Hockey great Eric / SAT 12-7-24 / Renowned conductor born in Bombay / Stressed half the time, say / Introducer of the "New Look" in 1947 / Most successful American video game franchise, for short

Constructor: Luke K. Schreiber

Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium

THEME: none 

Word of the Day: Zubin MEHTA (22A: Renowned conductor born in Bombay) —

Zubin Mehta (born 29 April 1936) is an Indian conductor of Western classical music. He is music director emeritus of the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra (IPO) and conductor emeritus of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. [...] Mehta was music director of the Montreal Symphony Orchestra from 1961 to 1967 and of the Los Angeles Philharmonic from 1962 to 1978, the youngest music director ever for any major North American orchestra. In 1969, he was appointed Music Adviser to the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra and in 1981 he became its Music Director for Life. From 1978 to 1991, Mehta was music director of the New York Philharmonic. He was chief conductor of the Maggio Musicale Fiorentino in Florence from 1985 to 2017. // He is an honorary citizen of both Florence and Tel Aviv and was made an honorary member of the Vienna State Opera in 1997 and of the Bavarian State Opera in 2006. The title of Honorary Conductor was bestowed on him by numerous orchestras throughout the world. More recently, Mehta made several tours with the Bavarian State Opera and kept up a busy schedule of guest conducting appearances. In December 2006, he received the Kennedy Center Honor and in October 2008 he was honored by the Japanese Imperial Family with the Praemium Imperiale. In 2016, Mehta was appointed Honorary Conductor of the Teatro San Carlo, Naples.

• • •

[31A: Plea of innocence]

[I get to the puzzle, eventually, I promise]

Hello, everyone. I'm back from a whirlwind pre-weekend (the official term for W/Th/F) in Minneapolis—my spiritual hometown and, after NYC, the crossword-solvingest city in America, if reader mail is any indication. Minneapolis and Ann Arbor. Those are the two locations where NYTXW solving seems densest outside the immediate tri-state area of NYC. Pound for pound, I get more support and more mail from those two places than anywhere else. I mean, look—first thing I see after I get through security and stop to get my coffee: this couple, solving the NYTXW together, On Paper (they had printed out the newspaper version of the puzzle)

It was all I could do not to sit down at their table and try to make friends, but you don't interrupt solvers mid-solve, and anyway, who wants to be accosted by a giant bald puzzle evangelist first thing in the morning. Probably only six or seven of you. So I just sipped my vanilla latte and absorbed the calm focus radiating off these lovely people. Anyway ... where was I? ... oh, right. Minneapolis. And now I'm home again. Speaking of home, we arrived home to find our home ... recreated ... in gingerbread form (courtesy of our creative and apparently very bored daughter):

[here's Google Street view for comparison—sorry my gorgeous trees are blocking the view]

The trip included an unplanned overnight stay at one of Chicago's many mediocre airport hotels (courtesy of late plane + snow squalls in Syracuse); an unplanned viewing of Hopper's "Office At Night" (I went to the Walker to see Franz Marc's "Large Blue Horses"—truly amazing—but then my wife just pointed at the painting next to it and both our jaws fell open); and an unannounced and extremely unexpected guest appearance by Lucinda Williams (!!!!?!?!) at the Cyndi Lauper Farewell Tour concert that I went to with my best friends on Wednesday night. 

[me and a lady in a gold vest absolutely losing our minds as Cyndi Lauper says "... Lucinda Williams"]

I didn't solve at all while I was gone. Well, no NYT puzzles, anyway. I have a book of old Out of Left Field cryptic crosswords that co-creator Joshua Kosman sent me recently, and I solved those on various planes and in various waiting areas (great puzzles, ideal traveling companions). Was a bit worried to dive back into NYTXW-solving on a Saturday (the hardest of days, usually), but today's puzzle was very accommodating. Thorny, but doable, and ultimately somewhat on the easy side. The giant open middle area looks daunting, but once I got a little traction, it started to come together without too much trouble. The first (NW) corner was the slowest, but first parts are always (or often) slowest. All the other corners I've got marked as "Easy" or "Easy-Medium"—I rated them all separately, as the segmentation made this feel like five puzzles in one, but no part ever got north of "Medium," and on the whole, it ended up a solid "Easy-Medium (two parts Medium, two parts Easy, one part Easy-Medium). 

