1974 CIA spoof / THU 8-13-20 / Fitting nickname for athletes at Whittier College / Sea creature pictured on flag of Anguilla

Constructor: Jon Olsen

Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium (5:42)

THEME: THREE MUSKETEERS (57A: Group whose motto is a hint to this puzzle's theme) — "All for one and one for all—letter strings "ONE" and "ALL" are swapped inside all the themers, resulting in, well, gibberish:

Theme answers:

• FONEINGROCKZALL  (i.e. falling rock zone) (17A: Sign on a mountain roadway)
• RHALLVONEEY (i.e. Rhone Valley) (22A: Famed French wine region)
• PHALLCONE (i.e. phone call) (35A: Dinnertime annoyance)
• SLY STONEALL (i.e. Sly Stallone) (51A: Actor with a "Rocky" performance, familiarly)

Word of the Day: bird's nest soup (32D: What the nests in bird's-nest soup are made of => SPIT) —

Edible bird's nests are bird nests created by edible-nest swiftlets, Indian swiftlets, and other swiftlets using solidified saliva, which are harvested for human consumption. They are particularly prized in Chinese culture due to their rarity, high nutritional value in nutrients such as protein, and rich flavor. Edible bird's nests are among the most expensive animal products consumed by humans, with nests being sold at prices up to about $3,000 per pound ($6,600/kg), depending on grading. The type or grading of a bird's nest depends on the type of bird as well as the shape and color of the bird's nest. It is usually white in color, but there also exists a red version that is sometimes called "blood" nest. According to traditional Chinese medicine, it promotes good health, especially for the skin. The nests have been used in Chinese cuisine for over 400 years, most often as bird's nest soup. (emph. mine) (wikipedia)

• • •

When I was done, all I could think about was SPIT, and about how sad that was. SPIT. As a piece of land or a slender rod for roasting meat, I don't mind the word, but as a rough synonym for "saliva," I find it gross, mostly because it evokes the (human) activity of spitting. You can keep your SPIT out of my puzzles, thanks. But the presence of SPIT here was made so so so much worse by the really weird and misleading clue. I have to believe that the term for what the nests are made of is "saliva." SPIT is a slangy word associated with humans. The idea that birds make their nests with SPIT seems ... odd. I will admit that I had no idea that the nests were saliva-based and in fact I assumed that there was some other culinary thing called "bird's nest soup" involved here in which the "nests" were made of, say, vermicelli. I thought the answer was gonna be a more typical human food thing. I had SPI- and would not write in the last letter / assumed I had an error until the very, very end. I'm never going to believe that SPIT > saliva here. SPIT is an informal, grosser form of the word, and I can't see how it squares with this culinary / avian context. I wouldn't put SPIT in my grid at all, and if I did I would insist it be clued with one of its non-saliva meanings. There's an ick factor; and today, there's a weird anthropomorphization factor. This one answer completely blotted out the rest of the puzzle for me. 

But I guess there was a theme and I should address it, however briefly. I see that the concept is very ... precise; I mean, all for one and one for all, yes, that is exactly what you are doing as you solve, so the concept is literal, I'll give it that. But just look at the grid. It's just nonsense. RHALLVONEEY is a thing that is in this grid. If you're going to do the thing, there should be a good reason and a pleasant result of some sort for doing the thing. Doing the thing just to do the thing gets you, well, this: flagrant non-wordness. What's more, once you grok the theme, the rest of the themers all of a sudden get way way way easier, because you know those circled squares are going to have ALL or ONE in them, so you can just fill them in with very little help from crosses, without even looking at the clue. Also, once you do look at the clue, you know that both ALL and ONE are in there somewhere. SLY STONEALL is I think supposed to be the cleverest of the bunch, but it's actually the worst, in the sense of "least wacky." SLY STONE is a real person, and now ALL I want to do is listen to his music rather than think about this puzzle anymore. 

Further: Kevin SORBO is right-wing dipshit à la Chuck Woolery and Dean Cain and Scott Baio and James Woods and other has-been white-guy fuckwits of the entertainment world, so seeing his dumb ass in the grid wasn't any fun (34D: Kevin who played Hercules). I applied to Whittier (Nixon's alma mater!) when I was applying to college and had no idea they were the POETS (46A: Fitting nickname for athletes at Whittier College). That would not have been a selling point, even though I grew up to teach [checks notes] poetry. There was a big quake in Whittier my first year in college (I went to a different southern California college). No idea why you need to know that, but now you can figure out my exact age if you just do a little stalker-like googling. The "?" clues seem pretty straightforward, though big eyeroll for 13D: February 4th, for many? (SILENT R). There's no silent "R," there's just correct and incorrect pronunciation. Hate SAFARIS as a verb (1D: Travels à la Theodore Roosevelt in 1909-10). Had FICTION before FANTASY (3D: Bookstore section). Had no idea who RON Cephas Jones was. I barely watch network TV and don't care about the Emmys. If Rhea Seehorn has no Emmys (for playing attorney Kim Wexler on AMC's "Better Call Saul"), then the Emmys are clearly meaningless. Five seasons and she's Never Even Been Nominated, LOL, go to hell, Emmys. 

