Budget airline of Ireland, informally / WED 7-15-26 / Narrator on "Euphoria" / Liam Neeson action trilogy / Ben Jonson wrote one to himself / Bold way to go when bluffing / Name repeated in a hit 1963 rock song / Giving up one's amateur status / Mork's planet on an old sitcom

Constructor: Jonathan Raksin and Jeff Chen

Relative difficulty: Easy

THEME: SPEEDCUBER (56A: Competitor suggested by 17-, 23- and 45-Across) — three theme answers are punny descriptions of speedcubing (i.e. competitive Rubik's Cube solving), and then there's a kind of mock-up of a Rubik's Cube in the middle of the grid, with nine letters forming a 3x3 square (one side of an implied "cube"), with those letters unscrambling to spell the name of the Cube's creator: ERNO RUBIK. You have to "solve" the "cube" in the middle yourself, I guess:

Theme answers:

• TURNING PRO (17A: Giving up one's amateur status) (speedcubers are professional turners, of a sort)
• MAD SCRAMBLES (23A: Frantic rushes) (speedcubers ... well, I would've said they 'unscramble' madly, but whatever, close enough)
• FLYING COLORS (45A: Something it's good to pass with) (Rubik's Cubes have brightly-colored sides, so presumably the colors "fly" when you solve them quickly)

Word of the Day: SPEEDCUBER (56A) —

Speedcubing or speedsolving is a competitive mind sport centered around the rapid solving of various combination puzzles. ^[3] The most prominent puzzle in this category is the 3x3x3 puzzle, commonly known as the Rubik's Cube. Participants in this sport are called "speedcubers" (or simply "cubers"), who focus specifically on solving these puzzles at high speeds to get low clock times and/or fewest moves. The essential aspect of solving these puzzles typically involves executing a series of predefined algorithms in a particular sequence with pattern recognition and finger tricks. // Competitive speedcubing is predominantly overseen by the World Cube Association (WCA), which officially recognizes 17 distinct speedcubing events.^[5] These events encompass a range of puzzles, including NxNxN puzzles of sizes varying from 2x2x2 to 7x7x7, and other puzzle forms such as the Pyraminx, Megaminx, Skewb, Square-1, and Rubik's Clock (until 2027). Additionally, specialized formats such as 3×3×3, 4×4×4, and 5×5×5 blindfolded, 3×3×3 one-handed (OH), 3×3×3 Fewest Moves, and 3×3×3 multi-blind are also regulated and hosted in competitions.

As of February 2026, the world record for the fastest single solve of a 3×3×3 Rubik's Cube in a competitive setting stands at 2.76 seconds. (wikipedia)

• • •

Did the makers of Rubik's Cube pay for this puzzle? What a weird niche thing to build a puzzle around. I knew there were speed-solving competitions, but SPEEDCUBER? Yeah, I'm not familiar with your slang, fellas. Not that that held me up at all today. I didn't solve the puzzle in 2.76 seconds (the world record for ... speedcubing, is it?), but it went by pretty fast, as most of it was composed of incredibly boring, completely ordinary fill. An avalanche (I'm gonna need new metaphors here) ... a landslide? ... of the most dull-as-ecru 3-4-5s I've ever seen. IPA ARIA TESSA UAE ISAY ERIE ADO RARER ODE ASTO ICET EST ALLIN ALIT ORATE OMIT APED IBIS OVA  ... its' like the puzzle was trying to put me to sleep. Hardly. There are only four non-theme answers longer than 6 letters. For me, this was like solving the world's plainest and easiest themeless, except for the revealer, which did its job, but ... it hardly seems worth it. The theme answers are kind of cute as punny descriptions of what speedcubing must be like, though MAD SCRAMBLES feels a little less apt than the others. Is the solver "scrambling" to solve it? Is the idea that the colored squares on the Cube are all "scrambled" up and the solver has to unscramble them? The exact meaning of that one feels ambiguous and slightly off in a way that the other two do not. Anyway, if you just take the thematic bones of this puzzle, I think it's OK. But the bulk of the puzzle felt like an afterthought. Total snooze.

