Apple pan ___ (baked pastry) / WED 4-1-26 / Bone that squeaks, maybe / Midwestern native

Constructor: Jess Shulman and Amie Walker

Relative difficulty: Easy...? (7:06 on my phone while walking home)

THEME: QUIP — In a classic "Quip Puzzle," the clues are just there to show you where to write each part of the quote. Here, each clue (phrased just like they would be in a Quip Puzzle) is a literal description of the entry. More details below!

Theme answers:

• [Quip, part 1] for QUICK START
• The first part of the term "quip" is the letter Q, so that is circled
• Additionally, the "start" of the word "quick" is the letter Q
• [Quip, part 2] for YOUNG AT HEART
• The first part of the term "quip" is the letter U, so that is circled
• Additionally, the "heart" (or center) or the word "young" is the letter U
• [Quip, part 3] for SECOND IN LINE
• The third part of the term "quip" is the letter I, so that is circled
• Additionally, the "second" in the word "line" is the letter I
• [Quip, part 4] for PAY UP FRONT
• The fourth part of the term "quip" is the letter P,  so that is circled
• Additionally, the "front" of the word "pay" is the letter P

Word of the Day: Apple pan DOWDY —

Grunts, pandowdy, and slumps are Canadian Maritimes, New England, and Pennsylvania Dutch varieties of cobbler, typically cooked on the stovetop, or in an iron skillet or pan, with the dough on top in the shape of dumplings. They reportedly take their name from the grunting sound they make while cooking. Another name for the types of biscuits or dumplings used is dough-boys. In the United States, additional varieties of cobbler include the Betty, the buckle (made with yellow batter [like cake batter] with the filling mixed in with the batter), the dump (or dump cake), and the sonker. The sonker is unique to North Carolina: it is a deep-dish version of the American cobbler. [wiki]

• • •

Hey squad! Happy Malaika MWednesday! Short write-up from me today as I have some work I need to finish :( I wondered what trick they'd throw at me for their April Fools' Day puzzle, and this seemed pretty tame. I think I could see it as a Thursday puzzle if it hadn't been April 1st.

Constructors can be so creative! I could imagine brainstorming aspects of this theme, but no way could I have come up with every part and got them all working together. Quip Puzzles are a very polarizing type of theme. Everyone I know (including me) hates them. (I only say they're polarizing as opposed to hated bc presumably some people must like them if they keep getting published??) So I think it makes a lot of sense to theme a puzzle around making a solver think it's a Quip Puzzle and then pulling the rug out from under them.

I don't solve cryptic crosswords, but I understand that the clues in them are similar to what's going on here. You are plucking letters that will be in the entry from parts of the clue, with words like "start" or "second" giving you hints. We've seen cryptic-esque clues in Sam's April 1st puzzle from several years ago. And even regular puzzles will occasionally employ cryptic techniques like [Enrollment center?] as a clue for ELS.

I wonder how many phrases they brainstormed for each of the letters! I could imagine, e.g. PICK FIRST as an entry for [Quip, part 4], so I think part of the challenge comes from getting everything to have a symmetrical number of letters. With some puzzles, if you have (e.g.) two theme answers that are ten letters and two that are thirteen letters, you can swap the positions of theme answers 1 & 4 and answers 2 & 3. Here, the order matters.

On top of the cleverness of the theme, there were some great long entries with I GOTTA SAY, INDIE POP, HOT DATES, WATCH THIS, DOG TOY, and TREE FROG. So impressive! I found the clues throughout to be really easy, which I think made the theme entries fall into place for me. Even though I didn't clock what was going on until the puzzle was fully done (I knew it wasn't a Quip Puzzle, but I didn't get what the theme entries meant), my time was still average.

Bullets:

• [Go a-courtin'?] for SUE — Cute!
• [Nash who wrote "Who wants my jellyfish? / I'm not sellyfish!"] for OGDEN — I comment on a lot of the older references that are lost on me, but I know and love Ogden Nash. (Because my grandparents had a book of his rhymes at their house lol.)
• [Kind of burger that lacks meat] for SOY — I've heard of VEGGIE burgers, black bean burgers, impossible burgers, beyond burgers.... I have never heard of a soy burger!
  

xoxo Malaika

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What gives Scotch an earthy flavor / MON 2-12-24 / Undergarment for a dress / Menial workers, dismissively / Baked things that might get people baked / Long, cylindrical instrument

Constructor: Jess Shulman and Amie Walker

Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium (solved Downs-only, untimed)

THEME: [Get my innuendo?] — this clue is used for four repeated-word phrases that you might use when you want to make sure your meaning is being understood 

Theme answers:

• NUDGE NUDGE
• WINK WINK
• HINT HINT
• COUGH COUGH

Word of the Day: Midori ITO (58A: Midori ___, first woman to land a triple axel in competition) —

