Winged Godzilla nemesis of Japanese film / MON 1-16-23 / Old Norse character / Bird that has calf muscles / It's bandaged in a classic van Gogh self-portrait / Only weapon in clue that isn't metallic / Till namesake of a landmark hate-crime law / Dab as spilled ink

Constructor: Michael Paleos

Relative difficulty: Easy 

THEME: You've got mail ... — theme answers all end with words relating to a piece of (snail) mail:

[ADDENDUM: the actual "title" of the theme is MAIL / ITIN (35A: With 37-Across, perform perfunctorily ... or a hint to the ends of 16-, 25-, 41- and 55-Across). I missed it completely because I was solving Downs-only. This revealer makes the puzzle somewhat stronger than my initial assessment of it below ... but only somewhat. Thanks to the commenter who pointed out I missed the revealer! My bad, for sure]

Theme answers:

• LOWERCASE LETTER (16A: The "e," but not the "B," of eBay)
• PASSPORT STAMP (25A: Traveler's proof of entry)
• TERM OF ADDRESS (41A: "Madam President" or "Your Honor")
• PUSH THE ENVELOPE (55A: Test boundaries)

Word of the Day: MOTHRA (9D: Winged Godzilla nemesis of Japanese film) —

Mothra (Japanese: モスラ, Hepburn: Mosura) is a fictional monster, or kaiju, that first appeared in the 1961 film Mothra, produced and distributed by Toho Studios. Mothra has appeared in several Toho tokusatsu films, most often as a recurring character in the Godzilla franchise. She is typically portrayed as a colossal sentient larva (caterpillar) or imago, accompanied by two miniature fairies speaking on her behalf. Unlike other Toho monsters, Mothra is a largely heroic character, having been variously portrayed as a protector of her own island culture, the Earth and Japan. Mothra's design is influenced by silk worms, their imagos, and those of giant silk moths in the family Saturniidae. The character is often depicted hatching offspring (in some cases, twins) when approaching death, a nod to the Saṃsāra doctrine of numerous Indian religions.

Mothra is one of Toho's most popular monsters and second only to Godzillain her total number of film appearances. Polls taken during the early 1990s indicated that Mothra was particularly popular among women who were, at the time, the largest demographic among Japan's movie-going audience, a fact that prompted the filming of 1992's Godzilla vs. Mothra, which was the best-attended Toho film since King Kong vs. Godzilla. IGN listed Mothra as #3 on their "Top 10 Japanese Movie Monsters" list, while Complex listed the character as #7 on its "The 15 Most Badass Kaiju Monsters of All Time" list. (emph. mine)

• • •

Wow, ladies like MOTHRA, who knew!? I learn something every day doing this blog, whether I like it or not. I solved this one mostly Downs-only (I started normal then remembered I preferred to do Mondays Downs-only, and anyway, I don't remember actually looking at an Across clue ever). It was so easy to do Downs-only that I can only imagine it was even easier to do the regular way, though that may not be true at all, since by solving Downs-only you avoid half the clues, which means you avoid half the opportunities for drawing a blank! Looking this one over, I'm kinda glad I went Downs-only as I missed at having to guess at anything over 6 letters long, and I also missed both of the ugly-looking partials—answers that my Downs-only brain had to rationalize as valid, i.e. if you end up with ITIN as one of the crosses, you have to decide, "Do I have an error, or is the Across a partial?" Today, the Downs were so solid that I just decided that the partial must be right, and it was. See also OUTA (!?). These are really rough partials, and there are two of them, in a non-demanding grid, which I don't really get. The grid is already almost completely devoid of longer non-theme answers (nothing longer than 7, and only two of those (!?). Seems like it shouldn't have been too hard to steer clear of partials completely, but instead we get two, as well as the usual slew of common short stuff (APOP OENO TSPS AMAT ARTE ARTIE STET and on and on, etc etc etc). This would've been dreary to solve the regular way; at least Downs-only gave my brain something extra to do as I was assessing the validity of my answers (that "something extra": make sure the Acrosses I was making made sense). 