I haven't cared about the Rubik's Cube since it first came out, when I was about 11. I think of it as a fad toy that stopped being popular years ago, but ... apparently there's this whole world of competitive solving I know nothing about. By "whole world" ... I don't know how big we're talking. But the Speedcubing wikipedia page is astonishingly, painfully long and detailed, so however niche that world is, it appears to be, uh, well established. I know something about niche hobbies, and niche competitions. I have the trophies to prove it. Nothing wrong with nerdy niche worlds. It's just ... I don't expect speedcubers (or anyone, really) to know about crossword speedsolving, and yet this puzzle expects me to know and care about speedcubing. That's a no on both counts for me. Still, I know what a Rubik's Cube is, so the basic concept here wasn't mysterious. The theme answer placement felt a little weird to me. It's not—it's just a arrangement of long Across answers, but that's the thing: because the puzzle centers around a cube and its turning sides, I wanted those long Downs to be themers, so that there'd be one themer on each side, evoking the square shape of a cube. In fact, when I was done, for a few seconds, I thought those long Downs were theme answers, and I was struggling to understand what PEDAL POWER or POETRY SLAM had to do with speedcubing. "I guess there's 'power' involved ... and maybe you 'slam' the cube down when you're done? Is speedcubing supposed to be 'poetry' in motion? Is the act of turning the cube sides called 'pedaling'?" So many questions flashing through my brain. Then I realized the themers were just arranged in a standard all-Across way, and those long Downs were ... irrelevant.

The only answer that held me up at all today was RYAN (42A: Budget airline of Ireland, informally). I have almost nothing written on my printed-out grid today except for next to the clue for RYAN, where I have scrawled a double-underlined "TF?" (that's the "TF" from "WTF"). I'm supposed to know a discount Irish airline? Sorry, the informal nickname for a discount Irish airline? Apparently, yes, I am. It seems that RYANair is a way, way bigger enterprise than I could've imagined: 

Ryanair is an Irish ultra-low-cost airline headquartered in Swords, County Dublin, Ireland. It is the largest airline in Europe by scheduled passengers carried, fleet size, and total flights. Globally, it is the largest airline by international passengers carried, the third-largest by market capitalisation behind Delta Air Lines and United Airlines, and the fifth-most profitable by net income. In 2025, the company sold 208 million airline tickets, averaging €70 in total revenue against €62 in costs per ticket sold. It is widely considered to be the cheapest airline operating in Europe. (wikipedia)

So I learned something today. I learned about a popular business that "consistently scores poorly in customer satisfaction ratings" but thrives nonetheless. Inspiring.

Bullets:

• 14A: One of approximately three million in Finland (for a population of less than six million) (SAUNA) — when I say America should follow more of a European social model, this is what I mean. You gotta admire a country this committed to health and relaxation. 
• 21A: Name repeated in a hit 1963 rock song (LOUIE) — wrote in "LAYLA" here (seven years off).

• 20A: Ben Jonson wrote one to himself (ODE) — it's a poem in which he takes himself to task for ... not writing poetry. Writing about how he's not writing. The poem opens with him beating himself up for not being more productive—basically a version of the voice in every self-loathing writer's head: "Where dost thou careless lie / Buried in ease and sloth?"
• 31D: Narrator on "Euphoria" (RUE) — I "know" this only from crosswords. It gets kind of densely pop-culturey in the middle of that damned cube: RUE, ORK, TAKEN clued as the Liam Neeson franchise. I doubt there's enough pop culture confusion there to scuttle someone's solve, but still, you might've taken RUE or TAKEN in a different, less name-y direction, just to be sure.

• 55A: One flying in to the coast, maybe (GULL) — so glad to find out this was just a bird and not some person flying into California to do business or take a vacation or whatever.
• 37D: Vampire double feature? (FANG) — A great clue, but maybe a better clue for FANGS, plural. I mean, yes, you can lawyer your way to a defense of singular FANG, but that "double" really wants FANGS. One FANG, double it, now you've got FANGS. Man, that word looks weirder and weirder the more you type it, so I'm gonna stop.