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

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Something to believe in / TUES 8-6-19 / Ballet leap / Home of Anne of Green Gables / Bygone kind of tape

Hi, everyone! It's Clare — and I'm writing on the first Tuesday of the month this time around. Hope everyone managed to stay cool during the record-breaking heat in July. I'm learning that summer in DC is very different from what I'm used to in California — the humidity is ridiculous! Anywho, onto the puzzle...

Constructor: Jon Olsen

Relative difficulty: Quite hard

THEME: BLUE ON BLUE (61A: 1963 Bobby Vinton hit... or a hint to both halves of 18-, 23-, 37- and 54-Across) — Both parts of the theme answers fit with the word "blue" after them.

Theme answers:

• BABY POWDER (18A: Bottom coat?)
• ARCTIC OCEAN (23A: Habitat for a walrus)
• ROYAL NAVY (37A: Its motto, translated from Latin, is "If you wish for peace, prepare for war")
• COBALT STEEL (54A: Drill bit alloy)

Word of the Day: CASCA (5A: Co-conspirators with Brutus and Cassius) —

Publius Servilius Casca Longus (84 BC – c. 42 BC) was one of the assassins of Julius Caesar. He and several other senators conspired to kill him, a plan which they carried out on 15 March, 44 BC. Afterwards, Casca fought with the liberators during the Liberators' civil war. He is believed to have died by suicide after their defeat at the Battle of Philippi in 42 BC. (Wiki)

• • •

Well, I had a hard time with this puzzle. In fact, the solve had me feeling a bit blue (if you'll pardon the cheesy pun — my brain is a bit fried after trying to work this puzzle out). A lot of my trouble may have come from the fact that the puzzle is very much OLD TIME (11D). The longer answers didn't really click with me while I was solving, and a lot of the puzzle is stuff I wasn't expecting to see in a Tuesday puzzle, so I wasn't quite in the right mindset while solving.

The theme was clever enough. It didn't help with the solve, but it was somewhat fun to go back after the fact and see how BLUE ON BLUE worked with the theme answers. My color knowledge from those giant Crayola crayon boxes from elementary school came in handy because I actually knew all these different shades of blue! Probably my favorite of the theme answers was BABY POWDER (18A), which gave me a good laugh when I figured it out. The other theme answers were fine. I just didn't particularly enjoy them because the rest of the puzzle gave me trouble.

Probably my least favorite of the fill was DATSUNS (42D: Old Nissan Autos). Yes, I'm pretty young, but I've never heard of these cars before in my life. Same with Esther ROLLE (52A: Esther of "Good Times"), AEC (50A: Early nuclear org.), SYD (33D: Guitarist Barrett), or AJA (64D: Best-selling Steely Dan album). It's 100 percent fine to put these in a puzzle, but to see all of these (and more) words/phrases on a Tuesday?

The constructor did have clever clues/answers in the puzzle, too. I particularly enjoyed EVE (60A: Good name for a girl born on December 24?) and ALPHA (9D: Leader of Athens?), which were good uses of clues with question marks at the end. Likewise, I found SLEEVED (12D: Like LPs and some dresses) fun; same with CLAUSE (51D: A dependent one might start with "that"). I weirdly didn't find KLEENEX (45D: Something that may be used before a blessing) all that amusing, which I'm going to attribute to the fact that I solved that corner last and was very, very ready to just be done with the puzzle at that point. Also, some of the short fill answers were clued differently than usual, which was nice.

Bullets:

• Maybe I couldn't come up with CHELSEA (25D: Posh neighborhood of London or New York) because it's not Liverpool. (And we all know that Liverpool has the best men's soccer team, of course. Chelsea is mediocre — at best!)
• Sorry, OONA Chaplin, you were great in GOT, but your character, Talisa, was done dirty in the show.
• My sister tells me that TWEED (56D: Jacket material) is going to be very "in" this fall! Who needs Vogue when you've got the Rex Parker crossword blog?
• I got a kick out of LENS (65A: Focusing aid), because I was literally solving the crossword while my glasses sat on top of my head... unused. Oops!
• In my opinion, Dennis QUAID (28A) has a much better resume than his brother, Randy (including The Parent Trap and The Rookie, two amazing movies I've seen way too many times), and Randy seems to have turned into a bit of a kook. So I'd give the point in the Battle of the Brothers to Dennis!