The theme itself is so basic, it feels like it could've appeared 30-40 years ago, no problem. Ultra-simple. Plain to the point of blandness. I guess all the mail-related words are clued in non-mail-related contexts, but it's not like that distinction is every terribly remarkable. The "envelope" in PUSH THE ENVELOPE is still ... an "envelope," even if it is only a metaphorical one. I just don't see what was NYTXW-worthy about this one. If you're rejecting 19 of every 20 puzzles you receive (or whatever it is now), I don't quite get how this one makes it. Also, this makes six puzzles in a row now by solo male constructors, which feels like backsliding. More guys named "Michael" have had puzzles published in the last week than have women. Michaels: 2, Women: 1 (and you gotta go back to Tuesday for her). Hopefully the NYTXW gets back to something close to gender parity soon. They were (finally) doing OK for a bit there.

I can't remember a single Down answer I struggled with. Once you get a bunch of Downs, you can start to infer some of the Across letters that you're missing, which then makes other Down answers easier to get. I think RUNE is the only one I really balked at (47D: Old Norse character). I put ODIN in there ... but then immediately realized that "character" was being used in the sense of "letter," and so changed ODIN to RUNE. Oh, I absolutely balked at REDHOT, but eventually the "D" and "H" went in from the longer Acrosses, and REDHOT became obvious. Did I learn anything new (besides how much MOTHRA appeals to women)? Oh, EMUs have calf muscles! I wonder how much you could learn about EMUs just from reading NYTXW clues. In just the past week I've learned not only about their musculature, but also that they were the subject of "wars" in the early 20th century. What else (glances over recent clues) ... extinct in the Tasman since the 19th c. .. can sprint up to 30 mph ... lays big green eggs ... second-tallest bird on earth ... source of Kalaya oil (whatever that is ... I'm afraid to look it up for fear of learning what cruel things you have to do to the EMU to get it) (looks like it's derived from the fat of the EMU). Next week, we'll do all-OREO facts. See you then?

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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Video game franchise featuring Sub-Zero and Sonya Blade / WED 8-17-22 / Hairy cryptids / Aurora's Greek counterpart / Star Wars cantina patrons for short / Buffalo soldier dreadlock Bob Marley / Largish jazz combos

Constructor: Michael Paleos

Relative difficulty: Easy

THEME: [SIC] (69A: [not my typo]) — Clues for famously misspelled names have "[69-Across]" after them, and 69-Across is [SIC], the notation for when you are indicating that "yes, I know the word appears misspelled, but that's how it appears in the original, don't blame me":

Theme answers:

• FROOT LOOPS (17A: Breakfast cereal with a toucan mascot [69-Across])
• BOSTON RED SOX (23A: Team that broke the "Curse of the Bambino" in 2004 [69-Across])
• AMERICAN PHAROAH (39A: Triple Crown winner of 2015 [69-Across])
• MORTAL KOMBAT (48A: Video game franchise featuring Sub-Zero and Sonya Blade [69-Across])
• DEF LEPPARD (61A: "Pour Some Sugar on Me" rockers [69-Across])

Word of the Day: Ray LIOTTA (6D: Ray of "GoodFellas") —

Raymond Allen Liotta (Italian: [liˈɔtta]; December 18, 1954 – May 26, 2022) was an American actor and film producer. He was known for his roles as Shoeless Joe Jackson in Field of Dreams (1989) and Henry Hill in Martin Scorsese's Goodfellas (1990). He was a Primetime Emmy Award winning actor and received nominations for a Golden Globe and two Screen Actors Guild Awards. 

Liotta first gained attention for his role as Ray Sinclair in the Jonathan Demme film Something Wild (1986), for which he received a Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actor - Motion Picture nomination. He continued to star in films such as Unlawful Entry (1992), No Escape (1994), Cop Land (1997) Hannibal(2001), Blow (2001), Narc (2002), John Q (2002), Identity (2003), Killing Them Softly (2012), The Place Beyond the Pines (2012), Kill the Messenger (2014), Marriage Story (2019), and the Sopranos prequel theatrical film The Many Saints of Newark (2021).

