Earth goddess in "Das Rheingold" / FRI 10-31-25 / Cookie marketing units / Yosemite Sam's role in "Bugs Bunny's Christmas Carol" / Opposite of the Latin "odi" / Point in a film when an iconic song sets the scene / City across the Rio Grande from El Paso / Caroline Kepnes thriller written partly in the second person / Cone ___ (iconic Jean Paul Gaultier undergarment)

Constructor: Juliana Tringali Golden

Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium

THEME: none 

Word of the Day: ERDA (30A: Earth goddess in "Das Rheingold") —

The United States Energy Research and Development Administration (ERDA) was a United States government organization formed from the split of the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) in 1975. It assumed the functions of the AEC not assumed by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

The agency was created as part of the Energy Reorganization Act of 1974, which was passed on October 11, 1974, in the wake of the 1973 oil crisis. The act split the Atomic Energy Commission into two new agencies: the Nuclear Regulatory Commission would regulate the commercial nuclear power industry, while the ERDA would manage the energy research and development, nuclear weapons, and naval reactors programs.

The Energy Research and Development Administration was established on January 19, 1975. The first administrator was Robert Seamans, followed by Robert W. Fri.

In 1977, ERDA was merged with the Federal Energy Administration to form the United States Department of Energy. (wikipedia) 

Also: 

Erda (/ˈɜːr.də/ UR-də) is a city in Tooele County, Utah, United States. The population was 4,642 at the 2010 census, a significant increase from the 2000 figure of 2,473. Erda was previously a Census-Designated Place (CDP) and a township but officially received its incorporation certificate in January 2022. (wikipedia)

• • •

[Earth goddess in "Das Rheingold"]!? Such a lovely grid, why, why would you drop this bottom-of-the-barrel crosswordese in there? Because it's Halloween and you thought you'd exhume the dead? OK, actually, that's pretty good, I'll allow it. Just think of ERDA as a spooky little haunting, the Ghost of Crosswords Past. How past? Ha ha, check it out:

Man, those 20th-century folks were really hot for Wagner. That's one hell of a heat map—towering columns of ERDA from the '50s through the '80s, and then Will takes over in the mid-90s and you can practically hear the ERDA supply getting choked off. It's been twelve years (!!?) since we last saw ERDA. I would absolutely have tanked ERDA if I hadn't known for sure that Ms. Clooney is an AMAL, not an AMEL—that is, I had ERDE written in there because I'm pretty sure that's German for "earth" and so that seemed the most plausible answer. I hope you all also knew AMAL, and the other ERDA crossings, because it seems at least plausible that many of you will be in my shoes here (those shoes being size "Never Seen a Wagner Opera In My Life And Sure As Hell Don't Know Who ERDA Is"). ERDA? Never ERDA her! This is why you should polish your grids within an inch of their lives, and not an inch and a half—I really enjoyed solving this, but I can't not see ERDA. The puzzle ends up like a fridge full of delicious food and then one small can of half-eaten cat food that you opened a month ago and forgot about (why would it be behind the mayonnaise?! who put it there where I wouldn't see it?). Before I stepped in ERDA, I was having a pretty good time. I had a pretty good time afterward as well. Hard to express how big an outlier that little answer is.

I've never seen a crossword that had its own NEEDLE DROP before (3D: Point in a film when an iconic song sets the scene). No, the puzzle didn't actually start playing music, but my brain did. Specifically, I've been thinking a lot about the NEEDLE DROPs in Paul Thomas Anderson's One Battle After Another, which was the first movie I saw with my Moviegoing class this year. Which means that as soon as NEEDLE DROP dropped, the first great NEEDLE DROP of that movie (in fact, the whole scene that it's in) started playing in my head. I can't find any clips of that scene (introduction of Willa, doing her karate forms in the dojo), so I'll just play the song

There's also another perfect NEEDLE DROP at the very end of the movie, but it's so good that I actually don't want to tell you the name of the song—in case you plan on seeing the movie but haven't yet, I don't want to deprive you of the fresh experience of that moment. For more information, here's the episode of Wesley Morris's podcast "Cannonball" where he discusses the movie in detail with guest Sean Fennessey:

The second movie I saw with my Moviegoing class was Roofman, starring Channing TATUM (coincidentally, Blink Twice was the first movie I saw with my Moviegoing class the first time I taught it, last year). Yesterday, I kept pronouncing it like ... like it was a last name, like it rhymes with "Goodman," while everyone else was saying the "Man" part like a separate word, like he was a superhero, Superman or Batman, which is probably the correct way to do it. Also, apparently I pronounce "roof" like a crazy person—my students were all team long-U (i.e. rhymes with "goof"), whereas I ... I don't even know the name for the vowel sound I use, but when I pronounce it, it rhymes with the dog bark sound, "woof." Seriously, the entire class looked at me like "why are you saying it that way?" and then I just tripped all over the title every time I said it for the rest of the class. Anyway, this puzzle made me remember recent movies I've seen and enjoyed, including Sinners (starring HAILEE Steinfeld), and I appreciated that. AYO EDEBIRI (28D: Emmy-winning actress for "The Bear") also stars in a recent movie that I nearly put on the ballot for my Moviegoing class (they vote each week on what we'll see), but it just didn't look that good, so I left it off.

