Meaty dog treats "in a blanket" / FRI 10-17-25 / Customizable Nintendo avatars / Arizona tribe with matrilineal clans / Max ___, boxer nicknamed "Madcap Maxie" / Plant often confused with algae / Portmanteau for evidence based solely on personal accounts / Brand of rum mentioned in Hemingway novels / Drinking game with projectiles

Constructor: Karen Steinberg

Relative difficulty: Easy

THEME: none 

Word of the Day: Max BAER (36A: Max ___, boxer nicknamed "Madcap Maxie") —

 

Maximilian Adelbert Baer Sr. (February 11, 1909 – November 21, 1959) was an American professional boxer and the world heavyweight champion from June 14, 1934, to June 13, 1935. He was known in his time as the Livermore Larupper and Madcap Maxie. Two of his fights (a 1933 win over Max Schmeling and a 1935 loss to James J. Braddock) were rated Fight of the Year by The Ring magazine. Baer was also a boxing referee, and had occasional roles in film and television. He was the brother of heavyweight boxing contender Buddy Baer and father of actor Max Baer Jr. Baer is rated #22 on The Ring magazine's list of 100 greatest punchers of all time. (wikipedia)

• • •

This was easy and delightful. Crossing CHARLI XCX with SNAUSAGES (3D: Meaty dog treats "in a blanket") ... I don't know where a crossword can even go from there. That's peak Friday fun. The long answers are consistently interesting and the glue (the short stuff) is perfectly tolerable and the whole thing felt very whoosh whoosh so I'm happy. You've got portmanteaus and superheroes and Whoopi and WICCA. The puzzle really gets around. It's also a very, very drinky puzzle. A drunk puzzle, even. What's your preference? Pick your poison. We can start with some ICE WATER, if you insist, but then ... You want some RICE WINE? No? How about a game of BEER DARTS? Or maybe just sip BACARDI? Speaking of BACARDI, as I was googling trying to remember the song lyrics I want that are floating somewhere in the back of my head ("... something something sipping BACARDI ..."), I discovered there are hundreds of songs that mention BACARDI, and approximately half of them are by Lana Del Rey. 

• "Bartender" ("Crosby, Stills and Nash is playing / Wine is flowing with BACARDI")
• "Off to the Races" ("I'm off to the races, cases of BACARDI chase / Chasing me all over town")
• "Noir" ("I'm Miss Parlor Tricks, sips of the BACARDI")
• "Girl That Got Away" ("Come back, sugey, come back to me / Fix me up a mixed drink, BACARDI")

Either that's all of them or there are dozens more, I don't have time to wade through the (non-ANEC)DATA. The phrase "sipping BACARDI" alone is found in more rap songs than you can shake a stick at. I'm just scrolling and scrolling and the songs keep coming. There's just something musical about the way BACARDI sounds and flows. Also, it rhymes with "party," that probably helps.

Normally I start in the NW, but when I couldn't get 1A: What a comment might be made in (JEST) (me: "the comments ... section?"), I hopped over one section, to the due north section, and so my first word in the grid was ... MIIS. I can't believe I've lived long enough and solved long enough for neo-crosswordese like MIIS to become a gimme. MIIS is the new BAER. Of course the old BAER is BAER, Max BAER, who has been around long enough, and then disappeared long enough, that I'm actually kind of happy to see him. I imagine him in a Crossword Retirement Village, occasionally getting the old gang back together for drinks (some RICE WINE for Bert LAHR, BACARDI for ZASU Pitts, maybe just ICE WATER for ASTA). Like yesterday's Charles READE, Max BAER used to appear much more often than he does these days. Check out the BAER chart:

[from xwordinfo dot com]

Shortz didn't exactly cut BAER out entirely, but there's a definite drop off, and then it's almost like you can see him, some time around 2010, deciding to turn the BAER tap down to a trickle. Of course, there's also just time ... which tends to take even famous people down, eventually. So the chart probably represents a combination of editorial decision-making (less overcommon short stuff!) and just natural fame diminishment. Still, I think of BAER as very much the boxer of CrossWorld in the olden days (well, the boxer of CrossWorld is ALI, for all eternity, but among mortals, it was BAER). I'm too young ever to have seen him box, but I have seen him in movies, most recently as the winner of this very brutal boxing match in Humphrey Bogart's last movie, The Harder They Fall (1956).
 

My favorite parts of the puzzle came near the beginning, in the NW (CHARLI XCX / SNAUSAGES), and then again near the end, on the opposite side of the grid. At first I couldn't get into it. I had BRAIN but no idea what followed (ROT ... FART ... DRAIN ...?) I managed to remember "VOLARE" thanks to the very helpful "V" from VINE, but it took some thinking for me to get both SUPERMAN and MENOPAUSE. With SUPERMAN, I fell for the "DC figure" misdirect (i.e. I thought of politics), and with MENOPAUSE, I fell for the gender-free nature of "one's" (30D: Event typically occurring in one's late 40s or early 50s). Had the "M" and wanted something like MIDLIFE CRISIS. But what I failed to see, couldn't have seen, was that "one's" meant "women's." You got me. I somehow liked the surprise when I finally got the answer. I'm so vain, I probably thought the clue was about me. It wasn't.

