Curved bedframe style / SAT 6-10-23 / Mythological figure with an eponymous body part / Roman statesman for whom a Midwest city was named / Speaking openly in texts / Either brother in an old pop duo / Hermes invention in myth

Constructor: John Hawksley

Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium

THEME: none 

Word of the Day: Triple ENTENTE (51A: Triple ___) —

The Triple Entente (from French entente [ɑ̃tɑ̃t] meaning "friendship, understanding, agreement") describes the informal understanding between the Russian Empire, the French Third Republic, and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. It was built upon the Franco-Russian Alliance of 1894, the Entente Cordiale of 1904 between Paris and London, and the Anglo-Russian Entente of 1907. It formed a powerful counterweight to the Triple Alliance of Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy. The Triple Entente, unlike the Triple Alliance or the Franco-Russian Alliance itself, was not an alliance of mutual defence.

The Franco-Japanese Treaty of 1907 was a key part of building a coalition as France took the lead in creating alliances with Japan, Russia, and (informally) with Britain. Japan wanted to raise a loan in Paris, so France made the loan contingent on a Russo-Japanese agreement and a Japanese guarantee for France's strategically vulnerable possessions in Indochina. Britain encouraged the Russo-Japanese rapprochement. Thus was built the Triple Entente coalition that fought World War I.

At the start of World War I in 1914, all three Triple Entente members entered it as Allied Powers against the Central Powers: Ottoman Turkey, Germany and Austria-Hungary. On September 4, 1914, the Triple Entente issued a declaration undertaking not to conclude a separate peace and only to demand terms of peace agreed between the three parties. Historians continue to debate the importance of the alliance system as one of the causes of World War I.

• • •

I always feel like I'm meant to ooh and / or aah at these Saturday puzzles with wide-open centers like this, where lots of long answers intersect. What I usually feel, and feel today, is that a few of the answers are nice and some are OK and others feel weak or obscure or jury-rigged in some way. The Acrosses in there seem fine–I really like "HE STARTED IT!," and I'm not sure I would've gotten good traction at all without CINCINNATUS—but the Downs are less appealing. Hard to like something like TELESCOPIUM, which sounds more like an element than a constellation, and anyway I have no idea what that is or what stars are in it or anything. Big shrug. And "STAND AT EASE" is really badly clued. Do they really say the whole thing like that. The only "order!" I've ever heard used is "AT EASE!" STAND AT EASE is something you do after the order, I guess, but it doesn't feel like an order (exclamation point!). ORNAMENTING is weird in the gerund form, and contributes to this puzzle's overall -ING problem: SETTING FREE near ORNAMENTING crossing E-SIGNING crossing TIRING (we'll let GINGER slide...). I definitely recognize that the center was probably tough to construct, and that making it come out as smooth as it is is a kind of feat, but there were too few highs for me today. Felt a bit bland, a bit off, especially in the cluing. What does a MOM CAVE have to do with "zen." Are they using "zen" ... super-metaphorically here? Like, it's where mom goes to find some ... zen-as-in-peace? Is she meditating? Is a MOM CAVE even a thing? Is that somebody's idea of gender equity? "Well, we've got mancaves, why not MOM CAVEs? Surely we can sell *that* concept to anxious upper middle-class people!" It's better than SHE-SHED, I'll give it that. Anyway, you're insulting Zen is all I'm saying (note: Zen, being Zen, doesn't care). The best/worst thing in the grid is CAWCAWED (32D: Quoth the raven?). I hate/love it, then hate it again, then love it some more. I wish it were crossing EAPOE so my hate/love could expand infinitely throughout the universe. The past tense, my god! As I worked my way through theoretical CAW verb permutations (CAWCAWING? CAWCAWCAW?), my mind boggled, then toggled, then it just melted away. I'm not even sure it's there any more. Very Zen.