He was also known for his television work in ER for which he received a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Guest Actor in a Drama Series in 2004. He starred as Frank Sinatra in the television film The Rat Pack (1998) and Lorca and Tom Mitchell in Texas Rising (2015) for which he earned Screen Actors Guild Award nominations. He starred in the drama series Shades of Blue (2016–2018) with Jennifer Lopez and had a prominent voice acting role as Tommy Vercetti in the video game Grand Theft Auto: Vice City (2002). (wikipedia)

• • •

So this one was weird primarily because no one would write [SIC] after any of these names except maybe AMERICAN PHAROAH, whose fame was very short-lived and whose name really might seem like a typo to an ordinary reader (an ordinary reader who knows how to spell "pharaoh"). Actually, it kinda feels like the only reason people remember AMERICAN PHAROAH at all (outside the ever-decreasing ranks of horse-racing fandom) is precisely because of that misspelling. Whereas with BOSTON RED SOX ... that name is so long-established that I, a fan of baseball for coming up on half a century, never really think of the name as a misspelling of "socks." That is, it doesn't even register as a misspelling, the way that DEF LEPPARD and FROOT LOOPS at least do—I know how to spell the band and the cereal, but those names at least register as wacky intentional misspellings, whereas SOX does not. The idea that you'd write SIC after the horse, I can buy, but after BOSTON RED SOX? Preposterous. I doubt anyone out there is going to think "don't you mean Deaf Leopard?" either. Anyway, these are famously "mis"-spelled names, so that's an interesting theme premise ... I just don't know if the SIC thing is really the best way to go about bringing it all together. I'm sure the use of SIC as a revealer here is supposed to be jokey / facetious, so the fact that you wouldn't *actually* use it for these names is (maybe) supposed to be beside the point. Still, the fact that I might in fact use it for some (horse) but never for others (baseball team) makes the theme set feel weirdly uneven, and the revealer feel like a punch line that doesn't quite land.

["One lump or two!"]

Speaking of misspellings, I was happy to see WHOA spelled correctly, but then I realized that the encroaching WOAH spelling (shudder) is not for this particular meaning of WHOA (3D: "Easy there!"), but for the exclamation you might make if you are surprised or left speechless by something. Today's WHOA is horse WHOA, not omg/wow WHOA. I think the move from WHOA to WOAH for the "omg/wow" exclamation is generational, but I don't know. Surely someone has written on this (... googling ...) yeah, looks like exceedingly-online folks are more apt to use WOAH (a misspelling that started as a message board phenomenon in the '80s, per this article). To me, WOAH is always gonna look like a chemical formula, and my brain is always gonna pronounce it like NOAH, e.g. "Noah's Ark contained a pair of every animal on earth, whereas WOAH's Ark contained only AMERICAN PHAROAH and hasn't been seen or heard from since 2015."

Some more notes:

• 13D: Big name in shapewear (SPANX) — there's a SPANX store in the relatively small Delta terminal at LAX. Crummy restaurants, a couple of those candy / snack / sad-small-rack-of-books-and-magazines stores, and ... a SPANX store. It seemed odd. But I guess shapewear emergencies might arise anywhere. 
• 41D: Supermodel Wek (ALEK) — correct on the first guess! This is the first time I've landed ALEK's name with no problem! I am supermodelly challenged, but I'm working on it! I took this picture in one of those aforementioned candy / snack / sad-small-rack-of-books-and-magazines stores at the Delta terminal, just so that I could remember a name I feel sure is coming to a grid near me very soon:

[YUMI NU]

• 7D: "Not true what you say about me!" ("I DO SO!") — wrote in "I DON'T!" and did Not want to remove it.
• 14A: "Nasty!" ("UGH!") — wrote in "ICK!" which says "nasty!" to me far more than "UGH!" does.  "UGH!" indicates a kind of resigned / exasperated revulsion, whereas "ICK!" feels more truly grossed out. (This may only apply in writing about crosswords, I don't know.)
• 59D: Like many of Horace's works (ODIC) — I didn't go on about the weak short fill today because sometimes I just get weary of saying the same thing day after day, but I wanted to say something about ODIC because it is an entirely self-inflicted wound. ODIC is pretty pure crosswordese. Not gonna find a lot of defenders for that never-seen-outside-crosswords, use-only-in-case-of-emergency fill. But today, the constructor has made it so that there aren't really any other options there. When you lock yourself into -D-C with your themers ... well, maybe consider a different solution. Swap FROOT LOOPS and DEF LEPPARD, move SIC ... something. -D-C leaves you with nowhere to go but ODIC. Why build crosswordese into your grid like this if you don't have to?