Last bits:

• 5A: Plant often confused with algae (MOSS) — had the "MO-," wrote in MOLD :(
• 17A: British singer with the top 10 albums "Crash" and "Brat" (CHARLI XCX) — if you're not up on your pop stars, you should probably get up on this one. She's gonna be used in BRAT clues for a long time to come. Wouldn't be surprised to see XCX show up occasionally on its own. She is a megastar whose album BRAT was all over the news last year, turning the term BRAT into an entire cultural phenomenon (BRAT was Collins Dictionary's Word of the Year last year) (Here's a Times article from last summer entitled "It's the Summer of 'Brats'"). Charli is feud-with-Taylor-Swift famous, and though she's never going to be as crossword-common as other pop stars with more grid-friendly names, like ADELE or RITA ORA (26D: British singer with the hits "R.I.P." and "Radioactive"), you should expect to see her name in clues and in the grid for some time to come. 

[You: "Hey, you know that song 'Radioactive'?" Me: "Oh hell yeah" [starts singing this song]]

• 46A: Portmanteau for evidence based solely on personal accounts (ANECDATA) — portmanteaus (portmanteaux?) are not always pleasing to my eye/ear (see SKORT, for instance), but I love ANECDATA. It somehow both sounds good and is a perfect expression of what it is.
• 41D: "Stop the presses!" ("HOLD IT!") — wanted something more press-specific here at first, but the "presses" part is just metaphorical. The clue could just as easily have been ["Stop!"], but ... every other clue in that SE section is trying to throw you off, why not this one!?

That's all. See you next time.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on BlueSky and Facebook and Letterboxd]
=============================
❤️ Support this blog ❤️: 

• Venmo (@MichaelDavidSharp)]

=============================
✏️ Upcoming Crossword Tournaments ✏️

• Finger Lakes Crossword Competition (Ithaca) (Sat., Oct. 18, 2025) (***TOMORROW***)

=============================
📘 My other blog 📘:

• Pop Sensation (vintage paperbacks)

Read more...

Roman guardian spirit / FRI 4-4-25 / Anti-jaywalking directive / One getting in online debates, colloquially / Greek goddess who is the equivalent of the Roman Pax / Its flag was solid red with a white elephant / Hair color blending technique / Pinched pasta shape

Constructor: Karen Steinberg

Relative difficulty: Easy

THEME: none 

Word of the Day: LAR (6D: Roman guardian spirit) —

Lares (/ˈlɛəriːz, ˈleɪriːz/ LAIR-eez, LAY-reez, Latin: [ˈlareːs]; archaic lasēs, singular lar) were guardian deities in ancient Roman religion. Their origin is uncertain; they may have been hero-ancestors, guardians of the hearth, fields, boundaries, or fruitfulness, or an amalgam of these.

Lares were believed to observe, protect, and influence all that happened within the boundaries of their location or function. The statues of domestic Lares were placed at the table during family meals; their presence, cult, and blessing seem to have been required at all important family events. [...]

Because of these associations, Lares are sometimes categorised as household gods, but some had much broader domains. Roadways, seaways, agriculture, livestock, towns, cities, the state, and its military were all under the protection of their particular Lar or Lares. Those who protected local neighbourhoods (vici) were housed in the crossroad shrines (Compitalia), which served as a focus for the religious, social, and political lives of their local, overwhelmingly plebeian communities. Their cult officials included freedmen and slaves, otherwise excluded by status or property qualifications from most administrative and religious offices.

Compared to Rome's major deities, Lares had limited scope and potency, but archaeological and literary evidence attests to their central role in Roman identity and religious life. By analogy, a homeward-bound Roman could be described as returning ad Larem (to the Lar). (wikipedia)

• • •

So ... LAR. It's been a minute. It's been over four years, actually. Look, I'll get to the good stuff in a second, but LAR is bugging the hell out of me because I cannot for the life of me understand keeping LAR in any grid except under the most extreme circumstances, and I don't think this particular grid qualifies as "extreme." LAR is a "Tear It Down" kind of word. It is the household god of Crosswordese, which I define as "short fill, largely arcane, that died a pretty hard death the moment Shortz took over, but still annoyingly hangs around because its particular letter combinations prove too tempting, at times, in tough spots." You wanna see a crossword answer die a hard death in real time (well, in time, anyway). Check out this LAR timeline (the blue is when the Shortz Era begins):

[xwordinfo]

And yet, LAR ... not dead enough, apparently. Man, 1951. Fourteen LARs! What a time to be alive. At least it's not LER, I guess (a Norse sea god? Maybe? Hang on ... gah, Celtic! Celtic sea god! So close... LER has been M.I.A. since 2013, but somewhere out there, the Cult of LER awaits his return...). Reading about LAR was actually interesting to me, and yet I still think it's a "better to tear your grid down and try again" kind of answer. I'll eat all of my hats if it's not the least familiar thing in the grid, on average, for most solvers, by far. It could so easily be OAR, except ... you've got OARS sitting right there, practically adjacent to it. Still, I think you tear the non-15 stuff out, down to NSF and up to the far NW if you have to, just to get rid of LAR. If you put LAR in your grid, expect that to be one of the things, if not the primary thing, that solvers remember. 