Felt very POWERLIFTER-y right off the bat today, as SLEIGH was my first guess at 1A: Curved bedframe style and GEL and ISIAH immediately confirmed it. In almost no time I was here:

... and HALOGEN BULB dropped from there. Then things slowed down considerably. Weirdly, the biggest mistake I made in that center area was a small one: GET IN for GET TO (24A: Find time for). "I'm gonna try to GET IN a few rounds (of golf?) before it rains," something like that. This wee mistake gunked up two of the long Downs for a bit, but eventually "HE STARTED IT!" became undeniable and all the letter combos got bad and I had to pull IN and think for a bit and then, of course, TO, GET TO. Other errors: I had HIREE instead of HIRER (28D: Headhunter's correspondent). Surely a headhunter has to contact the head that she's hunting, right? But I guess at *that* point the "correspondent" is not yet the HIREE, fair enough. No other outright errors, though bizarrely I blanked, or partially blanked, or felt creepily unsure about, two three-letter answers that I absolutely know: AMC and GTI. I watched Mad Men loyally and wrote in AMC easily ... but then it was turning the zen place into MOM-something and that made no sense so I looked at AMC and thought "Is that even right? Isn't that ... American Movie Classics ... why would a TV show be on American Movie Classics? ... A Movie Channel? ... jeez louise, what do letters even mean anymore!?" Turns out AMC did (originally) stand for American Movie Classics. But now it ... doesn't. As for GTI, I wanted that, but it started seeming more like an infection than a car, so I considered GTO, but I knew that the Beach Boys or Jan & Dean or whoever were not singing about a Volkswagen, so out went the "O." Eventually, with both these short answers, I ended back where I began, with my first instinct, which was correct. 

[Ronnie & the Daytonas!? How many surf rock bands were there!?]

Other things:

• 34D: Prudent poker player, perhaps (PASSER) — oof, this puzzle has a way of putting a bright hot spotlight on its worst fill. I know you "pass" in poker but would you ever call anyone a PASSER? The American football clue is always going to be the best one if you have to use PASSER (there's a "PASSER rating" and everything). 
• 8D: Fly, at times (LURE) —think fishing ("fly" = "a fishhook dressed (as with feathers or tinsel) to suggest an insect" (merriam-webster.com))
• 26A: Not from Scotland (NAE) — i.e. the word "Not," as they would say it in Scotland.
• 34A: Athlete often found on the bench (POWERLIFTER) — "bench" = the "bench" from which you do the "bench press" (one of three powerlifting components, along with deadlift and squat: the Triple ENTENTE of weightlifting!)
• 39A: Van trailer? (BUREN) — this clue is CAWCAWED levels of loopy, and yet I got it easily, and kind of liked it. BUREN "trails" Van in the name of our beloved, mutton-chopped president, Martin Van BUREN. Look on this facial hair, ye mighty, and despair!

Have a lovely, hopefully smoke-and-haze-free weekend. See you next time.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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Journalist podcaster Rehm / WED 11-16-22 / Indie band known for their high-concept viral music vidoes / Obsession with being published / Biblical unit of weight / Venue with a token-based currency / Giant Brain in 1946 news

Constructor: John Hawksley

Relative difficulty: Medium-Challenging

THEME: It's all Greek (or Latin) to me... — obscure words with familiar suffixes are clued both as what they mean and what they do NOT mean ... the NOT part is what helps you figure out the spelling of the word:

Theme answers:

• TYPOMANIA (17A: Obsession with being published ... NOT a flurry of transcription errors)
• ARCTOPHILE (24A: Lover of teddy bears ... NOT a devotee of polar regions)
• PANTOPHOBIA (35A: Fear of everything ... NOT a fear of trousers)
• MANDUCATES (50A: Chews ... NOT elaborates condescendingly to a female)
• METROLOGY (59A: Science of measurement ... NOT the study of urban areas)

Word of the Day: DIANE Rehm (41A: Journalist/podcaster Rehm) —

Diane Rehm (/ˈriːm/; born Diane Aed; September 21, 1936) is an American journalist and the host of Diane Rehm: On My Mind podcast, produced at WAMU, which is licensed to American University in Washington, D.C.. She also hosts a monthly book club series, Diane Rehm Book Club, at WAMU. Rehm is the former American public radio talk show host of The Diane Rehm Show, which was distributed nationally and internationally by National Public Radio. The show was produced at WAMU.