This puzzle played pretty easy, but twice I got stuck at the crossroads of two longer answers. OPENED ... / LAUREL ... no idea what was supposed to follow either, particularly the former. I guessed LAUREL TREE easily enough, eventually, but I don't think I knew a "bay" was a tree. Oh, bay leaves. Is that where they're from? A bay tree? That would ... make sense. Are bay leaves laurel leaves? I was thinking of the horse meaning of "bay," but then couldn't understand why a horse would be "green" (is it envious? inexperienced?). OPENED DOORS was much harder (6D: Provided entrees), as "entrees" = food to me (OPENED ... A RESTAURANT!?!?). The other pair that stopped me for a bit was "LET'S ..." / "THAT'S ..." I really liked discovering "THAT'S SO COOL!" which is bright and bouncy and in-the-language. I really did not like "LET'S BOUNCE" (47A: "We should get out of here"). Feels extremely contrived, even though it's intelligible. BOUNCE on its own as a slang term for "leave" is fine. “I gotta bounce,” “he bounced,” etc. It's the "LET'S" part that feels ... meh [apparently it’s a normal thing to say (acc. to the internet)—not sure why the “let’s” part clanks in my ear]. I had the ending letters (-CE) and all I could think of was ...

The "ZZ"s also got me into a little trouble, as I had HURRAH before HUZZAH at 27A: Old-fashioned "w00t!" Without those "Z"s, EBENEZER and JUAREZ are hard to see, as you can imagine (or maybe as you experienced yourself). I don't think I've ever seen "Bugs Bunny's Christmas Carol," and if I had, I probably would've thought SCROOGE before EBENEZER (Yosemite Sam is his full name, as far as I know, so nothing indicated to me that I should be looking for Scrooge's first name, specifically) (9D: Yosemite Sam's role in "Bugs Bunny's Christmas Carol"). I wrote in SUAREZ at first for 10D: City across the Rio Grande from El Paso and then didn't check the cross and ended up having to hunt down ESECT (?) at the end of the solve (9A: Boot = EJECT). Before that, the only mistakes I had besides HURRAH were CAPRI before CRETE (37D: Island home of what may be the world's oldest living olive tree (2,000+ years)) and of course ... ERDE :(

Bullets:

• 35A: Cookie marketing units (GIRL SCOUT TROOPS) — I guess they are "units," in the military sense. I could tell the answer started GIRL SCOUT, but then hesitated a bit deciding what should come next.
• 39A: Opposite of the Latin "odi" (AMO) — "I hate" v. "I love"
• 41A: Stinky ___ ("Toy Story 2" antagonist) (PETE) — this may as well have been ERDA to me. I don't remember all the Toy Stories. Not sure I've seen them all. It's likely I only saw the one. This puzzle is full of proper nouns, and if that's not your jam, I can see how this puzzle might be less than pleasing.
• 25D: Apt anagram of GAMES minus M (SEGA) — so dumb. Just an awkward-ass clue. It's either an anagram or it's not. Nothing can be "apt" if you have to "minus" something to get there, come on.
• 55D: British monarch between William and George (ANNE) — that's William of Orange (of "William & Mary" fame) (1689-1702) and George I (1714-27). William and George are also the names of the likely next two British monarchs as well, as you probably well know.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld 

P.S. that RUN dupe is very bad (RUN/I GOTTA RUN), but I didn’t see it because I blew right past RUN. Thanks for pointing it out, commenters!

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Shady, in modern slang / WED 7-3-24 / Japanese rice cake often filled with ice cream / Totally tubular pasta / Three-player trick-taking game / Feature of high heels popularized in the 1920s /

Constructor: Juliana Tringali Golden

Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium (Easy, were it not for one answer)

THEME: Prognostication puns — things used to tell the future get wacky pun clues:

Theme answers:

• TAROT CARDS (17A: Observation deck?)
• CRYSTAL BALL (33A: Glass eye?)
• I CHING COINS (41A: Metal detectors?)
• OUIJA BOARD (61A: Predictive text?)

Word of the Day: I CHING COINS (41A) —

The I Ching or Yijing [...]  usually translated Book of Changes or Classic of Changes, is an ancient Chinese divination text that is among the oldest of the Chinese classics. The I Ching was originally a divination manual in the Western Zhou period (1000–750 BC). Over the course of the Warring States and early imperial periods (500–200 BC), it transformed into a cosmological text with a series of philosophical commentaries known as the Ten Wings. After becoming part of the Chinese Five Classicsin the 2nd century BC, the I Ching was the basis for divination practice for centuries across the Far East and was the subject of scholarly commentary. Between the 18th and 20th centuries, it took on an influential role in Western understanding of East Asian philosophical thought.

As a divination text, the I Ching is used for a Chinese form of cleromancy known as I Ching divination in which bundles of yarrow stalks are manipulated to produce sets of six apparently random numbers ranging from 6 to 9. Each of the 64 possible sets corresponds to a hexagram, which can be looked up in the I Ching. The hexagrams are arranged in an order known as the King Wen sequence. The interpretation of the readings found in the I Ching has been discussed and debated over the centuries. Many commentators have used the book symbolically, often to provide guidance for moral decision-making, as informed by Confucianism, Taoism and Buddhism. The hexagrams themselves have often acquired cosmological significance and been paralleled with many other traditional names for the processes of change such as yin and yang and Wu Xing. [...] 