(We now join our LAR-less portion of the program, already in progress.) ... latticework of 15s! A sparkling, solid foundation for an extremely whooshy grid. True, I have never heard the phrase CROSS AT THE GREEN (55A: Anti-jaywalking directive). I mean, I have crossed when the light turned green, of course, so I have crossed on green, and I have crossed at the corner, where the light is, but CROSS AT THE GREEN must be some kind of city-specific directive that just missed me. My most memorable street-crossing moment happened in Edinburgh in 1989, when one of my friends (Sarah?) stepped off the curb too soon, or didn't look the right way, or something, and had to jump back to the curb to avoid getting hit by traffic, which prompted the tiniest old man to walk up to her, point to the "Don't Walk" sign, and say (in the most Scottish accent possible): "Ye 'ave to wait for the wee man!" (you know, the little green walking guy that signifies "walk"). I hear that guy's voice in my head every time I'm waiting to cross the street now. 

[the wee man]

Anyway, CROSS AT THE GREEN did nothing for me, but the rest of the 15s were wonderful, running the gamut from the quaintly colloquial (USING THE OLD BEAN) (11D: Thinking hard, informally) to the currently colloquial (KEYBOARD WARRIOR) (17A: One getting in online debates, colloquially) and making stops at all points in between. Those answers really propelled me through the grid, getting me into all corners of the grid with relative ease. Look at this opening:

Exploding out of the gate in two directions! Amazing feeling. Maybe too amazing, as the puzzle was over a little quicker than I'd have liked, and there wasn't really much resistance to speak of, but it was fun while it lasted. The toughest part for me today was parsing the central 15: "I CALL 'EM AS I SEE 'EM" (35A: "Lemme be straight with you"). I had "ICALLE-" and ??? That "E" was baffling. Could not see at that point that the "TH" had been elided from "THEM" to produce "'EM." I also thought ISM was IST (28D: Ending with real or social), but even "M" would've probably still left me shrugging. But all I had to do was move on and come back to this answer, and eventually it filled itself right in. Otherwise ... no issues. I no-looked AI WEIWEI! Exhilarating. Seems unlikely, I know, but I took one look at the improbable letter pattern, --WEI--I, and just knew. I did read the clue after I'd entered the answer, just to confirm, but turns out I didn't need to. I still remember putting AI WEIWEI in a Sunday-sized puzzle I co-wrote many years ago, and having it rejected for obscurity. And now here we are. I don't know that AI WEIWEI is any more popular now than he was then. Maybe. Either way, I always enjoy seeing him. 

["Map of China"]

Had three different single-letter hesitations today, the "M" (not "T") in ISM, the terminal "E" (not "A") in IRENE (30D: Greek goddess who is the equivalent of the Roman Pax), and the "D" (not "E") in USING THE OLD BEAN ("OLE" seemed very plausible). Unless proper nouns gave you trouble, I don't see any other real trouble spots today.

More more more:

• 1A: It may lead to a second opinion ("ALSO ...") — hard, and fun(ny).
• 27A: Boorish sorts (SWINE) — good misdirection here. Thought "boorish" would be figurative. Maybe it still is, actually. We call people "SWINE," sure, why not? Point is, I penciled in a terminal "S" for this plural, and then eventually had to retract it.
• 39A: Turndown? (DOGEAR) — when you "turn down" the corner of a page in a book (in LIEU of a bookmark), you DOGEAR the page.
• 33A: Grad. student fellowship funder (NSF) — hard to know from day to day if any of these federal agencies are still functioning any more. Looks like there've been massive cuts to both the National Science Foundation and the NIH (National Institutes of Health). This is great news for, you know, haters of scientific progress and high-mortality enthusiasts. 
• 34D: High ___ (JINKS) — weird. I thought this was one word. Also, I wanted to spell this JINX. But no: though it's sometimes (apparently) spelled "hi-jinks," it really is two words, spelled just as it appears in the puzzle. 

• 49D: "___ Doone," R.D. Blackmore romance (LORNA) — LAR's favorite novel! Classic crosswordese (both LORNA and DOONE). The way the clue is laid out in my paper print-out of the puzzle, the first line of this clue reads "___ Doone," R.D." and my first thought was "There's a sequel ... where LORNA gets a degree? What's an 'R.D.'? Registered Dietician?" Lorna Doone, Registered Dietician sounds thrilling, in a perversely boring kind of way. Would read. Would LORNA Doone, R.D. recommend LORNA Doone cookies? You'll have to read to find out!