Rehm had announced her plans to retire from hosting the show after the 2016 elections. The final program was recorded and distributed on December 23, 2016. Rehm announced she was going to host a weekly podcast, which she began doing in January 2017.

Rehm is the co-producer, narrator, and interviewer of When My Time Comes, distributed by PBS stations across the country. Her book by the same name was published in 2020 by Knopf. The Washington Post describes Rehm as a leading voice in the right to die debate. (wikipedia)

• • •

Did not think much of the theme at first, but somehow warmed to it as the puzzle went on—that is fairly rare. Usually the arc of feeling runs in the other direction: a puzzle strikes me as cute or interesting and then just wears thin by the end. My first thought was "so it's just obscure words that look like they mean something different than what they mean?" And yes, that is it. But there's something I ended up liking about the idea that giving me *wrong* information is actually *helping* me solve the puzzle. There's an odd consistency to it, or near consistency: their opening parts all look deceptively familiar (i.e. they look most like very familiar things ... that have nothing to do with the actual meaning of the word); they all have very familiar suffixes, which help us piece everything together (I thought these were all suffixes of Greek origin, but the -DUCATES part of MANDUCATES is from the Latin ... but I think the familiarity, not the etymology, is the important thing); and, maybe most importantly, their apparent (i.e. NOT) meanings are almost all entertainingly silly, with the silliest of them all, PANTOPHOBIA, sitting dead center, in pride of place, where it belongs. Even though I warmed to the idea as I went on, I think the themers are a little weaker on the bottom—neither MANDUCATES nor METROLOGY has the crystal clear NOT meaning that the first three themers have. MANDUCATES looks more like it means "educates a man" than "educates (a woman) *like* a man. I get that the clue is trying to make an analogy from "mansplaining," but that feels a bit forced. As for METROLOGY ... that's the only one of these five answers where I might actually have guessed the correct meaning. It definitely looks like it could mean "the study of urban areas," but it just doesn't have the "what the hell!?" wackiness or deceptive quality that the others do. Still, conceptually this works, and piecing together the odd words ended up being oddly enjoyable.

The puzzle played a little slow to me, largely because of the weird theme words. The piecing together just took some time. ARCTOPHILE took the most time, as I realized, early and with alarm, that despite having seen Timothée CHALAMET in several movies and knowing his name very well, I somehow knew how to spell his (unusual) *first* name but had neglected to register what all the vowels were in this *last* name (5D: Timothée of "Beautiful Boy" and "Dune"). This is to say I thought maybe CHALOMET ... which, now that I look at it, seems improbable, but that's where I was at. And then I had COS at 22D: Sin : y-axis :: ___ : x-axis but started to doubt it when it really seemed like the clue wanted me to think "Arctic," i.e. ARCTI-, i.e. "I" not "O." So now I'm doubting my 11th-grade trigonometry memory and things are getting to be a bit of a mess. Eventually the "O" became undeniable, but that answer gave me minor fits, and the NE corner in general wasn't helping me along. Utter blank on SPADAY. Needed every cross. Do people still say "Staycation"? Or SPADAY? When I see [Staycation option] I think "... couch?" The worst thing about that corner, though, was of course E-BILL, which is so bad I literally laughed out loud. Actual LOL. Just the worst E-answer I've ever seen (please, constructors, don't use EANSWER, that was not a suggestion). 

