way to get them to line up perfectly, but the clue just feels off to me right now. Possibly coffee will help. To that end ... see you tomorrow.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld 

P.S. Bonus Content: here's the first page of the MAD paperback pictured above:

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City where you won't find Virgil's tomb / MON 1-18-21 / 1986 sci-fi sequel set in deep space

Constructor: Jeff Stillman

Relative difficulty: Medium (3:01)

THEME: American / European cities — four cities in America, clued as *not* their European namesakes:

Theme answers:

• PARIS, TEXAS (17A: City where you won't find the Eiffel Tower)
• ATHENS, GEORGIA (24A: City where you won't find the Parthenon)
• NAPLES, FLORIDA (46A: City where you won't find Virgil's Tomb)
• TOLEDO, OHIO (56A: City where you won't find the El Greco museum)

Word of the Day: Virgil's tomb (see 46A) —

Virgil's tomb (Italian: Tomba di Virgilio) is a Roman burial vault in Naples, said to be the tomb of the poet Virgil (October 15, 70 BC – September 21, 19 BC). It is located at the entrance to the old Roman tunnel known as the Crypta Neapolitana or grotta vecchia in the Piedigrotta district of the city, between Mergellina and Fuorigrotta. // Virgil was the object of literary admiration and veneration before his death. In the following centuries and particularly in the Middle Ages his name became associated with legends of miraculous powers and his tomb the object of pilgrimages and pagan veneration. At the time of Virgil's death, a large bay tree was near the entrance. According to a local legend, it died when Dante died, and Petrarch planted a new one; because visitors took branches as souvenirs the second tree died as well. (wikipedia)

• • •

This seems a pretty decent set of answers, and a pretty original way to clue them all ("City where you won't find..."). Wish there'd been a way to include the one glaring omission from this set: MOSCOW, IDAHO. While it's true that Moscow, ID is not as nationally well known as any of the others, there is a major university there (the University of Idaho); my mom grew up in Idaho, my grandma lived there until her death last year at the age of 99, and my aunt, uncle, and cousins used to live a short drive from Moscow (in Lewiston, ID), so I'll admit the place is probably more on my radar than it is on you, but still, the University of Idaho angle makes it legit and at 11 letters long it could've sat in the middle of the grid. The puzzle probably would've ended up more Tues. or Wed.-level in difficulty, though, just because Moscow, ID is a little more obscure, and the grid would've been tougher to fill cleanly, but it probably would've worked. Still, this set is fine. And I learned something about Virgil's tomb, which, who knows, maybe will come in handy when I start teaching the Aeneid yet again in a few weeks. 

I ended up with a fairly normal Monday time, but that average time masks the fact that I was Very slow to start and Very fast to finish. When the top Acrosses give me trouble on a Monday, I'm in trouble, and man did they give me trouble. The clue on PIN UP was by far the hardest (1A: Get ready to hem, say). Just no idea. There is a Monday meaning for PIN-UP and this ain't it. The Monday meaning is a racy picture, the hyphenated PIN-UP. The Betty Grable PIN-UP. The verb phrase, yeesh, that took several crosses to see. And then the next top Across, 6A: Hankering (ITCH), at four letters, I confidently wrote in URGE. Again, there is a Monday meaning of ITCH, and this ain't it. So two fat whiffs on the first two Acrosses on a Monday, when a mere twenty seconds of solving time is the difference between Easy-Medium and Medium-Challenging, yikes. Luckily the bottom half of the grid went much, much faster. The kind of fast that feels like flying. So I managed to get my time back to ... boring normal. 