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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Bygone Mach 1 breaker for short / WED 5-11-22 / Former L.A. Laker Odom / Jazz piano style played by Fats Waller and Mary Lou Williams / Island like Kiritimati / Tot's mount / Windy City rail system in brief / 1908 boxing film for which De Niro won Best Actor / Banjo spot in song

Constructor: Michael Paleos

Relative difficulty: Easy

THEME: PARTY ANIMALS (57A: They're always ready for a good time ... or a description of 18-, 25-, 35- and 49-Across) — familiar names / titles / items that sound like animals partying:

Theme answers:

• ROCKING HORSE (18A: Tot's mount)
• WILD TURKEY (25A: Jim Beam competitor)
• DRUNKEN CHICKEN (35A: Chinese poultry dish marinated in wine)
• RAGING BULL (49A: 1980 boxing film for which De Niro won Best Actor)

Word of the Day: LAMAR Odom (52A: Criticize harshly) —

Lamar Joseph Odom (born November 6, 1979) is an American former professional basketball player.^[2] As a member of the Los Angeles Lakers in the National Basketball Association (NBA), he won championships in 2009 and 2010 and was named the NBA Sixth Man of the Year in 2011. [...] Odom played on the United States national team, winning a bronze medal in the Olympics in 2004 and a gold medal in the FIBA World Championship (later known as the World Cup) in 2010. // Odom was married to Khloé Kardashian from 2009 to 2016. During their marriage, Odom made several appearances on the reality television show Keeping Up with the Kardashians. He and Kardashian also had their own reality series, Khloé & Lamar. (wikipedia)

• • •

Wow, almost got the third appearance of AM-N RA in four days, but instead we get the near-miss RAMONA (44D: ___ Quimby, Beverly Cleary heroine). Close call. Too close. I really like this theme, but unfortunately I didn't see the theme until the very end. The part before the end—you know, the part where you put all the letters in the little boxes—that was a lot (lot) less enjoyable. The puzzle really lost me, fill-wise, right about here:

Well not there exactly. A little earlier than that, when I wrote in ELI and before I'd really acceded to the singular WILE, which I very much did not want to do. Not sure why singular WILE is so grating today. It's not like it hasn't appeared in puzzles before. But it has big singular-KUDO energy for me now. If you asked me to name a [Illusionist's skill] I could name a dozen things before I'd name WILE. In fact, I'd never name WILE, because as far as I know I have never ever used or even thought of that answer in the singular (outside of the occasional crossword). GUILE sounds more correct than WILE. WILE is the first name of an animated Coyote or (to me) it's nothing. But seriously I was done before that, with ELI, after having slogged through TOG (another only-ever-see-in-xwords) and IDNO and SEETO and ARI and AEONS and INCAN and even with the very promising DRUNKEN-something waiting for me to fill the rest of it in, I felt fatigued, early. 

Then came ATOLL TTOP IOS UTICA ESTEEMS and by FOGEYS (apt!) all the solving joy felt like it had been bled out of me. I liked ONCE OVER, but I got almost nothing else from the top of the grid except exhausted. And then I get down to longer answers in the SE and I get ... NET SALES? That answer makes ESTEEMS look spicy. Just the dullest collection of common letters you're ever gonna see in an 8. AMEN NOS ENT DAS in the SW ... it all feels like gross crossword negligence. Here you have this very clever and (by its very nature) lively theme, and you just bury it in this gelatinous goop ... this SBARRO-esque, INEDIBLE fill inundation. Keep the theme, in its entirety, strip everything else out, start over. Then, you might get somewhere. Don't do this to your clever theme. Don't bury it in cold gravy.

TTOP!