Mistakes? Well, I wrote in MASTICATES at first for that fourth themer because it's a word that means "Chews" (how many words for "Chews" do we need!?). No other out-and-out mistakes, but I struggled with SITSKI (1D: Para alpine sport equipment). I think if "Para" had been attached to "alpine" in some way I might have figured it out sooner, but I did not get the disability angle from stand-alone "Para" somehow. If I'm shopping, I think of a "find" as an item that I am purchasing, not the tag *on* that item, so the clue on  SALE TAG was tough for me today (45A: Fun find for a bargain hunter). That's it for struggles. None of the struggles amounted to much; they just put me a little on the slow side. I think the fill on this one stays largely clean and largely interesting, even outside the themers. Strong Downs in all the corners. You've got crosswordese here and there (you know, RESOD, ENIAC, etc.), but there's not much, and anyway it's just functioning as glue, holding ample good stuff in place. There's something old-fashioned-seeming about this theme, and even the overall fill, but it's a delightful kind of old-fashioned. I'm into it. See you tomorrow.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld 

P.S. One big gripe that I left out, re: the MANDUCATES clue: "to a female"!?!?! "... elaborates condescendingly to a female"!?!?! Unless you're elaborating condescendingly to your pet or a farm animal, that should really be "woman." Maybe there was some idea of not wanting the clue to contain any form of "MAN" (even "wo-MAN") since "MAN" was part of the (fake) cluing concept, but ... calling women "females," oof, whatever kind of feminist intent this clue was supposed to have really backfired there.

P.P.S. I'm now looking at CHALOMET and thinking it seems *reasonable* so I don't think my uncertainty about spelling his name was so unreasonable after all.

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Father of Calypso / SAT 10-15-22 / Corp with red umbrella implied in its logo / Latin music duo / What classic sonnets do / Fashion trend embraced by Fendi and Versace / The first T of TOTY / Is shocked or horrified by the image of jocularly / Potentially prophetic child / Adherent to the motto Fortune favors the bold

Constructor: John Hawksley

Relative difficulty: Medium-Challenging (3/4 Medium, 1/4 Challenging)

THEME: none 

Word of the Day: SCAN (6D: What classic sonnets do) —

1. 3. 

   analyze the meter of (a line of verse) by reading with the emphasis on its rhythm or by examining the pattern of feet or syllables.

   • (of verse) conform to metrical principles. 

     "well, it doesn't rhyme and certainly doesn't scan" (my emph.) (Oxford languages / Google)

• • •

Short write-up today as I have things to do before I head up to Ithaca and hang out with a certain all-star crossword constructor (and lovely human being). I took one look at this grid and knew it wasn't going to be my cup of tea. These low word-count, super-segmented, boxy, essentially four-part (four-quadrant) puzzles are always more Hard than they are Fun, and today's was no exception. When your grid requires you to use APISHLY (!?!), a word no human being has ever actually used and which even the clue doesn't seem to know the meaning of (12D: How an imitator or silly person acts), the rest of that grid better be sterling, and of course is demanding grids like this it never is. At its best, it's pretty good—that SE corner on its own is really impressive, and impressively smooth. Here, there is just the one less-than-stellar answer (LIM.) and that answer makes possible a whole array of great longer answers. The whole stack of Acrosses at the bottom is solid, especially "IT WASN'T ME" and CAN'T UNSEE, which are wonderful. From YESMAN around to CODPIECE, that corner works really really well. But it was hard to get excited about much else in the grid. SEVENTH SON? (27D: Potentially prophetic child). I don't really know what that is. Sounds biblical. I've heard it used metaphorically, I guess, but, well, it's no ATHLEISURE (one of the few longer answers outside the SE that I was excited to see) (26A: Fashion trend embraced by Fendi and Versace). 