The fill on this is a bit musty, a bit last-century in its predilections (can't remember the last time I saw MATA, and then there's the other crosswordese name part, ALVA, for instance) but it's a clean kind of stale. The one "look at me, kids! I'm slangy!" bit in the puzzle somehow also felt olden: "NERD ALERT!" I think Homer Simpson says this once, maybe, when he goes back to college and tries to be one of the Jocks. Somehow I find nerd discourse infinitely tiring these days. People brag about being nerds now; cool / pretty / rich people imagine that they are, or were, nerds, so, the whole insult angle ("Poindexter!") feels either dated or fraudulent. I don't mean to get IN A LATHER about it (is that expression still in use?), it's just that "NERD ALERT!" felt some combination of abusive and old-fashioned and didn't land for me. HAS-BEENS are by definition passé, and yet I really liked that answer. PHASE TWO is stupidly arbitrary, but harmless, I guess. Overall, a luke-warm thumbs-up today. See you tomorrow.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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Aziz Iraq War figure / TUE 6-18-19 / Double-apostrophe contraction / Old Italian capital / Jumbo combatants

Constructor: Jeff Stillman

Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium to Medium (3:30)

THEME: Interrupting MCs — familiar two-word phrases have MC- added to front of second words, creating wacky phrases that appear to be about famous(ish) people / characters with Irish last names ...

Theme answers:

• BEING MCCOY (17A: Autobiography of a "Star Trek" doctor?)
• SACRIFICE MCFLY (23A: Kill off a major "Back to the Future" character?)
• RUNAWAY MCBRIDE (51A: Film star Danny hurriedly leaving the set?)
• ICE MCQUEEN (60A: Help film star Steve recover from an action sequence?)

Word of the Day: Danny McBride (See 51-Across) —

Daniel Richard McBride (born December 29, 1976) is an American actor, comedian, and writer. He starred in the HBO television series Eastbound & Down and Vice Principals, both of which he co-created with frequent collaborator Jody Hill. He has also starred in films, such as The Foot Fist Way(2006), Pineapple Express (2008), Tropic Thunder (2008), Up in the Air (2009), Your Highness(2011), This Is the End (2013), and Alien: Covenant (2017). (wikipedia)

• • •

So there's an idea here, but it doesn't really have anywhere to go. Maybe there is some way to make this theme work—some way to give the themers that extra layer of coherence that they so desperately need, some way to bring the lot together with a playful revealer or something—but whatever that way is, if it exists, this constructor hasn't found it. He seems to want to bring the group together around some vague concept of Hollywood—two fictional screen characters, two actors—but that just puts us all in Uncanny Valley territory: close enough for us to see it's trying, but not close enough to be convincing. So it's just MC MC MC MC. The core gimmick is consistent, but it's slight, and who cares? Beyond that, there's not much here. Why would you put actual CRAP in your own puzzle. CRAM is approximately 2 million times better there. Maybe 3 million. Unfathomable. And I'M A MESS, too. This puzzle is literally crying for help.


Very slow to start on this one, as "adjuncts" to me (from my university setting) refers to people, not parts of classes (in this case, LABS) (1A: Science class adjuncts). All LAB clues should be required to be about dogs. I'D'VE made the clue about dogs, for sure (note: just 'cause I just used I'D'VE doesn't make it good). And then there was a horrible moment of total guessing on my part when, after SPOCK was wrong, I wrote in MCCOY, which I thought was maybe MCKOY (which now looks ridiculous to me, but mid-solve, seemed plausible). That C/K issue was In No Way resolved by the cross, which was RICKI, a name in the title of a movie I have literally never heard of before this puzzle (7D: "___ and the Flash" (2015 Meryl Streep movie)). Once you know the theme, you can see that it has to be MCCOY (though "being coy" is a very weak base phrase, imho). Also, as I say, MCKOY looks very wrong once you type it out (I was probably thinking of MCKAY). Anyway, lots of hesitation in here as I tried to make sense of what the hell was going on. Rest of the grid went Much faster.


Why would you clue OTIS as [Mayberry sot]. Aside from being super dated, it feeds into the whole tired "alcoholism is here for our amusement" thing. There are many OTISES (OTI? OTES? OTISSES?) in the world. Redding. That elevator dude. To name just two. Also, maybe make PAM an actual woman instead of a cooking spray. I see you've got MARIAH in there but Did You Know you can put more than one woman in a puzzle!? I mean, you put four dudes in the puzzle In The Themers Alone. Theme should've been tighter, fill should've been more polished. PAM and OTIS deserved better. The end.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

P.S.