That's all for today. See you next time.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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British glam rock band of the 1970s / WED 6-17-26 / Rival of a Raven / Folkie DiFranco / Disney film set in a fictional Colombian village / Like Tom Cruise as Jack Reacher, some say / Casino maneuvers carried out three times in this puzzle? / Fast-paced scam, such as the shell game / "___ the Day" (Thomas Pynchon's longest novel) / "Just What I Needed" band, with "the" / Geraldo Rivera uncovered his "vaults" on live TV

Constructor: Jonathan Raksin

Relative difficulty: Medium-Challenging

[5D: Disney+ series whose name sounds like a compound conjunction = ANDOR]

THEME: RIFFLE SHUFFLES (43A: Casino maneuvers carried out three times in this puzzle?) — first four letters of theme answers in the top half of the puzzle are "(riffle??) shuffled" into the last four letters of their respective answers to make the theme answers in the bottom half:

Theme answers:

• STONEPIT --> SET POINT (41A: BEFORE (Deck 3): Quarry / 46A: AFTER (Deck 3): Crucial moment in a tennis match)
• CONSOLES --> COOLNESS (20A: BEFORE (Deck 2): PlayStation and Switch / 55A: AFTER (Deck 2): Noted quality of the Fonz)
• GOOFOFFS --> GOOFOFFS (16A: BEFORE (Deck 1): Slackers / 73A: AFTER (Deck 1): Slackers)

Word of the Day: AGAINST the Day (72A: "___ the Day" (Thomas Pynchon's longest novel)) —

 

Against the Day is an epic historical novel by Thomas Pynchon, published on November 21, 2006. The narrative takes place between the 1893 Chicago World's Fair and the time immediately following World War I and features more than a hundred characters spread across the United States, Europe, Mexico, Central Asia, Africa and "one or two places not strictly speaking on the map at all," according to the book jacket blurb written by Pynchon. Like its predecessors, Against the Day is an example of historiographic metafiction or metahistorical romance. At 1,085 pages, it is the longest of Pynchon's novels to date. (wikipedia)

• • •

This was probably closer to a two-and-a-half-star puzzle for me, but I bumped it up for the final "joke" (i.e. the revelation that a shuffled GOOF-OFFS is also GOOF-OFFS). I should probably take that half star back for the duping of "OFF" in OFF-PUT (itself a pretty awkward verb ... or is it an adjectival phrase? Who can tell, when the only terms anyone actually uses for this phenomenon are PUT OFF (v) or OFF-PUTTING (adj.)) (32D: Repelled). But I like the goofy joke well enough to keep the rating where it is. If you're going to break crossword convention (in this case, repeat an answer), there better be a good reason, and today I think there is. Still, the very concept here is kind of a snore. And the revealer is a silly phrase that means nothing to me. I have heard of shuffling, of course, but not riffle-shuffling, which is ... just shuffling? Where the half-deck in one hand merges with the half-deck in the other hand in alternating-card fashion? Casino terminology, as you know, not my thing. A bigger issue, for me: the theme reeks of "a computer program helped me find these words." It's like someone wrote some code that could take a wordlist and determine which of the (8-letter) words in that list could turn into other 8-letter words if you did this. The non-GOOF-OFFS themers are a big shrug to me. I don't want to mentally shuffle longer words to that extent. I also don't really have to, as the theme clues are easy enough that you don't really have to pay attention to the theme. This puzzle feels like it's in some kind of thematic no-man's-land between Wed. and Thu. It's structurally complex ... but not that complex; not such that you really have to think about it. It took me a little longer than usual. I can write some of that off to the oversized grid, but those giant NW and SE corners had something to do with it as well—much harder to get traction in all that white space than it is to get traction in a typical M-Th corner. 