Signed, Clare Carroll, a melting DC law clerk

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

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Raised block of earth's crust to geologist / THU 4-25-19 / Home to mythical ferry / Blot on landscape / Onetime competitor of RCA Columbia / Online moderator for short / Center of Krupp family dynasty

Constructor: Jon Olsen

Relative difficulty: Easy if you figured out those center squares faster than I did; spent 5 min. on everything but the center, then another 90 seconds+ trying to work out the center (~6:30)

THEME: :-) — long themers lay out in detail all the elements of a HAPPY FACE (3D: Response to solving this puzzle) (not at all) when you represent it as an EMOTICON(S) (don't ask why EMOTICONS is in the plural, it's terrible, I know) (35D: Images such as 3-Down). COLON, HYPHEN (18A: First two symbols in a 3-Down), and PARENTHESIS (61A: Final symbol in a 3-Down) are represented visually in the center of the grid as a rebus (where EYES, NOSE, MOUTH appear in successive boxes) (39A: Elements of a 3-Down)

• (EYES)ORE (39D: Blot on a landscape)
• PIA(NO SE)ATS (25D: Perches for some musicians)
• PLY(MOUTH) (26D: ___ Rock)

Word of the Day: HORST (44D: Raised block of the earth's crust, to a geologist) —

noun

GEOLOGY

1. a raised elongated block of the earth's crust lying between two faults. (google)

• • •

What is with the painfully straightforward earnest puzzles. Yesterday's was a remedial trivia test, and today, an extended explanation of what, exactly, an EMOTICON is (weak that the revealer is in the plural, considering there's just the one, but that's the least of this thing's problems). First, it's a SMILEY FACE, not a HAPPY FACE. Second, it's not just PARENTHESIS. It's very specifically the close PARENTHESIS. Please do not tell me the distinction does not matter. It is, in fact, the determining difference between a smiley face and a frowny face. You can't just say PARENTHESIS without specifying which one. One thousand boos! What else? Well, EMOTICONS are pretty dated now, what with the advent of emojis, but that's not really the puzzle's fault. The NYT is always living like 5-to-50 years in the past, so if we get an EMOTICONS puzzle 10 years after the heyday of EMOTICONS, you can't be too surprised. And most smiley face EMOTICONS lack the nose, honestly. Sigh. And the cutesy smugness of that clue on HAPPY FACE, ugh (3D: Response to solving this puzzle). Don't clue self-congratulatorily, people, please.


But then there are those center squares ... on the one hand, they're the only interesting thing about this theme. On the other, they occupy such a teensy (not EENSY, no one says that) portion of the grid that they hardly seem worth it. Oh and also they make things very messy. PIANO SEATS???? Benches or stools, OK. But SEATS feels forced. And EYESORE doesn't effectively bury the EYE. That is, it's got EYE in it, as a body part, so that feels like cheating. Note that the MOUTH in PLYMOUTH does not refer to the body part, nor the NOSE in PIANOSEATS. But the EYES in EYESORE are definitely the body part in question. So more boos! This just feels like a desperate HEAVE—lots of elements, but conceptually messy and awkwardly executed. Also, man did I want black squares to be involved somehow. I mean, how are black squares *not* involved in a puzzle about EMOTICONS!? If ever there was a theme begging to have black square design involved, this is it. Oh, and another thing—very bad editing to allow EMO in the same grid as EMOTICONS. You could've at least tried to deny the affiliation by cluing EMO the old-fashioned way: via [Comedian Philips]. But no. It's the [Indie rock genre], where the EMO refers to EMOTION just as it does in EMOTICONS.


As I look around the grid, I'm seeing that the fill is pretty weak overall, but with this much theme material, I'm not that surprised. EX-JETS? No one refers to Mickey Mantle as an EX-YANKEE. Curtis Granderson is an EX-YANKEE, but that's because he's still playing baseball ... for another team (currently, the Marlins). Do you mean "EX-" in that they are now retired football players, in which case they are EX-all the teams they played for. Needless to say, I had NYJETS here at first. I sincerely thought NOICE was one word—an affected way of saying "nice" (i.e. ["Neat"]). My struggles in the center were hampered considerably by a. writing in SNEERS at first for 46A: Shows derision, in a way (SNORTS), and b. not having any idea what a HORST is (44D: Raised block of the earth's crust, to a geologist). What do I look like, a geologist? I know, I know, a HORST is a HORST, of courst, of courst ... BAH!

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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