The truth is, though, that I don't remember much about this puzzle except for the NW because ugh, again, as I said, these things always break down into essentially four separate puzzles, and without real flow between the sections, once you get stuck, you get Stuck. And in the NW, hoo boy, I got stuck hard. How stuck? This stuck:

Very appropriate that one of the very few answers I had up there was IRKS (and *that* was a total guess). I teach "classic sonnets" (not a term I'd use) every single semester. All the time. From Petrarch to Donne, I really do have the sonnet form covered. And yet faced with the clue 6D: What classic sonnets do, I had no idea. I was like "Well, RHYME doesn't fit ... and I'm out." I deal with poetic meter in detail, all semester long, and yet I've never once asked myself if a poem SCANs or not. I guess SCANs just means "has a regular meter." This is obviously a case of my being (way) too close to the material. *All* poetry in the period that I teach (~1300-1700) SCANs (of course early on in the period you still have the odd alliterative poem, but ... this is probably more than you want to go into right now...). "Scanning" is common to lots and lots of lyric poetry; it's not particular to the "sonnet." So deflating to get such a general term after getting such a specific clue. Then there's the other end of the spectrum—the topic I know nothing and care nothing about: PORSCHES! (9D: Taycan and Macan) And corporate logos ("implied" umbrella?!?). Figured "Fortune favors the brave" was the motto of some org. My guess is that most actual RISKTAKERs have zero awareness of that concept. Never give it a thought. Thank god I knew HAKEEM, or I'd really have had no traction in that corner. Finally (finally!) I got *some* god to fit in the ---AS section (ATLAS!). And those three new letters, oddly, broke the whole quadrant open. First AMIRITE!? Then MARACAS. And things fell from there, but not with any great revelations. What's the last place I would ever find myself, question mark? That's right, a MAGIC SHOP (1A: Tricky spot to be in?).  This is very much a case of my aversion to the physical form of the grid coupled with my highly personal, probably idiosyncratic distaste for much of the content of the grid, as well as the cluing. It was a proper Saturday workout for sure. Just didn't have enough high points for me. But again, props to that SE corner. It's a beauty.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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Protagonist of the O.C. / FRI 11-19-21 / Pioneering brand of caffeine-free soft drink / Phrase popularized by Long John Silver of Treasure Island / Eponymous instrument inventor Adolphe / Smaller than usual endearingly / Vast poetically / Sheik's peer / Presidential monogram of the early 1800s / Black sorority with 3000,000+ members in brief

Constructor: John Hawksley

Relative difficulty: Medium

THEME: none 

Word of the Day: GTA (47A: Popular video game series with cars, for short) —

Get That Ape!

Grand Theft Auto (GTA) is a series of action-adventure games created by David Jones and Mike Dailly. Later titles were developed under the oversight of brothers Dan and Sam Houser, Leslie Benzies and Aaron Garbut. It is primarily developed by British development house Rockstar North(formerly DMA Design), and published by its parent company, Rockstar Games. The name of the series references the term "grand theft auto", used in the United States for motor vehicle theft.

Gameplay focuses on an open world where the player can complete missions to progress an overall story, as well as engage in various side activities. Most of the gameplay revolves around driving and shooting, with occasional role-playing and stealth elements. The series also has elements of the earlier beat 'em up games from the 16-bit era. The games in the Grand Theft Auto series are set in fictional locales modelled after real-life cities, at various points in time from the early 1960s to the 2010s. The original game's map encompassed three cities—Liberty City (based on New York City), San Andreas (based on San Francisco), and Vice City (based on Miami)—but later titles tend to focus on a single setting; usually one of the original three locales, albeit remodelled and significantly expanded. The series centers on different protagonists who attempt to rise through the ranks of the criminal underworld, although their motives for doing so vary in each title. The antagonists are commonly characters who have betrayed the protagonist or their organisation, or characters who have the most impact impeding the protagonist's progress. Several film and music veterans have voiced characters in the games, including Ray Liotta, Dennis Hopper, Samuel L. Jackson, William Fichtner, James Woods, Debbie Harry, Axl Roseand Peter Fonda. (wikipedia)

• • •

Well, things started out easily enough:

After that, I tried to run the Downs—actually, I had tried to run the Downs first, which is usually what I do when confronted with 3- (or 4-) stacks, but that got me nowhere, so I just peeked at the Acrosses first. Anyway, I went after the Downs and still did not make much headway. Got most of the way Across the grid with only ELI and ELEANOR in place. Then I hit the NE and things picked up ... they also got a whole lot uglier:

Anything "poetically" is usually a disaster, but for some reason ENORM feels Particularly disastery. They don't mean "poetically," as no "poet" would use that word. It's deeply olden. I think I see it sometimes in the poetry *I* teach (medieval, early modern), and I'm sure it had legs through the 19th century, but no one would touch that word in the 20th and after unless they were quaint or ironic or just bad. Something like 'NEATH or O'ER I can tolerate, "poetically," as those are just contractions, usually used for the sake of maintaining metrical regularity. But ENORM—you love to see it ... in Coleridge, maybe. Not so much here. And now. "Poetically" is true enough, but "obsoletely" is more accurate ("obsolete" is Merriam-Webster's word, not mine). Crossing HARKS, ENORM really, uh, throws things back. Not in a good way. This is the trouble with these stack grids—an olden form themselves, much in fashion when (usually) men thought them to be showy accomplishments (and technically, architecturally, they were, esp. before constructing software). But when you stack long answers, oh, the crosses. That's where things can go very wrong for you. The ones today are OK, but you can really hear the creak with ENORM IFA and HOTTO (which I was stunned to find out was the real answer—I figured that since it was so obvious an answer to the clue (2D: "Too ___ Handle" (Netflix)), no way it was right. You could at least tell me what the Netflix series is *about*. If you're gonna give me junk fill, at least, I don't know, educate me ... something).

None of the marquee answers are that hot. ETHNIC RELATIONS is a phrase, I guess, but it gives me weird vibes. Like, you'd only use the phrase if things were going very bad. Don't love it. I NEED A HUGE FAVOR is a thing you would say, sure, but I got I NEED A and saw that FAVOR was gonna be the ending, and then thought, well, I NEED A FAVOR works, so ... now I just have to find a random adjective? Coulda been BIG or GIANT. The whole phrase doesn't snap the way I want it to, somehow. HATERS GONNA HATE already feels very dated. I think it's been dated since ... when did Tayl*r Sw*ft use it in a lyric? When was "Shake It Off"? Anyway, it was by definition dated when she used it, so it just didn't have the currency (or POP, I guess) that maybe it was supposed to. 

(2014! LOL even older than I thought!) (P.S. this song is catchy, no

T*ylor sl*nder intended)

The abbreviations were also pretty dire today. Grand Theft Auto is very famous, but that doesn't make GTA great fill. And JQA, yeesh. No one knows him that way. We have to endure a lot of monograms in this crossword life, and yes, I've had to endure this one before, but I shouldn't have to. All so you could get what? A "Q"? And DAD JOKE? Not worth it. SHIVER ME TIMBERS is nice, as is "IT HAPPENS..." and FUN SIZE. But in the end I don't think the marquee answers are snappy enough, or the resulting fill strong enough, to make this really Work. I'm judging this one by Friday standards, which are the Highest Standards, so just know that it's ... it's fine. But there wasn't a lot of joy here. If you want to do a truly wonderful triple-stack puzzle (just one stack, not two), try this one by Claire Rimkus (for free!) over at the Just Gridding blog. Really lovely.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld 

P.S. no idea RCCOLA was caffeine-free and really really had no idea it was "pioneering" (6D: Pioneering brand of caffeine-free soft drink). To me, it was always a fictional soda no one drank because they were too busy drinking Coke or Pepsi like normals.

P.P.S. I told you (see yesterday's write-up for more on the recent SASS wave):

P.P.P.S omg I only just realized that [Sheik's peer?] (53D) is a pun and oof that one hurts. Gotta go sheik it off (sheik it off)

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