One other potentially OFF-PUTting thing about this puzzle is that it is positively drowning in pop culture clues. I can handle a pretty decent amount of movies / music / TV shows in my puzzles, but this puzzle was testing even my patience in this arena. It starts with Tom Cruise. MISCAST? Do people say that? That clue was lost on me, as those Reacher movies held zero appeal for me (1A: Like Tom Cruise as Jack Reacher, some say). They held appeal for someone, though, as the two of them made close to half a billion dollars at the box office, so I guess the MISCASTing wasn't such a problem. After Cruise, we get (deep breath): ANDOR, Paul MESCAL, The CARS, TOTAL Recall, "Werewolves of London" (SOHO), Nick at NITE, SLADE, Booker T & the MGS, The Fonz, ENCANTO, Spielberg's EGOT, Jay LENO, NIA Vardalos, ANI DiFranco, AL CAPONE (clued via Geraldo) and PERU (clued via The Emperor's New Groove). That is Yeeeesh levels of pop culture. I didn't even count the sports clues in there, or the (not exactly 1st-tier) Pynchon. What's odd is that so many of those answers were needlessly pop culturefied. TOTAL, PERU, CARS, NITE, SOHO. Just shift the cluing on those and you have something closer to a reasonable balance. As is, I kept rolling my eyes going "again?" Except with Paul MESCAL, whom I love and who can do no wrong. Put him in every puzzle, I won't mind. 

The difficulty for me today lay in those big corners, where I just had to work harder than usual for traction. Otherwise, the difficulty level felt about normal for a Wednesday. I didn't have any real mistakes, though there was a bunch of stuff I didn't know. I've read a couple late-ish Pynchons (the most recent one, Shadow Ticket, which features a character known as the AL CAPONE of Cheese, and Inherent Vice), and I know the titles of his more famous works (V, Gravity's Rainbow), as well as the novel that One Battle After Another was based on (Vineland), but AGAINST the Day? That one got past me. I also didn't know if the common football score was going to be ONE-ONE or ONE-NIL (52D: Final score of at least 10% of professional soccer matches) (yesterday's World Cup matches were 3-1 (France-Senegal), 4-1 (Norway-Iraq), and 3-0 (Argentina-Algeria)), and I've never used or heard anyone use the phrase DOG IT in my life (59D: Give minimum effort), so that SE corner took some time. Similar problems in the NW, with MISCAST being hard to pin down, and then INTONE being oddly/vaguely clued (and just being an odd word to begin with) (2D: Vocalize), and SCAN IN being needlessly prepositionally awkward ("Digitize" = SCAN, no IN needed) (3D: Digitize, as a document).. No real trouble elsewhere in the grid.

Bullets:

• 19A: Fast-paced scam, such as the shell game (SHORT CON) — this is a fun term. I think I learned it (and LONG CON) from The Grifters. With "CONS" highlighted in CONSOLES, the CON in SHORT CON kind of feels like a dupe, even though it isn't.

• 57A: ___ With Friends (WORDS) — does anyone still play this? This feels very ... aughts. Huh, looks like it's an exceedingly popular mobile game. Or at least it was as of 2017 ("the most popular mobile game in the U.S." as of May 2017) (wikipedia). No one I know plays (or talks about playing it, if they do). I do So Many word games and puzzles every day. This just isn't one of them.
• 25D: Gathering, informally (SESH) — I will never like this awful shortening, though I will say that SESH is much, much more tolerable than UNFORCH, which is a shortening I encountered in a puzzle this past weekend, UNFORCH.
• 62A: Telepathy, e.g. (PSI) — I ... don't really know this term. Are supernatural abilities called "PSI"s? Apparently yes, though it's not a countable noun, i.e. PSI is just the collective term for "parapsychological psychic phenomena or powers"_which are fictional, of course, as the clue for nearby ESP kind of gets at with its scare quotes (71D: "Ability" that's hard to believe, for short).