The most common form of divination with the I Ching in use today is a reconstruction of the method described in these histories, in the 300 BC Great Commentary, and later in the Huainanzi and the Lunheng. From the Great Commentary's description, the Neo-Confucian Zhu Xi reconstructed a method of yarrow stalk divination that is still used throughout the Far East. In the modern period, Gao Heng attempted his own reconstruction, which varies from Zhu Xi in places. Another divination method, employing coins, became widely used in the Tang dynasty and is still used today. In the modern period; alternative methods such as specialized dice and cartomancy have also appeared. (wikipedia)

• • •

This isn't much of a theme. It's just ... four of the same kind of thing. Four things from the same general category. It's like BUS CAR TRUCK VAN. Or four baseball player names. Or author names. Or U.S. states. True, it's drawing from a category with fewer items in it (not sure how many prognostication devices there are in the world). But still, this is just "Here are four items that are used for similar purposes." That doesn't really get us to Theme Territory. There's no hook, no revealer, nothing at all to make it make sense as a theme. The theme clues are just ... regular crossword clues!?!? I mean, yes, they're wacky "?" clues, but we see those Every Day. The first one was actually used by this very outlet back in August of 2017 (TAROT CARDS = [Observation deck of the future?]). The cluing is giving us nothing in terms of making the theme cohere. I'm baffled at how this made the grade. I would also say that I CHING COINS feels like a strong outlier here, familiarity-wise. I had to read way way down the wikipedia "I Ching" page to find anything about "coins," and even then, it was just in passing (turns out "I Ching divination" has its own separate page). I think of the I Ching as a text. I know it's used in various rituals of foretelling, but how those rituals are performed, pfft, no idea. Apparently, there's no one way. There are lots of ways. One of those ways involves coins. It seems. I did not have to wonder about how the other three theme answers worked. At all. But I CHING COINS is not a phrase I've ever heard. As a result, this puzzle was briefly Not Easy, which I should be grateful for, but it's a mild bummer to have the only difficulty in a puzzle concentrated on just one answer. I feel like what we've got here is a first draft of a theme idea, but there's nothing to elevate it to real Theme status. No snap, no pop. Just a list of things. Disappointing.

All difficulty for me came in and around ICHINGCOINS. I briefly forgot MOCHI but then crosses helped me remember (5A: Japanese rice cake often filled with ice cream). Didn't know ALYSSA at all but easy crosses made that irrelevant (23A: ___ Thompson, U.S. soccer star who made her World Cup debut at 18). It wasn't until CRISCO for CANOLA (33D: Kind of cooking oil) that I started to struggle a bit. Didn't take *too* long to see that the I CHING was involved in that third theme answer, but what was supposed to follow I CHING ... I had no idea. And so ... let's see, I had DEAD before DAMN (31D: Word with "straight" or "right") (a bad guess, I admit), ADO before IRK (44D: Bother), didn't have enough info to get CONSUME straight away (42D: Eat), and could think only of the expression I actually use (GO SOUTH), not the one that ended up being in the grid (GO SOUR) (46A: Take a turn for the worse). Concentrated struggle. But brief struggle, as struggles go. After that, back to Monday-easy.

MISC. (28D: This and that: Abbr.):

• 56A: Pass up, using a less common spelling (FOREGO) — to be quite honest, if you'd left out the "using a less common spelling," I'm not sure I'd've blinked. It's like the clue is calling attention to a weakness I didn't know it had, and making the clue ungainly in the process. Better just to find another word entirely. It wouldn't be hard to do a mild tear-down in this corner and start over.
• 2D: Three-player trick-taking game (SKAT) — I wrote in SPIT. My family (or some members of it) used to play a card game called "SPIT in the Ocean," which must be why my brain went that way. Don't know SKAT, but it was what I guessed off the SK- so I must've heard of it before. SKAT is the "national game of Germany" (wikipedia); you know, in case anyone ever asks you "hey, what's the national game of Germany?" Now you know.
• 25D: Shady, in modern slang (SUS) — short for "suspicious." And yes it's common. I'm stunned to find that this is its Modern Era NYTXW debut, as I've seen it a whole lot in other, apparently more contemporary crosswords. The last time SUS appeared in the NYTXW (1986) it was as a [Swine genus], wow, yeesh, and yipes. Twenty-one "swine genus" appearances between 1949 and 1986. 
• 39D: Totally tubular pasta (RIGATONI) — speaking of 1986, glad to see this clue lean into '80s slang. Made me smile. "Tubular" was slang for "awesome" (like "radical"). I think it's originally surfer slang. I want to say I first heard it from Jeff Spicoli in Fast Times at Ridgemont High, but I can't confirm that. I *can* confirm that the word appears in "Valley Girl" by Moon Unit Zappa. Please enjoy one of the most unlikely and strange Solid Gold performances of all time.

• 34D: Activities that might require 20-sided dice, for short (RPGS) — role-playing games. I almost wrote in DNDS here (!?). 