The puzzle is oversized and yet I never felt the extraness because it was so incredibly easy. The second Monday-level puzzle in a row after a pretty non-Monday Monday ("MONDAY, MONDAY" being a potential theme answer that the *Sunday* puzzle somehow neglected to include, but that's really truly neither here nor there). The reason it's 16-wide is to accommodate the 14 that sits at the center (the puzzle's best answer). 14s can't sit dead center in a standard 15-wide grid, so here we are. It's a reasonable, not uncommon accommodation. I like how different all these "animals" are—a toy, a bottle of whiskey, a plate of food, a Scorsese film; it's a really nice, varied assortment. Again, the main reason I'm mad at the fill is because the theme is so good, whereas the fill HARASSES you, looking like something that the cat EGESTS. I'm definitely exaggerating, but not a lot. I think I'll stop there. See you tomorrow.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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2002 basketball movie starring Lil Bow Wow / WED 8-5-20 / Major oenotourism destination / Believer in Five Thieves / Big draw for Icelandic tourism

Constructor: Michael Paleos

Relative difficulty: Medium (Easy except for the west, which, yeesh)

THEME: EVERYTHING BAGEL (39A: Breakfast order suggested by the answers to the starred clues) — answers to starred clues either begin or end with an ingredient in the seasoning for said bagel:

Theme answers:

• POPPY FIELD (17A: *Wicked Witch's trap for Dorothy in "The Wizard of Oz")
• OPEN SESAME (10D: *Storybook password)
• VERUCA SALT (29D: *Bratty girl in "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory")
• ONION DOMES (60A: *Colorful architectural features of Moscow's St. Basil Cathedral)

Word of the Day: GANYMEDE (42A: Largest moon in the solar system) —

Ganymede /ˈɡænɪmiːd/, a satellite of Jupiter (Jupiter III), is the largest and most massive of the Solar System's moons. The ninth-largest object in the Solar System, it is the largest without a substantial atmosphere. It has a diameter of 5,268 km (3,273 mi), making it 26% larger than the planet Mercury by volume, although it is only 45% as massive. Possessing a metallic core, it has the lowest moment of inertia factor of any solid body in the Solar System and is the only moon known to have a magnetic field. Outward from Jupiter, it is the seventh satellite and the third of the Galilean moons, the first group of objects discovered orbiting another planet. Ganymede orbits Jupiter in roughly seven days and is in a 1:2:4 orbital resonance with the moons Europa and Io, respectively. [...] In Greek mythology, Ganymede /ˈɡænɪmiːd/ or Ganymedes /ɡænɪˈmiːdiːz/ (Ancient Greek: Γανυμήδης Ganymēdēs) is a divine hero whose homeland was Troy. Homer describes Ganymede as the most beautiful of mortals, and in one version of the myth, Zeus falls in love with his beauty and abducts him in the form of an eagle to serve as cup-bearer in Olympus. (wikipedia)

• • •

Getting kind of tired of seeing men's names in the by-lines. Been almost two weeks since we've seen a solo woman constructor. Still can't believe that the inequity is this bad, this late in the game. Oh, hey, in totally unrelated news, did you see the Time article about the editor of the USA Today crossword, a certain Mr. (checks notes) Erik Agard? It's worth reading (and the USA Today crossword is now very much worth doing).  But on to this puzzle, which ... Shrug, I guess, is my main feeling. Those are definitely things that can be on an EVERYTHING BAGEL, though the seasoning mixture is in no way standardized or uniform, and seems very frequently to include garlic, so ... I dunno. I think you are supposed to be impressed that two of the themers actually cross the revealer. That's one of those "feats of construction" that just don't matter that much to me. Cool if you can pull it off, but if the core concept isn't great, then I just don't care how many themers you cram in there or whether they cross or not. So this theme is fine—some of the theme answers are nice in their own right—but not particularly innovative or clever.