That's all for today. See you next time.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on BlueSky and Facebook and Letterboxd]
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Novel feature of the 1974 Olds Toronado / TUE 1-20-26 / Skill shared by bats and dolphins / Hellenistic storytelling / Sports grp. for Coco Gauff / Fight night souvenir, perhaps / Historic destination for Pueblo pilgrimages / Modern pickup sport for delivery drivers / East coast convenience chain with a reduplicative name / Tour overseer, for short / Mayberry boy of '60s TV

Constructor: Jonathan Raksin

Relative difficulty: Medium-Challenging (just a bit harder than the typical Tuesday)

[23D: "Star Wars" princess (LEIA)]

THEME: ECHOLOCATION (53A: Skill shared by bats and dolphins ... or, when read as two words, what 19-, 26-, 34- and 44-Across each is) — locations of four different "Echo"s:

Theme answers:

• NATO ALPHABET (19A: It begins with Alfa and ends with Zulu) (Echo = letter "E")
• GREEK MYTHOLOGY (26A: Hellenistic storytelling) (Echo = Nymph in love with Narcissus)
• AMAZON WAREHOUSE (34A: Modern pickup sport for delivery drivers) (Echo = some stupid A.I. thing you allow to surveil you in your own home for some reason)
• THE GRAND CANYON 44A: Historic destination for Pueblo pilgrimages) (Echo = sound repetition)

Word of the Day: Echo (of GREEK MYTHOLOGY) (26A) —

[Echo and Narcissus by John William Waterhouse (1903)]

In Greek mythology, Echo (/ˈɛkoʊ/; Greek: Ἠχώ, Ēkhō, "echo", from ἦχος (ēchos), "sound"^[4]) was an Oread who resided on Mount Cithaeron. Zeus loved consorting with beautiful nymphs and often visited them on Earth. Eventually, Zeus's wife, Hera, became suspicious, and came from Mount Olympus in an attempt to catch Zeus with the nymphs. Echo, by trying to protect Zeus (as he had ordered her to do), endured Hera's wrath, and Hera made her only able to speak the last words spoken to her. When Echo met Narcissus and fell in love with him, she was unable to tell him how she felt and was forced to watch him as he fell in love with himself. [...] [According to Ovid's Metamorphoses], when Narcissus died, wasting away before his own reflection, consumed by a love that could not be, Echo mourned over his body. When Narcissus, looking one last time into the pool uttered, "Oh marvellous boy, I loved you in vain, farewell", Echo too chorused, "Farewell." // Eventually, Echo, too, began to waste away. Her beauty faded, her skin shrivelled, and her bones turned to stone. Today, all that remains of Echo is the sound of her voice.(wikipedia)

• • •

There's something regrettable about the fact that this theme has to go through Amazon. I guess that since the Amazon Echo exists, you gotta use it, but ... do you? I just find it so depressing to see the puzzle shilling for Amazon, a behemoth that does not need the free advertising. And I can't think of many places on earth more depressing than an AMAZON WAREHOUSE, nor any grid-spanning answer I'd less like to see splashed across the center of my puzzle. After I finished the puzzle and grasped the "Echo" theme, it actually took me a few beats to understand how AMAZON WAREHOUSE worked. I thought, "yeah, they are pretty vast, your voice probably would echo in there... but... that's the same kind of echo that you'd experience at THE GRAND CANYON. You can't repeat echoes like that ... [two seconds later] ... oh. Right. It's a 'smart' device. <sarcasm> Great </sarcasm>." I think this would make a very nice three-themer puzzle. It's ridiculous that you've got the the Echo in a warehouse anyway. Most people only ever see the Echo in their homes (if they see them at all). AMAZON WAREHOUSE does have the "virtue" of making clear the Echo in question (it's got AMAZON in it, after all). Honestly, from a purely structural standpoint, the answer works fine. It's just that my personal distaste for all things Bezos and the anti-free trade, anti-union behemoth that is Amazon prevents me from really liking this puzzle as much as I'd like to. It's amazing (and heartening) to me that BEZOS, despite having a five-letter name with a very attractive "Z" in it, has appeared in the grid only once, and not for 15 years now! Let's keep that trend going!