See you next time.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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La-di-da / WED 5-01-24 / Soprano ___ Te Kanawa / Covers with a glossy black varnish

Constructor: Juliana Tringali Golden

Relative difficulty: Easy (6:16, while, um, inebriated)

THEME: WALLFLOWERS — Shy sorts, with a hint to the answers on this puzzle's perimeter

Theme answers: (all are against the "edge" of the puzzle)

• [Disney princess who sings "A Whole New World"] for JASMINE
• [Basic yoga position] for LOTUS
• ["The Black ___" (1987 crime fiction best seller)] for DAHLIA
• [East Egg resident in "The Great Gatsby"] for DAISY
• [Scented ingredient in some hand creams and shampoos] for FREESIA
• [One of Indiana's state symbols] for PEONY
• [Rainbow's end] for VIOLET
• [Subject of an annual festival in the Netherlands] for TULIP

Word of the Day: KIRI (Soprano ___ Te Kanawa) —

Dame Kiri Jeanette Claire Te Kanawa, born Claire Mary Teresa Rawstron, is a New Zealand opera singer. She had a full lyric soprano voice, which has been described as "mellow yet vibrant, warm, ample and unforced." On 1 December 1971 she was recognised internationally when she appeared as the Countess in Mozart's Le nozze di Figaro at the Royal Opera House in London.

• • •

Good evening, friends! It's Malaika, subbing for our fearless leader! Despite everything, I loved this puzzle, which is one of my favorite types to critique! When I love (or even just like) a puzzle that I think is without major flaws, it's tough to write anything at all. And when I hated a puzzle, I feel mean criticizing the author, who is surely a lovely person who is very proud of what they created. But puzzles like today are fun in that I get to unpack the "bad" things about them as well as why I didn't care. (Unrelated: I wrote this while listening to the bonus tracks on "GUTS (spilled)" if you'd like to join in.)

For the most part, I breezed through this puzzle which can mean a variety of things. For instance, it could mean that I am a Puzzle Solving Genius. (I am not.) In this case, I just vibed with a lot of the trivia / phrasing that our constructor and editors were using. It feels good to drop in 1-Across without even thinking about it, and it feels even better when 1-Across is a substantial length. Many entries in this grid were complete no-brainers to me, and it's only upon going back through that I wonder how others fared. If you can't easily input SERENA as [Wimbledon-winning Williams] I feel you are living under a rock... But was TAMORA (fantasy author Pierce) hard for others? To me she is incredibly famous. HEIDI (classic children's novel set in the Swiss Alps) and DAISY (theme answer) were other literary gimmes that I genuinely don't know how will fare with others.

Then (welcome to the Critique Part of this review) there were a series of Crossword Words that, personally, I could enter without thinking but New Wednesday Solvers may have found incredibly unforgiving. (Looking at them now... "series" perhaps does not do justice to the amount... I'm seeing a lot: ARTY, NIH, ELS, SOL, PSST, SRA, ATT, ANA, LTS, ILK, ESTA, ITE.) I think this didn't bother me that much because I knew them (well... I knew the ones that I listed... I didn't know INT or KIRI or MIR) and, as a constructor, I understand that placing your theme answers along the edges of the puzzle (plus an 11-letter central entry!!) is very tough! But I'm wondering if any of you commenters felt alienated by the quantity of what some (but not I!!!) might call "crosswordese."

Something else that didn't bother me (Critique Part 2) is the "double meanings" of the theme answers. I think the "correct" thing to do for themes like this is to use words that are the names of flowers, and then write a clue that has nothing to do with flowers in order to mask the theme. (JASMINE, DAISY, and VIOLET do this the best, in my opinion. DAHLIA and LOTUS are solid efforts. PEONY and TULIP fail at this but at least are specific, and FREESIA is the worst offender since the answer could be basically anything.) I understand that concept, I understand its elegance, I understand why people care about it and yet... I just really didn't care! The entries were all cute! The flowers all made me think of spring and golden sunlight pouring across NYC and illuminating the botanical gardens and my budding tomato plants! The first two entries that I encountered were masked well enough, and (very important!) when I reached the revealer at 36-Across, it did not highlight (and thus immediately give away) all of the other entries. So.... what about it???

Bullets:

• DAISY — "The Great Gatsby" is an incredibly polarizing book, and Broadway shows are an incredibly polarizing genre, and adaptations are an incredibly polarizing category and yet-- I will say that I saw Broadway's adaption and adored it. It is trite and frivolous and obvious and sparkling and luscious and the tech is gorgeous and Eva Noblezada is perfect. 
• JASMINE — Oh, did you think we were done with musicals? Ha! Sorry, pals. I've been to Mexico City many times on vacation, and many of my friends (going on vacation there for the first time) ask me what my favorite thing I've done there is. The answer is quite unhelpful, which is that I saw a now-closed production of Aladdin (in Spanish) that was hysterical, affordable, and dazzling. Cannot recommend enough... I literally wept at during the magic carpet scene and feel zero shame because honestly if you don't weep, that's on you.
• [Rule of ___ (comedic principle)] for THREE — What's your favorite examplee of this? I always think of Pulp Fiction, where he grabs the hammer, then baseball bat, then chainsaw.... and then wrecks the rule and grabs a fourth, even better object (katana)... But this is also hard to beat.
• This is the part of the review (hidden at the very, very end, like where you'd put the poison in an ingredients list if you were someone selling a snack that had poison in it) where I reveal that I couldn't finish this puzzle-- the crossing of JAPANS / INT plus KARMA / KIRI led me to guess on (what was ultimately) the N and the K. And yet! I still had fun :) 

xoxo Malaika

P.S. The second word of the day today, is Mimouna-- a Jewish festival that is held at the end of Passover, when (at sundown), Jewish people can return to eating leavened breads. I know that many of my friends were gorging on mofletta and dates tonight-- maybe some of you commenters were as well! Happy Mimouna to all of you <3 