I'm off to Stamford today for the Crossword Tournament. Eli's got tomorrow and Sunday covered. See you Monday.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on BlueSky and Facebook]

Read more...

Rhyming destinations for yummies / TUE 7-18-23 / Harvest goddess with a daughter in the underworld / Pal you might take fishing? / Chilly-sounding pod in a stir-fry / Muslim land with a monarch / Nonvegan fat in a pie crust

Constructor: Karen and Paul Steinberg

Relative difficulty: Easy

THEME: GRECO-ROMAN (36A: Kind of wrestling ... or a hint to four pairs of crossing answers in this puzzle) — Greek gods cross their Roman counterparts four times:

Theme answers:

• POSEIDON / NEPTUNE (18A and 1D: Trident-wielding god of the sea)
• ARTEMIS / DIANA (19A and 8D: Apollo's twin who rules over the hunt)
• DEMETER / CERES (60A and 52D: Harvest goddess with a daughter in the underworld)
• DIONYSUS / BACCHUS (65A and 45D: God celebrated with wine, feasts and dancing)

Word of the Day: CHUM (4A: Pal you might take fishing?) —

Chumming (American English from Powhatan) is the blue water fishing practice of throwing meat-based groundbait called "chum" into the water in order to lure various marine animals (usually large game fish) to a designated fishing ground, so the target animals are more easily caught by hooking or spearing. Chums typically consist of fresh chunks of fish meat with bone and blood, the scent of which attracts predatory fish, particularly sharks, billfishes, tunas and groupers. In the past, the chum contents have also been made from "offal", the otherwise rejected or unwanted parts of slaughtered animals such as internal organs. [...] Chumming is illegal in some parts of the world (such as in the U.S. state of Alabama) because of the danger it can pose by conditioning sharks to associate feeding with human presence. (wikipedia)

• • •

Was humming along and not really thinking much about the theme at first. I noticed that gods were crossing, but I know my gods pretty well, so I was writing them easily as I went along, without even noticing that the crossing gods were clued identically, or that they were Greek / Roman counterparts. Early in the week, this is pretty typical for me—burn through the grid, vaguely notice that there *is* a theme, wait for that theme to jump out and loudly announce itself. So I'm enjoying myself pretty well, doo doo doo, and then I hit the reveal and have a very genuine aha! Actually, it was more like an "Oh!" but an excited "oh!" with an exclamation point, not a meh "oh" ["Meh oh! ... Meh-eh-eh oh ..."—Harry Belafonte encountering a so-so revealer]. The revealer did what it was supposed to do: grabbed my attention and got me to see the pattern at work. Now, if I'd been going slower and had cared to suss out the pattern on my own, I definitely could have, but that's just not how I solve a Tuesday, so ... great. The revealer was like a tour guide pointing out the side of the bus telling me to notice some building I could see in my peripheral vision but wasn't really paying attention to. Thanks, revealer. GRECO-ROMAN isn't the most ... acrobatic wordplay you're ever going to see. Yes, it is a play on a wrestling term, but it's also straightforward, literal description of the theme. But the fact that GRECO-ROMAN *only* evokes wrestling (that's the only time I'd ever use that term, or have ever heard that term) makes it wordplayish enough, I think. Structurally, it's pretty remarkable that the theme works out so nicely within the confines of a rotationally symmetrical grid. In fact, two of the crossings are perfectly symmetrical (ARTEMIS / DIANA, DEMETER / CERES). The other crossings find the gods shifted one column (and row) out of symmetry, but first of all, you probably didn't notice, and second of all, names cross where they cross ... they have the letter(s) in common that they have in common, so threading the needle can be very challenging. It's genuinely remarkable that the theme was doable at all in the confines of a regular Tuesday grid. That fact that the symmetrical counterparts of every Greek and Roman god are all the same length, and that it's always Greek in the Across and Roman in the Down, these features simply add to the elegance of the theme's execution.

The grid is 16-wide in order to accommodate GRECO-ROMAN in the center of the grid (an even-number-length central answer requiring an even-numbered grid width in order to sit true in the center), but the extra column didn't seem to add any time to the solve. Anyway, if the puzzle felt easy but your time was normal, the extra column is probably why. I was strong out of the gate on this one—unsure which org. was involved at 1A: U.S. intelligence org. (I wrote in CIA), but then getting NSA easily once I took one look at the clue for NEPTUNE. After that, very few hiccups. I smiled a few times as I was solving, and probably smiled most broadly at the clue for CHUM (4A: Pal you might take fishing?). Something about the idea of bloody chunks of flesh being your "pal" was funny to me. Same thing happened with the clue on TUMMIES—probably too easy, but something about the phrasing "Rhyming destinations"—and the term "yummies"—was bizarre enough to make me laugh (12D: Rhyming destinations for yummies). There's some pretty decent longer fill in here today, which is mildly surprising given how theme-dense the puzzle is. Loved "I'M SO DEAD" and MEDIA SHY, and UNBURDEN and "I'D SAY SO" are solid as well. I made one mistake today, but even that made me laugh: I had the "RE-" at the beginning of 24A: Capital of Saskatchewan and thought "ooh, ooh, I know this ... it's ... uh ... oh, it's RED HAT!" Uh, no. I think I was thinking of Medicine Hat (which is in Alberta). RED HAT is the software company where friends of mine work. REGINA is, of course, the capital of Saskatchewan. 