RE: ORCA (65A: Marine menace)

If you really cherish the alliteration in the clue so much, there's [Mammoth marine mammal] or [Seal swallower] or, I don't know, be creative!

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Dame Myra of piano fame / TUE 5-22-18 / Compound in synthetic rubber / Constellation next to Draco / Sheik's land in poetry / drain decloggers

Constructor: Jeff Stillman

Relative difficulty: Medium, sliding toward Medium-Challenging (*for a Tuesday*) (3:58)

THEME: BIG DIPPER (9D: Part of 17-Across ... and what the circles from A to G depict) — themers related to big dipper and connect-the-dots gives you a kind of replica of said dipper:

Theme answers:

• 17A: Constellation next to Draco (URSA MAJOR)
• 34D: Thing located in the night sky by extending a line from circle F past circle G (NORTH STAR)
• 64A: Another term for 17-Across (GREAT BEAR)

Word of the Day: RONDEL (47D: 14-line verse with only two rhyme sounds) —

A rondel is a verse form originating in French lyrical poetry of the 14th century. It was later used in the verse of other languages as well, such as English and Romanian. It is a variation of the rondeau consisting of two quatrains followed by a quintet (13 lines total) or a sestet (14 lines total). It is not to be confused with the roundel, a similar verse form with repeating refrain.

• • •

OOF. The theme would've been OK, I guess—it's got issues, which I'll get into, but it does what it does and some people like drawing on their puzzles, so, whatever, fine—but when you throw in the fill, this one just slides down enjoyment mountain into the valley of OOF. Let's start with the theme. It's all over the (star) map. It's main purpose seems to be to create a connect-the-dots puzzle that allows us / forces us to envision the BIG DIPPER. But the revealer is in this weird place, and it's clued as *part* of some bigger constellation, which is in the puzzle ... twice (once in Latin, once in an English form that no one ever uses). And then there's NORTH STAR ... which is also called Polaris, but you don't see that here. Also, Polaris is not in the BIG DIPPER or anywhere in URSA MAJOR (it's in the minor bear). So it's conceptually interesting, somewhat ambitious, but rough. And then the fill, come on, can we get this stuff cleaned up. Editors should be sending MTW puzzles with fill like this back to constructors with a "please improve this" message. You know at ARABY that things aren't gonna be great. And then bang there you are with all of ESO BESO which causes you to pause for a stunned second ORSO (!) like some kind of DODO. But OOF, EENY EMO NEG ANOD (!?), ASEA TERI LAO INURE ELON ENOLA (sans gay) SERE ILSA LYES *and* RYES (rhyming unlikely plurals!) ... and that's not even touching the longer unpleasantness BUTENE and RONDEL. This thing is Out of the Past, except "Out of the Past" is one of the greatest movies of all time, so scratch that. It's just stale.


I don't really stop to read and figure out long cross-referenced clues if I don't have to, and I'm certainly not consulting circles unless absolutely necessary, but the theme answers were pretty gettable without much time spent mucking around trying to figure out the exact relationship of the stars in space. Difficulty came from fill. In and around BUTENE, in and around RONDEL—that was all my puzzle drama. Didn't know if it was gonna be ENURE or INURE (16A: Habituate) and stupidly (and mostly inexplicably) wrote in PADUA for 9A: Noted tower setting (BABEL). I was probably thinking PISA, but there were five letters, so ... PADUA! Had trouble with ON DOPE because ... what year is it? Also DODO because DOLT DOPE etc. (36D: Numbskull). And there's ORBIS, dear lord, why? It's Tuesday. What does the "?" in the clue even mean? Is "Caesar's world?" some kind of expression? A pun? ORBIS ... honestly, that answer alone should've prompted a rewrite request. Really hope you know Latin or else are *certain* about the whole ILSA / ELSA thing (which I still botch like half the time ... including today). Do better, puzzle!

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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