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Downtempo electronica genre / SUN 10-15-23 / Kid often nicknamed Trey / Final opponent in many a video game / Two inside an ellipse / Hot sauce with a reduplicative name / Game popular in Brooklyn streets / Mazatlan moolah / Civil rights activist Sylvia who was a awarded a Presidential Medal of Freedom

Constructor: Jeff Chen and Juliana Tringali Golden

Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium

THEME: "Doing Doughnuts" — familiar phrases clued as if they related to different types of doughnuts (also the grid is shaped (-ish) like a doughnut):

Theme answers:

• CAKE STAND (26A: "I declare this doughnut to be a truly tasty treat!")
• FROSTED TIP (45A: "Here's one way to eat a doughnut without getting icing on your nose...")
• CINNAMON TOAST (68A: "Let's raise a glass to this outstanding doughnut!")
• PLAIN TRUTH (91A: "It is an undeniable fact that this doughnut is awesome!")
• SUGAR BUZZ (108A: "This doughnut is the talk of the town!")
• OLD-FASHIONED IDEA (16D: "This doughnut would be great dipped in milk!")
• GLAZED EXPRESSION (40D: "I'll bet you dollars to doughnuts...")

Word of the Day: Sylvia MENDEZ (14D: Civil rights activist Sylvia who was a awarded a Presidential Medal of Freedom) —

Sylvia Mendez (born June 7, 1936) is an American civil rights activist and retired nurse. At age eight, she played an instrumental role in the Mendez v. Westminster case, the landmark desegregation case of 1946. The case successfully ended de jure segregation in California and paved the way for integration and the American civil rights movement.

Mendez grew up during a time when most southern and southwestern schools were segregated. In the case of California, Hispanics were not allowed to attend schools that were designated for "Whites" only and were sent to the so-called "Mexican schools." Mendez was denied enrollment to a "Whites" only school, an event which prompted her parents to take action and together organized various sectors of the Hispanic community who filed a lawsuit in the local federal court. The success of their action, of which Sylvia was the principal catalyst, would eventually bring to an end the era of segregated education.

She was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the United States' highest civilian honor, by President Obama in 2011. (wikipedia)

• • •

I'm writing this just after coming back from my wife's birthday dinner and so I'm very full and a *little* on the alcoholic side of things so I'm gonna make this shortish. Possibly. Or else I'm going to ramble on about doughnuts, let's find out! First of all, I'm finding the long-ass "doughnut" spelling ... weird. I think I've just seen DONUT too many times in crosswords, and also Dunkin', before it was just Dunkin', was Dunkin' DONUTS, not Dunkin' la-di-dah we-make-our-doughnuts-with-actual-dough DOUGHNUTS, so the shorter spelling is much more familiar to me, the longer much more pretentious. No idea why they went with the longer spelling here (where the word appears over and over and over again, in every clue). If only for space-/ink-saving, you'd think they'd've opted for the shorter spelling. But no, it's dough dough dough a million times dough. 'S weird. 

As for the picture-grid, shrug. Yes, that is a vaguely circular thing you've got going there. I guess you kind of needed the visual element, given that the actual content of the theme is pretty tepid. But the resulting super-segmented grid, where section after section is accessible to adjacent sections only by one-square-wide passageways, was not exactly pleasant to make my way through. Like a disappointing donut: nice to look at, less nice to experience. The whole conceit here, where the clues are all things one might say about doughnuts, felt very strained, and the results just weren't punchy at all. "I declare this doughnut to be truly tasty!" is a CAKE STAND? A "stand" you've taken about a "cake" doughnut? Saying that a donut is tasty does not qualify as a stand any more than saying the sky is blue does. A stand is an intervention in a controversy. "Donut tastes good" is not an intervention in anything. Further, there's nothing particularly CAKE-y about tasting good. Most donuts taste good. Most donuts would also taste good dipped in milk. "This doughnut would be great dipped in milk!" sounds at least as much like a PLAIN TRUTH as it does like an OLD-FASHIONED IDEA. It even sounds a bit like a FROSTED TIP. The answers just aren't well-differentiated from one another, and almost none of them really land with the force, surprise, and keen wordplay, to say nothing of humor, that one would like to see, ideally, in a wacky theme answer. The clue writing here just isn't strong, and it has to be strong, because the entire weight of the theme is resting on it. Besides the picture-grid, all thematic interest lies in those clues, and today, they're just too tepid, as are the theme answers themselves. I usually love donuts, but these donuts left me COLD (60A: One way to have something down).