Fill is decent if uninspired, until you get to the west, where it is inspired ... but not by any force of good. It's always a bad sign when my printed-out / marked-up puzzle has all the green ink in one section of the grid (green pen is what I use to highlight trouble spots). EKE BY is awful in its quaintness and MY GOSH is equally quaint but much more frustratingly vague (lots of stuff could've gone after the initial "MY";  I first had "MY OH MY") (36D: "Goodness me!"). "LIKE MIKE" is a minor movie from 18 years ago, and since it stars the former Lil' Bow Wow (now just Bow Wow, I think), I wanna say ... woof! And yet when I looked the movie up just now the cast list was kind of amazing—Fred Armisen, Crispin Glover, Jimmy Kimmel, Eugene Levy (!), Vanessa Williams, Robert Forster (!!), and, best of all, the legendary Anne Meara (!!!). I didn't like seeing the title while solving, but now I'm starting to come around on it. One answer I will never come around on, however, is PREV (26A: <<< button: Abbr.). Let's start with the fact that PREV under any circumstances, with any clue, is a horrible abbr. Now throw in the fact that three (3) (???) left-facing arrows is not a thing. When I googled "prev button" and did an image search, there were lots of single arrows, some double arrows, and precisely no triple arrows. Also, I've never seen a PREV button in my life. Unless you count this — |< —that is, vertical line followed by left arrow, which I think of as "go back to the PREVious track or PREVious chapter in your Blu-Ray or DVD." Constructors used to just cop to the fact that they were using a bad abbr. for "Before," but the last two clues have tried to work this remote button angle, and it's terrible. A garbage answer in an already half-garbagey section of the grid. Again, I say, woof.


Bullets:

• 6D: Portuguese king (REI) — botched this one (REY)
• 12D: Leader of Kappa Lambda Mu? (IOTA) — "Leader" here = letter of Greek alphabet that precedes the sequence in the clue (that is, Kappa Lambda Mu is not, not my knowledge, a sorority)
• 43A: Tickle Me Elmo toymaker (TYCO) — me: "it's TYCO ... wait, that's the astronomer ... no, wait, that TYCHO Brahe ..."; also me: "They still make ... this toy??"
• 19A: This, in Spanish (ESTO) — absolutely my least favorite commonly accepted crossword answers are the one where the language being clued has gender but since ours doesn't, there's no way to tell which letter to put in the final slot. OTR-? EST-? Blargh. Not Spanish's fault. Just one of those ambiguous moments that always makes me sigh and makes my shoulders collapse a little in sadness while I'm solving. See also AM-M, which today I guessed very much wrong (4D: Switch on a clock radio). Nobody likes your little "radio" misdirection!!!!
• 62A: Pop sensation (IDOL) — hey, there's this great site dedicated to vintage paperback books called "Pop Sensation"; dude hasn't updated it in nearly a year but I hear he might be starting up again soon ... 

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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Protagonist in Toni Morrison's Beloved / SUN 10-27-19 / Ricochet like hockey puck / US island owned almost entirely by billionaire Larry Ellison / Display for tchotchkes / New Guinea port that was Amelia Earhart's last known point of departure

Constructor: Michael Paleos

Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium (10:02)

THEME: CANDY STRIPE (68A: Pattern once used for hospital volunteer uniforms, with a hint to this puzzle's theme) — "candy stripe"s are formed by having six different Downs columns be made up of candy names:

Theme answers:

• WHOPPERS / KISSES / PEEPS
• BOTTLE CAPS / LIFESAVERS
• NERDS / MOUNDS / MILKY WAY
• SNICKERS / CRUNCH / SPREE
• SUGAR DADDY / HOT TAMALES 
• RUNTS / PAYDAY / AIRHEADS

Word of the Day: EUBIE Blake (16D: Jazzman Blake) —

James Hubert "Eubie" Blake (1887–1983), was an American composer, lyricist, and pianist of ragtime, jazz, and popular music. In 1921, he and his long-time collaborator Noble Sissle wrote Shuffle Along, one of the first Broadway musicals to be written and directed by African Americans.^[1] Blake's compositions included such hits as "Bandana Days", "Charleston Rag", "Love Will Find a Way", "Memories of You" and "I'm Just Wild About Harry". The musical Eubie!, which opened on Broadway in 1978, featured his works. (wikipedia)