Had to fight through two little kealoas* today, at ATAD (not ABIT) (56D: Somewhat) and MDS (not DRS, which is what I wrote in at first) (62D: OB/GYNs, e.g.). I found the tide clue on RECEDES odd (66A: Goes out like the tide), since ... well, if you're gonna go tide-specific, I'd say the verb is (always?) EBBS. If you're gonna go hairline-specific, then RECEDES is definitely your guy. [Goes out] = "Ooh, that's pretty vague, I don't know." [Goes out like the tide] = "Oh, EBBS!" But no. Any other minor gripes? Not really. I do grow weary of DLISTER, and DLIST in general, as a term (8A: Very minor celeb). I feel like the term got currency a decade or so ago with the Kathy Griffin show "My Life on the D-List" and then constructors were like "cool" and just ran with it. Well, I discovered just now that the letter scale for celebrity status has a very specific origin. And a name! It's called the Ulmer Scale:

The A-list is part of a larger guide called The Hot List, which ranks the bankability of 1,400 movie actors worldwide, and has become an industry-standard guide in Hollywood. American entertainment journalist James Ulmer, the guide's creator, has also developed a version including directors, the Hot List of Directors. The Ulmer scale categorizes the lists into A+, A, B+, B, C, and D listings. Similarly, in India, there is three-tier strategy, tier-1, tier-2 and tier-3, which are based on the saleability and box office collection capability of a star. (wikipedia)

So I now know two Ulmers, the other being Edgar G. Ulmer, the director of the beautifully grim low-budget film noir classic, Detour (1945). It will surprise probably no one that ULMER has never appeared in a New York Times crossword puzzle. Adding him to the list of legendary directors that the puzzle continues to snub Justice for the OZU-VARDA-ULMER triumvirate! 

See you tomorrow.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld 

*kealoa = a pair of words (normally short, common answers) that can be clued identically and that share at least one letter in common (in the same position). These are answers you can't just fill in quickly because two or more answers are viable, Even With One or More Letters In Place. From the classic [Mauna ___] KEA/LOA conundrum. See also, e.g. [Heaps] ATON/ALOT, ["Git!"] "SHOO"/"SCAT," etc. 

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

Read more...

Small fancy confections / THU 6-1-23 / Subtle expression of contempt in modern lingo / Hotter substitute for jalapeño / Palindromic tracker / First Nissan model offered as a hybrid / Store with a suggested navigational map / Fontaine contents

Constructor: David and Karen and Paul Steinberg

Relative difficulty: Medium-Easy (for me, a brutal four square section ... and, once I worked that out, a cakewalk)

THEME: Reducing Fractions — The word "HALF" (in three Down answers) is replaced (over two squares) with a fraction representing "HALF" (with numerator/denominator reduced by HALF each time: 4/8, 2/4, 1/2); in the Across answers, the numbers in the fractions function as letters (e.g. "-four-," "-eight-," etc.).  
Theme answers (Downs / fractions):

• 17D: Coffee with less kick (4/8 CAF, i.e. HALF CAF)
• 26D: Pretty darn good (NOT 2/4 BAD, i.e. NOT HALF BAD)
• 47D: Inning part when the visiting team bats (TOP 1/2, i.e. TOP HALF)

Theme answers (Acrosses / letters):

• 16A: Not up to us (OUT OF OUR HANDS)
• 19A: Increase the intensity of (HEIGHTEN)
• 37A: Doctor's reassurance before a shot ("IT WON'T HURT")
• 40A: Small, fancy confections (PETITS FOURS)
• 60A: Made amends (ATONED)
• 63A: Reliable, to a lender (CREDIT-WORTHY)

Word of the Day: PETITS-FOURS (40A) —

A petit four (plural: petits fours, also known as mignardises) is a small bite-sized confectionery or savory appetizer. The name is  French, petit four (French pronunciation: ​[pə.ti fuʁ]), meaning "small oven". // In 18th and 19th century France, gas ovens did not exist. Large brick (Dutch design) ovens were used, which took a long time to heat up to bake bread, but also to cool down. Bakers used the ovens during the cooling process, taking advantage of their stored heat, for baking pastry. This was called baking à petit four (literally "at small oven"), a lower temperature which allowed pastry baking. // Petits fours come in three varieties:

• Glacé ("glazed"), iced or decorated tiny cakes covered in fondant or icing, such as small éclairs, and tartlets
• Salé ("salted"), savory bite-sized appetizers usually served at cocktail parties or buffets
• Sec ("dry"), dainty biscuits, baked meringues, macarons, and puff pastries

In a French patisserie, assorted small desserts are usually called mignardises, while hard, buttery biscuits are called petits fours.