There were two semi-toughish parts of the grid today. The first was in the NE, where I had MENDEZ / ZIPS BY as MENDER / RIPS BY (!?), and where STOOPBALL had me wondering "????" (I had STICKBALL) (17D: Game popular in Brooklyn streets). I'd never heard of Sylvia MENDEZ (despite her being associated with a landmark civil rights case (see "Word of the Day," above)), and when RIPS BY was the first the first thing that occurred to me at 43A: Blows past, I rationalized MENDER as a new name, thinking "well, yes, it's an odd name, but I've also never heard of this person, so why shouldn't it be a name I've never seen? This is probably the only famous MENDER." But no, she ended up having a much more ordinary last name. The other sticky part of the grid, for me, came in the western and southwestern parts of the do(ugh)nut. Could never tell my FOCI from my LOCI (55D: Two inside an ellipse), and even though I guessed FOCI at first, I also guessed FRET at first for 55A: Stew (FUME). Then there was UHH, which could easily have been UMM (79A: "Lemme think ..."), and then the very tough clue on HALT (80D: Pull up). "Pull up" could go a million ways, and I could've guessed all day and not gotten to HALT. Hurray for crosses! No other problems. Really hated NO-RUN, as that is not a thing anyone says re: baseball games (106A: Like a baseball shutout). Even the phrase "baseball shutout" sets my teeth on edge. NO-RUN is just bad fill, no way around it, no way to rescue it. Also bad, but apparently undying, is UNPC. Quit trying to rationalize your offensiveness by blaming the offended. "PC" was always right-wing racist / sexist / homophobic defensiveness and self-justification. You can keep telling yourself that you're (boldly!) "not PC," but deep down you must know that means you're probably mostly just a run-of-the-mill asshole, right? Right? Right. (note: "PC" discourse has largely been superseded by the equally stupid "Woke" discourse, so can we retire UNPC on the basis of its being dated!? Whatever it takes ...)

I love TRIPHOP, a truly original answer (98A: Downtempo electronica genre). I especially love it over SIREN, a cool musical 1-2. The clue on CANOPY BED is a bit of a groaner, but I have to admit that it works well (18D: What has good coverage for retirement?). Surface meaning is solid, and solidly misleading, with the double wordplay (on both "coverage" and "retirement"). ASTAIRE isn't that exciting on its own, but the clue is a fantastic bit of trivia (21A: About whom an early critic said "Can't act, can't sing. Balding. Can dance a little"). Especially appropriate, then, that ASTAIRE sits underneath STARDOM today. HORNS IN ON is colorful and interesting (75A: Interrupts when it's not one's place to do so). I like the symmetricality of PIRI PIRI (19A: Hot sauce with a reduplicative name) and OTTERPOP (122A: Frozen treat named for a playful animal)—do OTTERPOPs come in PIRI PIRI flavor? They should. I think they just come in "blue" and "green" and other color-based flavors. I honestly haven't had one since I was 10. But if they came in PIRI PIRI, I might consider it. They should also consider a TRIPHOP OTTERPOP. I don't know what flavor that would be. Just sounds cool. Time for bed. See you later. Enjoy your Sunday.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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Cute little mishap / TUE 6-13-23 / Cocktail garnished with an orange slice and a maraschino cherry / Classic theater name

Constructor: Juliana Tringali Golden and Wendy L. Brandes

Relative difficulty: Challenging (for a Tuesday)

THEME: "READY TO GO?" (34A: "Got everything before we leave?" ... with a checklist seen in the circled letters) — theme answers contain the "checklist," which checklist includes ID, CASH, KEYS, and PHONE:

Theme answers:

• TAXI DRIVER (17A: One hailed on city streets)
• VOLCANIC ASH (23A: Output from an eruption)
• WHISKEY SOUR (49A: Cocktail garnished with an orange slice and a maraschino cherry)
• KEEP HONEST (57A: Hold to a moral code)

Word of the Day: ELSTON Howard (27A: Yankee great ___ Howard) —

Elston Gene Howard (February 23, 1929 – December 14, 1980) was an American professional baseball player who was a catcher and a left fielder. During a 14-year baseball career, he played in the Negro leagues and Major League Baseball from 1948 through 1968, primarily for the New York Yankees. A 12-time All-Star, he also played for the Kansas City Monarchs and the Boston Red Sox. Howard served on the Yankees' coaching staff from 1969 to 1979.

In 1955, he was the first African American player on the Yankees roster; this was eight years after Jackie Robinson had broken MLB's color barrier in 1947. Howard was named the American League's Most Valuable Player for the 1963 pennant winners after finishing third in the league in slugging average and fifth in home runs, becoming the first black player in AL history to win the honor. He won Gold Glove Awards in 1963 and 1964, in the latter season setting AL records for putouts and total chances in a season. His lifetime fielding percentage of .993 as a catcher was a major league record from 1967 to 1973, and he retired among the AL career leaders in putouts (7th, 6,447) and total chances (9th, 6,977). (wikipedia)