When you design a puzzle like this, where everything is riding on one element (today, the giant center), that element had better be good, and while I think it's impressive to get that center area to work at all, given how wide open it is, I have to say that the actual answers in there didn't do much for me. Not enough zing. Or maybe too much ... lead? SEALANE and LINDROS (24D: Hockey great Eric) and SOILING and MISDEED and ROAD RALLIES and CENTRAL BANK (even as clued) (34A: Subject of a rap battle between Hamilton and Jefferson in "Hamilton") didn't exactly float my boat. LEAD BALLOON is an idiom part, so kind of sad on its own. That DIRE STRAITS clue should've been musical. 

Again, it all works there in the center, but only in a workmanlike way. And then the corners were largely throwaway, with some highlights (NECK RUBS, TUMULT, OJIBWA) but some lowlights as well (I don't want to think about Bush ever, even mockingly—or INOUYE, for that matter, given the allegations of improper conduct and sexual assault; the THE in THE USA feels awkward and gratuitous (15A: Host of a record eight Olympic Games as of 2024); and BIT OFF is yet another sad idiom part (1A: Undertook, in an idiom). It all played out very average. Adequate, fine, decent. Nothing godawful, nothing particularly memorable. 

Bullets:

• 7A: Stressed half the time, say (IAMBIC) — home run. Love this. It's perfectly misdirective. Seems to be about the anxiety kind of stress, ends up being about the poetic kind of stress. I follow a bot on BlueSky—the only good bot, I've decided—called iambic.bot, and all it does is retweet (on BlueSky it's "reskeet," I think) posts that are (unintentional) single lines of IAMBIC pentameter. 

• 27A: Illegal substance, in sports lingo (P.E.D.) — Performance-Enhancing Drug.
• 51D: Most successful American video game franchise, for short (C.O.D.) — Call Of Duty.
• 35A: Like the two Super Bowl teams in early January, for short (T.B.D.) — To Be Determined.
• 46A: Home turf? (S.O.D.) — jk, it's just SOD, like the stuff you might lay down in front of your "home" (if you want a front lawn).
• 52A: In which you might confront the elephant in the room? (CIRCUS) — this evokes animal mistreatment. Hate circuses, hate the idea of "confronting" an elephant, or doing anything to an elephant besides protecting it from human depredation, boo to your cutesy clue for sure. Consider making Sheldrick Wildlife Trust part of your annual giving plans.

See you tomorrow, with a Holiday Gift Guide and the first installment of reader-submitted Holiday Pet Pics!

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on BlueSky and Facebook]

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Worm found in every ecosystem on Earth, even the deepest oceans / WED 10-2-24 / Literary ___ / A public speaking coach might tell you to avoid these

Constructor: Luke K. Schreiber

Relative difficulty: Hard (13:05)

THEME: ANIMAL CROSSING — Nintendo video game series suggested by every answer running through this one?

Theme answers:

• [U.C. Irvine athlete] for ANTEATER
• [Worm found in every ecosystem on Earth, even the deepest oceans] for NEMATODE
• [Experiment subject] for GUINEA PIG
• [Dollar, informally] for CLAM
• [Complain (about)] for CARP
• [Literary ___] for LION
• [Religious figure in red] for CARDINAL
• [Cupid, e.g.] for REINDEER
• [Airhead] for DODO
• [Member of a historically privileged U.S. group] for WASP
• [Close tightly] SEAL
• [World's largest venomous snake] for KING COBRA
• [State fossil of Indiana] for MASTODON
• [Jungle peeper] for TREE FROG

Word of the Day: NEMATODE —

The nematodes, roundworms or eelworms constitute the phylum Nematoda. They are a diverse animal phylum inhabiting a broad range of environments. Most species are free-living, feeding on microorganisms, but many species are parasitic. The parasitic worms are the cause of soil-transmitted helminthiases.

• • •

Hey squad! It's Malaika here, for your regularly scheduled Malaika MWednesday! I solved this while listening to one of Sabrina Carpenter's new songs. I loooove a sad woman who sings with a guitar! My favorite genre.