• • •

Huge "aha" with this one, though it doubled as a huge "D'oh!" because once I got the gimmick (after much staring and quizzical head-tilting) I realized I'd been reading one of the clues wrong. For me the most vicious part of this puzzle was the fact that DECAF fit perfectly at 17D: Coffee with less kick. The second most vicious part was the fact that HIKE fit at 19A: Increase the intensity of, and the third most vicious was the clue on SHELLS (14D: Racing boats), which I thought were SCULLS (Is That A Thing!?!?! ... oh, %#$&@! It Is!! Cruel). I could see that 16A: Not up to us wanted to be OUT OF OUR HANDS, but with DECAF and SCULLS wanting in on the action, I had OUT O--ANDS and couldn't visualize how any of that was gonna work. And underneath that I had H--N for 19A: Increase the intensity of and no idea what I was supposed to do with that. Kept trying to pull GHANA (5D: Major exporter of gold and cocoa) but GHANA wasn't ghana go anywhere, so... yeah. Eventually I decided it was a "FOUR" rebus, somehow, and I shifted SCULLS to SHELLS. This allowed me to finally see the "8" in HEIGHTEN, right under the "4" in OUT OF OUR HANDS, but I still had this dumb moment of "Wait, if it's DECAF ... how does 4 over 8 equal "DE" ... D = 4? E = 8? This isn't some phone keypad thing, is it ... no, that doesn't work. I don't get it, why would you put HALF over CA- ... oh for &^#$%'s sake." It's coffee with less kick, not no kick. So ... HALF CAF. Allow me to repeat: D'oh! After that, the rest of the puzzle (and I still had a long way to go) was a breeze. 

I wonder if solving on paper would've made this easier. I think I could've maybe visualized the whole number rebus aspect a little better with pencil and paper. But as I say, once the "half" gimmick dropped, there wasn't much left to this one, except to discover how the remaining "halves" were going to play out, although at that point I guess I didn't know they were all going to be halves. I suppose other fractional amounts were still possible. But I at least knew to look for number rebuses in the Across answers, and it's not too hard to see the number in PETITS FOURS, which helped me change NOT SO BAD (?) to the much better NOT 2/4 i.e. HALF BAD. And then I came at TOP 1/2 i.e. HALF from above, with the TOP already in place before I ever looked at the clue, so no problem there—just needed to see what numbers were going to be involved, and ATONED made that clear quickly. I think this theme is ingenious, even if it meant that the puzzle played really, really unevenly (much struggle up front, virtually none thereafter). The fractions are handed gracefully—more gracefully than I require, frankly. No need to make your rebus gimmick this symmetrical, but if symmetry's your thing, here you go. I was definitely looking for another HALF somewhere in the grid, but I guess the choice was made to keep it simple, symmetrical, clean—so those NE and SW corners are allowed to remain fraction-free, and since they're more than solid, I appreciate that. Love the chili pepper over LIBIDO (hot!), and I love the colloquial quality of "GOT THAT?" I don't love TAKE A CAB, but of all the EAT A SANDWICH-type answers, TAKE A CAB is probably among the best, in that it actually seems like a legit standalone phrase. So we've got a very clever theme and a highly polished grid. Good enough for me.

I feel like some contingent of solvers are going to have trouble with PETITS FOURS, either with not really knowing what they are, or not knowing how plural French spellings work, or ... something. But I don't see much else (outside the entire theme concept!) to give solvers too much trouble today. There are hardly any proper nouns from pop culture (of any era). In fact ... there are none? I mean, SPOOFS is clued via "Airplane!" and "This is Spinal Tap," and I guess you could consider POOH "pop culture" if you wanted, but this puzzle just doesn't have trivia of the sort that is likely to leave anyone generationally baffled (see yesterday's BEASTIE BOYS, lol). My mistakes were all fairly petty. I wanted UTAH before UTES (18A: Salt Lake City team), which left me briefly wondering why a chair might need UGANDA (11D: Something a chair needs = AGENDA). I wrote in LEST for some reason at 22D: "Should that be the case ..." ("IF SO...") (four letters, "S" in place ... it seemed plausible in the moment). 32A: Grammy equivalent is a wicked clue, in that you're sure to think "award" before "grandmother." NAN came as a surprise there, but luckily crosses were easy. I liked the clue on DESELECT (8D: Turn off, digitally) because "digitally" seemed to work in two ways ("online," "with your fingers"). I don't really get the HOW and YES clues at the end (66D: Good question / 67D: Good answer). That is, I don't know why they're "good." Is this some kind of meta-commentary, like "HOW does this puzzle even work?" and "YES! I finally figured it out!"?  Maybe you have better ideas. Let me know. 

It's a new month—time to highlight the best NYTXW puzzles of last month (two themed puzzles, and one themeless). So here it is, the Best of May 2023:

• Themed: Catherine Cetta, "SAY CHEESE" (Mon. May 8); David J. Kahn, "CAPITAL / GAINS" (Thu., May 4)
• Themeless: Spencer Leach (PRIDE PARADE / POLE DANCE / PROMO CODE / BORED TO DEATH) (Sat., May 13)

See you tomorrow.