 

Midori Ito (伊藤みどり, Itō Midori, born 13 August 1969) is a retired Japanese figure skater. She is the 1989 World champion and the 1992 Olympic silver medalist. She is the first woman to land a triple-triple jump combination and a triple Axel in competition. At the 1988 Calgary Olympics, she became the first woman to land seven triple jumps in an Olympic free skating competition. She is widely recognised as one of the best figure skaters of all time. (wikipedia) 

• • •

An excellent Monday theme, I think. It's a bit weird, and maybe even a little shaggy, in that the first two phrases are usually said rather than done (i.e. if you actually winked twice, people would wonder what you were doing ... awkwardly flirting, maybe?). So they are stated actions ... but then HINT HINT ... is not that. The word "HINT" isn't standing in for "hint," it's literally just saying "HINT." And then COUGH COUGH ... well, that's another category of answer entirely. Unlike NUDGE NUDGE and WINK WINK, COUGH COUGH is a phrase I've never actually heard anyone say. That's an action that's done rather than said. So this group of four really isn't that tight ... except that they are all repeated-word phrases and they all mean or represent basically the same thing. Somehow it works. You understand intuitively what links them all, and they're structurally linked by their double-wordness, so you're only gonna balk at this theme if you think about it too hard, which is pretty much what I do about every theme, but today ... I dunno. The grouping seemed clever. Simple. Imaginative. Good. And the grid didn't give me hives. No great shakes, but POT BROWNIES and BEAT THE HEAT are definitely above-average long Downs, and if the rest of the fill is average, that's fine. Good theme, good long Downs, OK fill ... that's a win.

If the green ink on my printed-out puzzle is any indication, it looks like there were three Downs that gave me trouble today during the Downs-only solve, and one Across that I had significant trouble parsing. As for the Downs, ORDOC was probably the hardest to get on its own terms. That is, I couldn't hope to understand it from the clue alone (46D: Surgeon, for short), so I had to wait on (inferred) crosses, but I couldn't infer any of those with certainty until I had COUGH COUGH in place. That gave me the terminal "C" which finally got me to ORDOC. I had a reasonable amount of trouble coming up with ENSHROUD as well (41D: Cover completely). Even with the -OUD in place, I had to sit and think for a bit. Didn't help that I had SWALE (!?!?!?!) instead of SWATH at 30D: Strip of mowed grass. What the hell is a SWALE? Marshland of some kind? Ah, a "sunken or marshy place," yes. Anyway, grass is involved, so I don't feel *so* bad, but neither do I feel great. Actually, knowing the theme really helped here, as I was able to infer HINT HINT from -IN--IN- (once I finally pulled out SWALE), and that got me the "H" I needed to get PATHS (ambiguous noun-or-verb clue on that one, 26D: Trails), and from there I could get other Acrosses in that area, which finally allowed me to bring down BEAT THE HEAT, the last of the three recalcitrant Downs in today's solve (24D: Keep cool in a pool, perhaps). "SO I HEAR" was the one Across answer that was (slight) murder to parse (55A: "That's what people tell me, anyway") (had the SOI- but at that point had no way to know there was a break between "SO" and "I"). Anyway, all of this amounted to a fairly standard Downs-only struggle. Never was I well and truly stuck.

The only Down I really balked at was the very first one I saw: 1D: Chicken leftover (BONE). I wrote in BONE, but I did so very, very tentatively, as "leftover" is (in one common meaning of the word) something you eat, whereas a BONE is something you deliberately do not eat; it's something you discard. So my brain wanted the edible rather than the inedible kind of "leftover," hence the balking. But there's nothing wrong with the clue. It just threw me a bit. Nearly everything else, and certainly everything else under eight letters (besides ORDOC and (for me) SWATH) was very easy to get. Simple, bouncy, good. A fine Monday.

I'm going out-of-state this week, so my wonderful substitute team will be on duty here until Saturday. Starting tomorrow, you get Clare (T), Mali (W), Eli (Th), Mali (F). And then I'm back. Have a great week. See you when I see you.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld 

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

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Sports star turned model Gabrielle / THU 3-24-22 / Strip of computer shortcuts / Half of an old movie duo / Marvel mischief-maker / Traditional canoe material / Like oxygen therapy chambers

Constructor: Jess Shulman

Relative difficulty: Easy (for a rebus, very easy)

THEME: RAISE THE [BAR] (58A: Heighten expectations, say ... or a hint to entering four answers in this puzzle) — for four answers, you have to "raise" a box containing the word BAR at the end of the answer in order for it to make sense in the grid—that BAR box then works like a regular rebus box in the Across and Downs. So:

Theme answers:

• SUSHI [BAR] (as you can see in the grid, the [BAR] has been "raised" above the "I" in SUSHI) (20A: Place to order sake and sashimi)
• RAIN BARRELS (17A: Sustainable water receptacles)
• BARISTA (18D: One with the grounds to serve you?)
• TASK [BAR] (34A: Strip of computer shortcuts)
• EMBARGOED (28A: Banned from trade or commerce)
• BIRCH BARK (8D: Traditional canoe material)
• MINI [BAR] (47A: Where you might find very little liquor)
• DISEMBARK (44A: Get off)
• HYPERBARIC (25D: Like oxygen therapy chambers)
• DIVE [BAR] (62A: Shabby establishment)
• RAISE THE BAR (58A: Heighten expectations, say ... or a hint to entering four answers in this puzzle)
• CABARET (51D: Club with dinner and a show)

Word of the Day: SARA Delano Roosevelt (46A: New York City's ___ Delano Roosevelt Park) —

Sara Ann Delano Roosevelt (September 21, 1854 – September 7, 1941) was the second wife of James Roosevelt I (from 1880), the mother of President of the United States Franklin Delano Roosevelt, her only child, and subsequently the mother-in-law of Eleanor Roosevelt.

Delano grew up in Newburgh, New York, and spent three years in Hong Kong. She gave birth to Franklin in 1882, and was a devoted mother to him for the remainder of her life, including home schooling and living close by in adulthood. She had a complex relationship with her daughter-in-law Eleanor, which has led to media portrayals of her as a domineering and fearsome mother-in-law, though these are at odds with other views. She died in 1941, with her son, then the President, at her side. (wikipedia)

• • •

This puzzle was fun to solve even though the theme was actually kind of a mess. Let's start with the basic concept—the BAR is not raised. Or, rather, it is raised, but only after it is also squashed into one square. Nothing about RAISE THE BAR indicates that there will be squashing. You can't just say RAISE THE BAR and then leave out "oh, also squash it first." Further, the BAR isn't so much raised as it is sitting on top of the prior letter in the answer. A "raised" bar would've just floated straight up; e.g., the [BAR] would not be sitting on top of the "I" in SUSHI but instead sitting above where the [BAR] *should* be had the answer continued normally (so, where the "REL" is in RAIN BARRELS). The revealer is incomplete, in that it doesn't account for squashing, and it's incorrect in that "raising" isn't precisely what's happening. I initially thought that the revealer was more inaccurate still, in that I could count only three (not "four") BARs that had been raised. The BAR in the revealer / CABARET didn't appear to have been "raised" at all. But I had failed to notice that DIVE was actually DIVE [BAR]. You really (really) don't need BAR there to make the answer work, so I never registered that BAR was supposed to be there. A [Shabby establishment] is a DIVE. Full stop. Hence my confusion. But yes, DIVE [BAR] also works for the clue, so fine. And about these four [BAR]s. It's at least slightly weird that SUSHI [BAR] actually terminates in a black square (which seems appropriate), whereas the others ... somehow terminate ... in the middle of a Down answer??? Since [BAR] is not so much "raised" as turned up, it really feels as if we're supposed to read ... up. SUSHI [BAR] functions normally in that respect, i.e. the answer terminates with a black square, as all answers in a crossword terminate with a black square (or the edge of the grid, I guess). But TASK [BAR] stops in the middle of BIRCHBARK, so you get TASK [BAR] HCRIB if you follow normal crossword rules for answer termination. This is yet another problem with not *actually* raising your [BAR] but instead turning it up, as if the answer had merely veered off in a different direction. So much conceptual slop. And yet ...

And yet the [BAR]-containing answers were mostly a joy to uncover, by far the best part of the solving experience. Normally, tracking down rebus squares, especially if they are all the same, is kind of a dreary experience, but the [BAR] answers today were a lot of bouncy fun. RAIN BARRELS, BIRCH BARK, HYPERBARIC! Delightful. So I can't say I didn't enjoy myself, even though I think the theme is broken in multiple ways. The rest of the grid is solid too. No real groans or cringes. Well, ODIST is always a bit of a cringe, but it's an outlier today. So I don't think the theme really worked but I liked it anyway. Weird. But true. 

I had the usual "huh?" struggle before getting the rebus, but it didn't last long. I got SUSHI early and could see that the [BAR] was missing, so ... it was just a matter of *how* it was missing. Didn't take long to circle the rebus square and pin it down. After that, it was just a matter of [BAR] hunting, and none of the [BAR]s was that hard to find. Only struggles I had along the way were very minor. I had MIC TAP instead of TAP TAP (which I don't *love*, and which cost me a handful of seconds) (31A: Sound check sound), and I simply had no idea who SARA Roosevelt was (never heard of the park in question). But every cross was not just fair but easy, and SARA is a recognizable, common name—a name I'm happy to learn today. The end. See you tomorrow.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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