I really struggled to get a start with this puzzle-- I wasn't able to put in an answer until I hit ETS, nine entries into the puzzle. For me, that's a hard Wednesday. I suspected this wouldn't be a standard theme (i.e., 3-4 long across answers + one revealer) because of the shape of the grid, and indeed, I had literally no idea what was going on until I hit the revealer in the center. (I usually solve in order, so it took me a while to get there.) At that point, I was a little frustrated. The puzzle was hard for me, and I am really not a gamer at all, so I was preparing myself to have no idea what the theme was. But that wasn't the case!!

I've never played ANIMAL CROSSING, but I absolutely have heard of it from friends, The Internet, etc. And even if you don't know the game, you still understand the concept of animals crossing through the entry. Is every animal in this puzzle an animal that is in Animal Crossing? I have no idea, though my guess would be no. Playing as a NEMATODE does not seem cute and fulfilling, to be quite honest.

This is a real feat of construction, to have so many thematic entries all stacked like that! I can't even begin to think how I would approach making something like this. Actually I know how-- I would have the idea and then immediately go "Nope, that's impossible; moving on." As with every feat of construction, there are some trade-offs. I have never heard the word TEASEL before and I expect I never will again. And that top left corner, with NUMISMATIST, USURER, DOMINI, ERIN, and SENECA was where I spent roughly half of my solve time.

It seems like there was a concerted effort to clue the animals in non-animal ways, when possible. SEAL, for example, was clued as the verb. I liked this touch, which kept the theme hidden from me until I made it over to the down answers and clocked the revealer. Otherwise, I would have noticed all the animals much earlier and the gears would have started turning. I like to be tricked a little by the revealer and then go "Ohhhhh!"

Speaking of animals, this is a baby hippo called Moo Deng.
Will we remember his name six months from now???

The last thing I want to talk about it is only a little bit relevant to this puzzle. But I've been given a soapbox to stand on, so I will use it! (You are welcome to keep scrolling.) In the world of puzzles (the Crossworld, if you will), there's an ever-present tension between wanting to include entries that are "fresh," wanting to ensure that a large part of your audience is familiar with the entry, and handling the turnaround time between creating a puzzle and having it reach solvers. If there's a slang term that Kids These Days are using all the time, should it be in a crossword now, or should it wait until a broader audience is familiar with it? Or if you wait, will the term vanish from our lexicon?? Different publications have different goals and different timelines.

The Times, with its long turnaround time (typically a year from Creation to Publish) and its frequently-published collections, tries to avoid fads, while still including newish terms that they think will have Staying Power. Meanwhile, an outlet like Vulture magazine*, whose puzzles are posted weeks after creation and then sort of disappear into the void days later, leans in to incredibly flash-in-the-pan entries. If "Animal Crossing" were to appear in a Vulture puzzle, it would have run in 2020, when "New Horizons" was released. When it appears in The Times, it runs in 2024, once the game has cemented itself culturally. (Some people might even think this is years after it's cemented itself!!)

Since I've been making puzzles (which is not long! Four-ish years.) it feels like the number of places that are publishing puzzles has tripled. This is good for so many reasons, but one of my favorites is that each publication gets to have its own goals. Five years ago, I think there was a lot more frustration that The Times was unwilling to accept ultra-current entries which could very well become "out" before the puzzle had even been published. Now, those entries find homes in places like the aforementioned Vulture crossword and so many others.

My roommate's KATANAs-- see below for the story

Stepping down from my soapbox now for some bullet points.

Bullets:

• [Samurai sword] for KATANA — When I was twenty, I borrowed my dad's minivan for a couple of weeks to help me move into my apartment. I let my roommate know that if he needed any furniture, he could find stuff on Craigslist and I could drive him there to pick it up. He let me know that he had found something to pick up. I remember thinking "Oh, good!" because this boy did not have a dresser, nightstand, or bed frame. We drove to collect his purchase and it was a set of three katanas.
• [Natty dresser] for DANDY — This clue skewed a little old-fashioned to me; I was surprised to find out the constructor is a teenager. Honestly, I only ever hear the word "natty" in relation to a Natty Light.
• [It might need to be recapped] for PEN — I loved the misdirect here!!
• [Fivers] for ABES — If you have ever used this term to refer to a five dollar bill, please let me know in the comments! I'm not convinced that anyone does this.

xoxo Malaika

*I write puzzles for Vulture magazine and it is delightful to include ridiculous slang like WORK ISLAND, BRAT SUMMER, and NEPO BABY, without needing to worry if people don't know what those are a month from now.

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

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