 

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld 

P.S. OK some of you seem to have gotten a dark line between numerators and denominators but I cannot figure out what solving format was involved. If you *did* have a dark line, what solving format were you using?

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

Read more...

Northernmost capital in continental South America / WED 12-7-22 / Six-time M.L.B. All-Star Mookie / It might say "Scam Likely"

Constructor: Karen Steinberg

Relative difficulty: Easy? (6:30)

THEME: Words that mean different things in different languages

Theme answers:

• Vintage car, in German ... or veteran, in English-- OLD TIMER
• High school, in Danish ... or building for indoor sports, in English-- GYMNASIUM
• Competition, in French ... or agreement, in English-- CONCURRENCE
• Plywood, in Dutch ... or theater with several screens, in English-- MULTIPLEX
• Vacation, in Swedish ... or half of an academic year, in English-- SEMESTER
  

Word of the Day: MRES (G.I. food packs) —

Some of the early MRE main courses were not very palatable, earning them the nicknames "Meals Rejected by Everyone," "Meals Rejected by Ethiopia" (during the 1983–1985 famine in Ethiopia), or "Meals Rarely Edible." Some individual portions had their own nicknames. For example, the frankfurters, which came sealed in pouches of four, were referred to as "the four fingers of death." Although quality has improved over the years, many of the nicknames have stuck. MREs were sometimes called "Three Lies for the Price of One ... it's not a Meal, it's not Ready, and you can't Eat it."

• • •

Good morning, squad! Today's another Malaika MWednesday, and I am peering out of a thick World Cup Haze in order to write this post. I hardly know what day it is or what time it is. I'm still recovering from the Japan PKs and the Morocco PKs. I'm considering tattooing Mbappe's face onto my forearm. Today is the first day in seventeen days that there will be no games for me to watch and I'm already going through withdrawal. I haven't even written a paragraph yet and I'm already switching to another tab to watch the Richarlison goal for the one hundredth time.

Anyway, let's talk about this puzzle. The theme is not my favorite type... I'm always disappointed when there's no revealer. This was sort of "collection of things that have a thing in common, but you didn't know what that thing was." I was hoping I'd put in one of the answers and be like "Oh yeahhhh, I remember learning that MULTIPLEX meant plywood..." (or whatever) but nope. I basically said "Huh, okay" five times and that was the puzzle.

I wonder if I would find the double meanings more impressive if I hadn't just watched Richarlison's bicycle kick but to be honest there is very little that can impress me after that. That's not the puzzle's fault. My bar has been set impossibly high.

I'm very intrigued by the layout of this puzzle! Those stacks in the corners and the four pyramids of black squares are what I'd associate with a themeless puzzle. Kameron Austin Collins is always busting out the pyramids. This layout is probably influenced by the central answer which is 11 letters long-- it forces a lot of blocks into place. I think my favorite non-theme entries were SAMOSA and SWOOSH. What about y'all?

Bullets:

• [Six-time M.L.B. All-Star Mookie] for BETTS-- I KNEW THIS ONE!! ATTENTION FOLKS! THERE WAS A BASEBALL CLUE THAT I, MALAIKA HANDA, KNEW THE ANSWER TO! BOW DOWN, PLEASE!!!
• [Tooth holder] for JAW-- I had "gum" and then I had "saw" for sooo long
• Little EVA, who sang "Locomotion"-- Let me tell you, I made it through this whole freaking puzzle and was like "Aww man was it really only men??" and then got to this clue and was like "Phew!!"

xoxo Malaika

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

Read more...

Danish shoe manufacturer / TUE 7-12-22 / Apt name for a car mechanic? / Puccini opera set in Rome / Potato salad ingredient for short / Counterpart of rouge in roulette

Constructor: Karen Steinberg

Relative difficulty: Slightly to the harder side of Tuesday (mostly because the first longer answer was basically unclued and the second one ... I know only vaguely) 

THEME: SLEEP-WAKE CYCLES (57A: Body's internal clock patterns, regulated by the phenomenon seen in the circled letters) — circled squares form a wave across the grid that spells out CIRCADIAN RHYTHM. You also get the answer TWENTY-FOUR HOURS at the top of the grid (16A: Approximate length of 57-Across), as well as DAY up top (5A: Light time) and NIGHT down below (66A: Dark time)

Word of the Day: circadian rhythm (spelled out in the wavy circle-line across the grid) —

A circadian rhythm (/sərˈkeɪdiən/), or circadian cycle, is a natural, internal process that regulates the sleep–wake cycle and repeats roughly every 24 hours. It can refer to any process that originates within an organism (i.e., endogenous) and responds to the environment (entrained by the environment). These 24-hour rhythms are driven by a circadian clock, and they have been widely observed in animals, plants, fungi and cyanobacteria.