• • •

PKW. That was the original checklist, the original mnemonic, which I think I got from "Broad City" like a decade ago. The most useful thing I ever learned from a television comedy, by a mile. I say it to myself, mentally and/or out loud, virtually every time I leave the house. My wife and I both do this. We sometimes say it to each other, with a question mark on the end. "PKW?" It's like "You got everything?" And then we literally, ritualistically touch every item on the list to make sure we got it. The "W" here stands for wallet—we both carry wallets, though sometimes I think my wife's wallet goes inside a little purse, depending on what we're doing. Anyway, the point is, it's a very, very useful mnemonic. PKW! P.K. Dubs! It's short and sweet and it works. I've tried to add letters at times, but they don't really stick. "Mask" was something I tacked on to the end during the first COVID years, but "PKWM" just didn't want to happen. I sometimes need to remember "glasses" (sun- or regular, depending on which I currently have on) or "headphones" (if I'm going to be walking for any distance, which is often). But the core house-leaving mnemonic is unchanging: PKW. The holy trinity. This will perhaps partly explain why the concept of this puzzle is appealing to me, but the execution feels slightly off the mark. Now, I don't expect everyone to share my particular checklist/mnemonic. I just need to believe in the checklist itself, and I don't really believe in this one. I specifically don't believe CASH, and I'm iffy on I.D. I like to have CASH on me sometimes, but it's not essential—nowhere near as essential as PHONE and KEYS, and anyway, WALLET takes care of it. WALLET also takes care of I.D. (which I would never say—"I.D." is what a bar might ask for, but it's not a term I'd use when referring to my drivers license). Is IDCASHKEYSPHONE a common mnemonic? ICKP? ICK-P? It's a plausible checklist, for sure, but the items on the checklist don't feel tight. The first two feel less on-the-money than the second two. I don't know why the checklisted items are embedded in longer answers. Is something conceptual happening there? Maybe the answers "have" those things the way you need to "have" those things when you leave the house? OK. As a revealer, "READY TO GO?" felt less-than-snappy when I first wrote it in, but the more I say it out loud to myself, the better it sounds. 

The puzzle as a whole was way, Way harder than most Tuesdays for me. Well, I was way slower, anyway, for sure. Those corners are massive, and a lot of the longer Downs needed many crosses before they became clear. INAHOLE TALKSUP SAWPAST and then *all* the Downs in the SE: ANTBEAR (bear!?) MOVESIT STARTLE. All required work before I could parse them. I feel doomed never to remember ELSTON. I've seen his name a bunch in puzzles, and yet it won't stick. I had EASTON there at first today. The preponderance of two-letter words in today's puzzle made things tough. SET AT was SET TO at first (31A: Programmed to, as a thermostat) (yes, I see that "TO" was in the clue ... now). MOVES IT. TALKS UP. GEAR TO, yeesh, that one was brutal somehow (37D: Make specifically for). MAY NOT, also bizarrely hard for me to parse (48A: Is forbidden to). I had VOLCANO LAVA before VOLCANIC ASH. I couldn't make heads or tails of ITEM as the answer to 29A: Meeting point? until after I was done with the puzzle (I thought maybe it was referring to two people who, having ... met? ...  became a romantic ITEM, but it's the ITEM on any "meeting's" agenda. Seems obvious ... now. 

Would never spell OOPSY that way (or at all) (51D: Cute little mishap). Kept trying to make OWIE stretch to five letters somehow. We get double Spanish gender confusion at the bottom of the grid, in practically adjacent answers, with ESA and MUCHOS (not ESO or MUCHAS, both of which were reasonable answers). The fill felt a little on the weak side overall today, despite those reasonably solid longer Downs in the corners. APOLO SETAT ARIE ATIT KBS SITU ESA ERTE, stuff like this made the grid feel stuffy / clunky at times. But overall it's probably got more life than most Tuesdays. See you tomorrow.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld 

P.S. Clue on CITY BUS wasn't great (24D: Subway alternative), since the alternative to the subway is the bus, just the bus, that's it. If you're going to clue it that way, it's bus. You're clearly, obviously in the "city," since that's the only place you'd find a subway. ("Subway" had me looking for a sandwich shop). Also you probably should take "city" out of that TAXI DRIVER clue (17A: One hailed on city streets) (why in the world didn't that clue reference the movie???)

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Fulani braid decoration / FRI 9-16-22 / Treat with a hook / Chess prodigy protagonist of The Queen's Gambit / G.O.A.T. material / Big name in nail polish / Bygone Winter Palace resident / Platoon but not Dunkirk

Constructor: Juliana Tringali Golden

Relative difficulty: Medium+

Theme: none

Word of the Day: Kate UPTON (10D: Kate on the cover of Vanity Fair's 100th- anniversary issue) —

Katherine Elizabeth Upton (born June 10, 1992) is an American model. She first appeared in the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue in 2011, and was the cover model for the 2012, 2013 and 2017 issues. In addition, she was the subject of the 100th-anniversary Vanity Fair cover.

Upton has also appeared in the films Tower Heist (2011), The Other Woman (2014) and The Layover (2017). [...] 

Upton started dating then Detroit Tigers baseball player Justin Verlander in early 2014, and they were engaged in 2016. On November 4, 2017 the couple married in Tuscany, Italy. (wikipedia)