The theme concept is a winner. Nice wordplay on the revealer. Really delivers on the aha. The fill on this one I liked less. Easier to fill a puzzle cleanly with fewer themers—just sayin'! The cramming together of three themers in just five rows makes the crossing fill veer sharply toward SLOP (40D: Unappetizing food). The puzzle is definitely at its crosswordesiest through there, from AGRA through LEIA ORG WTA WAWA HAR LAH to the ETNA SLOP and the always regrettable UEYS. Just not a pleasant place to spend time. But alarm bells were going off much earlier, actually. I was just POSIES PGA ORD-deep in the puzzle when I paused and thought "ORD? Already? Uh oh." It's an airport code, it's a Fort in California, it's short for "ordinance" (or "ordinal"), it's [checks database] a river in Australia!? OK, take it easy, 1989 Thursday puzzle. Anyway, ORD is some top-shelf crosswordese. OOXTEPLERNON (the god of bad short fill) always flies through O'Hare, both because it is a hellish place where people often get stuck (apt!), and because it has the crosswordesiest airport code of them all. What about SFO and LAX, you say? At least those have the cities they serve embedded in the codes themselves. ORD is some nonsense you just have to memorize (O'Hare's original name was Orchard Field Airport). I don't mean to pick on ORD too much, but every time I see it, I wonder what's making the constructor so desperate. It felt like an omen, seeing it right away. 

But the most regrettable fill today wasn't the short common stuff. No. Instead, it came when someone LIT A FIRE IN A RUT. That takes the EAT A SANDWICH answer type to a whole new level—the EAT A SANDWICH IN A DINER level. This is the first time this level has ever been achieved, to my knowledge. It's one thing to roll out a weak "[verb] A [noun]" phrase, but quite another to follow that phrase with a "[preposition] A [noun]" phrase. Truly horrifying remarkable. What happens when you light a fire in a rut under a WHALE POD? You don't want to know. Also, WHALE POD felt redundant. A group of orcas is just a pod. Or it's an orca pod. If you know they are orcas, you are going to call them an ORCA POD. I think the clue is bugging me here more than the answer, actually. Check out this ORCA POD in Wellington Harbour:

Speaking of Wellington, or New Zealand, anyway: Split ENZ! (27D: Split ___ (New Wave band whose name sounds like a hair problem)). Seeing ENZ was a moment of deep ambivalence for me, as I love the band but hate to see just ENZ all on its own. Full-name bands > partial-name bands. And the clue was disappointing as well, since there was every opportunity to mention the band's country of origin (the "NZ" is embedded right in the name!), but they chose instead to go for "hair problem" as their hint. Boo. But yay for Split ENZ. They mean a lot to me. So funny to have loved Split ENZ as a kid, and then Crowded House after them, and then to discover (and love) the Dunedin (NZ) bands the Bats and the Chills as a young man, and then eventually, ten or so years later, marry a woman from Dunedin. It's a pretty small city, on the other side of the world! What are the odds!?

Bullets:

• 43A: Fight night souvenir, perhaps (WELT) — "Fight night" makes me think of the audience's experience, not the fighter's. I wanted something like "ticket stub." Also, this answer was hard because I spelled the (hateful) crossing, UEYS, like so: UIES. Sadly (very sadly), both are acceptable, per NYTXW tradition. 
• 37D: Sports grp. for Coco Gauff (WTA) — once again, I cannot come up with the tennis org. abbr. ATA? UTA? All sports org. abbrevs. are slowly turning into one ball of gelatinous goo in my head. 
• 11D: Novel feature of the 1974 Olds Toronado (AIR BAG) — one of the clues that made this puzzle harder than the usual Tuesday. I was looking for something "novel" in the sense of strange or eye-catching. Like tailfins or a dome or laser beams or something, I dunno. Needed many crosses to see the plain-old AIR BAG.

[1974 Olds Toronado]

• 20D: Prefix for element #8 (OXY) — LOL that I know the Periodic Table that well. I still don't know what element this is. Is it "Contin"? Hang on ... wait, what? Oxygen? So the "prefix for" is actually a "prefix already in"!?!?! If you say "Prefix for" something, I assume (logically) that it is a prefix that you can attach to whatever thing you're talking about, not one that's already part of the word. Unless there is an "oxyoxygen" I know nothing about, I hate this clue.
• 12D: Visibly disdainful (SNEERY) — I am visibly disdainful of SNEERY. I know you can't see me, but trust me: visibly.

That's all. See you next time.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

P.S. shout-out to my mom, out on the streets protesting fascism (that's her with the "Democracy Depends on Rule of Law" sign) (shout-out to the other lady too!)

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