The term circadian comes from the Latin circa, meaning "around" (or "approximately"), and diēm, meaning "day". Processes with 24-hour cycles are more generally called diurnal rhythms; diurnal rhythms should not be called circadian rhythms unless they can be confirmed as endogenous, and not environmental.

Although circadian rhythms are endogenous, they are adjusted to the local environment by external cues called zeitgebers (German for "time givers"), which include light, temperature and redox cycles. In clinical settings, an abnormal circadian rhythm in humans is known as a circadian rhythm sleep disorder.

• • •

What does the wave represent? I am not quite understanding the visual representation. It looks like an EKG or other hospital monitor ... but are circadian rhythms measured this way? If you do a google image search on [circadian rhythm], all the visuals you get are basically dial-shaped, like a clock face (not surprisingly), showing day on one side and night on the other, or something like that. Something like this, actually:

or this:

or this:

You do have the DAY / NIGHT thing going on, but those answers are so small they hardly register. As for the "circadian rhythm" wave: there's no doubt that a "wave" is a common enough representation of a cycle, but the connection between the visual (the puzzle's whole reason for being) and the word it contains just seems weak. Also, I know the phrase primarily in the plural: circadian rhythms. That's how it appears in the title of this page at UCLA Sleep Disorder clinic, for instance, and it must be the way the phenomenon is commonly talked about, otherwise I'm not sure why it would exist in the plural in my head. Its appearing in the singular here certainly isn't an error or inelegance, just a grid-fitting tweak that jarred my ear a bit. Notice that while "rhythm" is in the singular, the revealer is in the plural. More grid-fitting. Notice also that the wave isn't exactly regular, i.e. flattens out at the top of its cycle (for two squares) but then spikes at the bottom. Again, the grid is a harsh taskmaster, so you make your theme material work however you can. I don't think any of the grid accommodations here are egregious or disqualifying, but when you make a visual element into the marquee event, little glitches and incongruencies stand out (if you bother to look and don't just get on with your day like a normal person).

The fill was rough, especially through the wave, which is not surprising. As I've said before, trying to fill a grid neatly around a word that runs on diagonals is very hard. If you put TWENTY-FOUR HOURS in your grid, well, it just sits on one line and behaves itself and you just have to do the normal amount of architectural work to accommodate it, whereas when a phrase does what "circadian rhythm" does, hoo boo are you in for a rough ride. Seems like it should be the same amount of trouble—same number of letters as TWENTY-FOUR HOURS, after all; but when you leave the straight plane of the Across, now you're involving all the other Across planes in your shenanigans and the grid will really start to buck and thrash on you. This is why you get FAA and DOFOR and AONE and RAE all clumped in a wet bunch there in the middle, and then the OTTO OHM OHH wad in the east, oof, that was probably the roughest part of the grid for me. I'm never good at those [Good name for someone who works in some profession]-type answers, and having the "O" at 38A: Apt name for a car mechanic? (OTTO) all I could think of was "... OILY? Are people named OILY?" And then I wanted ERGO for THUS (40D: Start of a conclusion). And *then*, after I got THUS, I really Really wanted AHA for 44A: ""Now" I get it!" ("OHH!"). Oof, that one answer, "OHH!," gave me more trouble than anything else except the revealer, which I needed almost every cross for (that WAKE part was ???). I wanted OHM for 41D: Physicist Georg with electrifying discoveries? but AHA wasn't letting me go with it. And even when I went with it, I ended up with "AHH!" for 44A: ""Now" I get it!," which, come on, seems at least as right as "OHH!" Just a wreck, and a wreck happening on some of the junkiest fill in the grid. Not too much fun. I did run into a classic example of a kealoa* today, though, which wasn't fun either, but it does allow me to illustrate the phenomenon rather neatly with a grid shot:

The only way this could be a more perfect example of the type is if the word "Observatory" were not in the clue. Maybe it's supposed to help you decide between LOA and KEA, but not being an observatory aficionado, it didn't help me at all. And as you can see, I had the "A"—which also didn't help me at all. That is the hallmark of the kealoa*—there's no way to decide between two (or more) options until you get some crosses ... and then you get one (or more) ... and it *still* doesn't help you. This happens with a bunch of common crossword answers: ATON v ALOT, ELUDE v EVADE, etc. A kealoa is a little hassle, not a Natick**-level catastrophe. See you tomorrow.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld 

[UPDATE: the thing about having smart readers is, well, you will hear about it if you go crashing ignorantly into their specialities. Thankfully, I have not only smart but (mostly) kind readers. So thank you to reader Bill L. for sending me the following email this morning:]

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

*kealoa = a short, common answer that you can't just fill in quickly because two or more answers are viable, Even With One or More Letters In Place. From the classic [Mauna ___] KEA/LOA conundrum. See also, e.g. [Heaps] ATON/ALOT, ["Git!"] "SHOO"/"SCAT," etc.

**Natick = an impossible crossing (see blog sidebar for full definition)

Read more...