• • •

This one played a little harder than usual for me, largely because of the intentional vagueness of many of the clues, especially the early ones. For example—1A: Poles have them (ICE CAPS) ... no idea which kinda "Poles" we're talking about; 1D: Film site (IMDB) ... no idea which kinda "film" we're talking about. 2D: Heart (CORE) ... yeah, "Heart" could be lots of things (thought maybe "GIST" at first); etc. In other parts of the puzzle, the puzzles just didn't quite land right. Like 65A: Essay writing, e.g. (PROSE). Never would've guessed something as generic as PROSE (which is nearly *all* writing) from something as specific-sounding as "Essay writing," which sounds more like a task, homework, an assignment, an avocation, I dunno. And is SUPERGLUE an [Exemplar of stick-to-itiveness]? I get that it is supremely sticky, but if that's what meant, then for sure the clue should have a "?" on it, since that has nothing to do with "stick-to-itiveness" as it's commonly (metaphorically) used. But maybe someone who keeps at something is said to be like SUPERGLUE? I've never heard that, but maybe it's a thing. Someone might stick *to* someone (i.e. beside someone, near someone) like SUPERGLUE, I suppose, but that seems less like stick-to-itiveness and more like hounding, pestering, or stalking. Not sure what the clue on MLSCUP thought it was doing, cleverness-wise (25A: Goal-oriented final match, in brief?). What is the wordplay the clue is going for? I see how "goal-oriented" means one (metaphorical) thing in common parlance and here is being used to talk about (literal) soccer goals, but what is a "goal-oriented final match"? That is not a coherent phrase, and it's not a phrase that suggests anything *but* soccer (or maybe hockey). It's like they couldn't lay off the "goal-oriented" wordplay but then couldn't make it specific enough to fit the answer, so they just turned it into a bizarre mish-mash of pun and literal, and *then* added "in brief" for good measure. People are "goal-oriented"—once you say a "match" is "goal-oriented," you've lost the misdirection and added confusion. [Showdown for the goal-oriented, in brief?], maybe? Not sure, just know that the "?" we get today is rough. 

There were several delightful moments today, mostly in the longer answers. After that early struggle with the short stuff in the NW, I finally looked at 13A: Sugar refinery byproduct, and ELIA and ASK (my only two sure things in the NW) provided me with enough letters to see MOLASSES, which then got me CORE BEAD IMDB etc. Just after that came a flurry of sweet answers shooting out of that corner in all directions, starting with CANDYCANE, then DRINK IT IN (very nice) and "YOU NEVER KNOW..." (), which really blew things open:

AU NATUREL is a euphemism I don't hear much any more but I still like it a lot. I also (weirdly) liked the baby demanding to be picked up ("UP, UP"!). I was also very happy to see NEVILLE, not so much because I want to see any more clues about H*rry P*tter (I don't), but because puzzle constructor NEVILLE Fogarty is one of two dear crossword friends I solve cryptics with on (most) Tuesday nights. Fantastic constructor (you can see his cryptic crosswords at the New Yorker sometimes), and a lovely human being to boot. Absolutely loved "EASY, TIGER," even though I had it as "EASY THERE..." and that mistake caused a lot of SE confusion (33D: "Hey, hold your horses!"). I should've loved seeing NOIRISH, which is right up my personal and pedagogical alley, but that clue ... grrrr. "Hardboiled" and "noir" are not (not!) synonyms. There's a lot of terminological collapse because film noir so frequently feature hardboiled men (esp. detectives), but "hardboiled" describes a person, or maybe the prose, whereas "noir" describes either the (fatalistic, downbeat) mood, tone, atmosphere, worldview ... or the actual film qualities or techniques (expressive, often high-contrast B&W photography, flashbacks, voice-overs, etc.). Plenty of noir films and stories don't have anything "hard-boiled" about them. I don't know if they clue wants me to think of a movie or of a character in the movie, but NOIRISH is completely inapt for a [Somewhat hardboiled] person. This is a "close enough" / "horseshoes hand grenades"-type clue and I hate it. Feels sloppy. I really don't like -IZE but I do like realizing that the much better "ICE" can't go in that space for not one but two reasons: first, ICE is already in the grid at ICE CAPS (1A), and second, ICE at 28A would get you SEC at 21D, which would give you SEC crossing ... ONE SECOND. So the much better ICE would (sadly) give you a double dupe! And so you get a suffix, with a funky "Z" as your consolation.

Notes, entirely on the SW:

• 59A: Immediate threat to capture, in a game of Go (ATARI) — no idea why you do this with your crosswordese. It's crosswordese. Just own it and move on. I solved this by getting crosses and then inferring the answer from "game."
• 48D: G.O.A.T. material (CHAMP) — absolutely not. There are champs and there are champs but there can be only one G.O.A.T. (Greatest Of All Time). If you are hopping on the hyperbole bus and deciding that "all time" means "this month," then sure, any CHAMP will do. But I'm taking that "O.A.T." seriously. Iga Świątek is a champ, but Serena is the G.O.A.T. You see how that works? I thought the answer was going to be one of the words represented by the letters in "G.O.A.T." but none of them would fit.
• 51D: Anne of "Mom" (FARIS) — I wrote in SARIS ... is that anyone's name? Besides film critic Andrew SA(R)RIS, I mean? Harrumph. Not having the "F" made CRAFT PROJECT harder than it should've been.
• 50D: Roasted: Sp. (ASADO) — I thought it was ASADA (as in "carne ASADA"—thanks, Taco Bell), but looks like ASADA is just a Spanish adjective and as such comes in different genders. Just when I had ASADA and ADOBO sorted in my head, now I gotta deal with this ASADO business, sigh.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld 

P.S. an IAMB is a metrical foot composed of one unstressed and one stressed syllable, so ... "Pla-TOON," yes, "DUN-kirk," no (55A: "Platoon," but not "Dunkirk").

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