• • •

First reaction to this was "those are candy names ... and so ... what?" Then I saw the revealer, which I must have missed during the solve. The revealer makes it somewhat cute, though I really wanted it to be CANDY STRIPES, plural, as there are, in fact, six stripes (plural!) in this grid. But whatever, the pattern is CANDY STRIPE, it's OK. All the candy names can be (and are) clued in non-candy fashion, yes, good, OK. It's adequate. It's a shrug. Again. When the theme is a shrug, the fill better be sparkly, and while the grid has its moments ("FEEL ME?") there were some absolute atrocities in here as well. Too many. First, what in the world is ACI!?!?? (93A: Handel's "___, Galatea e Polifemo"). I don't know what ... I mean, is that Italian? Is ACI a name??? This answer appeared once in 2015 and before that, it hadn't appeared in 20 years! 1995! Oof. Hilariously, the only other appearance in the Shortz era came in 1994, and the '94 and '95 puzzles were made By The Same Guy (Bryant White, who, I'm assuming, really really liked Handel). Fun fact about ACI: before the Shortz era, there were Handel clues going back to 1985. Before that, it's *all* variations on [Chemical prefix] (!?) and before *that* it's exclusively [Seaport in Sicily]. Like, cluing for ACI doesn't toggle back and forth between types. It was all Sicily, then all chemical, and now all Handel. Anyway, it sucks, please never put it in your grid. See also LAE, which is more quintessential crosswordese garbage. That LAE and ACI are in the same damn grid is really damning. That MASSE / ULNAR / MMIII (!) stack is very rough, and it crosses ERI, Queen of the Crosswordese Ball. Also, why are you cluing ORE as ÖRE? (95D: Cent : euro :: ___ : krona) That is such bad decision-making. It combines unnecessary obscurantizing with the puzzle's always annoying diacritical blindness. Foreign currencies are like foreign rivers in that they are what crossword caricatures are made of. Stop stop stop.


The worst thing about this puzzle, though, is the clue on SUGAR DADDY (14D: Gold digger's goldmine). The concept of SUGAR DADDY is already pretty grossly sexist, and then when you throw in that clue, which imputes stereotypically avaricious motivations to the woman, it makes the answer that much worse. And over HOT TAMALES!? I dunno, man. There's just so much dudes making puzzles for dudes, chosen by dudes, edited by dudes, ad infinitum. Male gaze, all the way down.


Do people really use EHOW? (66D: Popular D.I.Y. site) It looks so bad in the grid, and sounds bad to say, and just adds to the seemingly endless array of E-prefixed words that pollute the grid daily. Dupes (i.e. repeated words) today are pretty egregious, in that they are bad and there are at least two of them. Repeating SEE is maybe not *so* bad ("I SEE" and SEES RED), but duping EYE (CRAZY-EYED and EYES UP), that hurt a little. I balked at EYES UP (107A: Regards covetously) because I'd already entered CRAZY-EYED in the grid. Figured it had to be EATS UP. But, no. So what do we have, really? A simple concept with a cute revealer, and then an occasionally interesting but too often clunky and stale grid. And some sexist cluing thrown in for "good" measure. Sunday!

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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Fictional African kingdom in Coming to America / WED 10-24-18 / Noted piranha habitat / Ring around watch face

Constructor: Michael Paleos

Relative difficulty: Medium-Challenging (4:42)

THEME: POP-UP AD (8A: Internet nuisance ... or a hint to four answers in this puzzle) — letters "AD" "pop up" (i.e. go up to the next line, leaping over two black squares) as part of longer theme answers:

Theme answers:

• ROPE-AD-OPE (19A: Classic strategy in the boxing ring)
• DEC-AD-ENT (28A: Hedonistic)
• CAN-AD-IAN (42A: Like seven teams in the N.H.L.)
• TRE-AD-MILL (54A: Where you may be going nowhere fast)

Word of the Day: BEZEL (48D: Ring around a watch face) —

noun

1. a grooved ring holding the glass or plastic cover of a watch face or other instrument in position.

   • a groove holding the crystal of a watch or the stone of a gem in its setting. (google)

• • •

This theme feels very familiar—maybe I've seen it in some other venue?—but no matter; it's a decent one. Enjoyable to solve. Not like "OOH ah!" enjoyable, but, I don't know, at least interesting. The main effect of it was that it kept making me trip because I kept forgetting about it, and so something like 54A: Where you may be going nowhere fast comes along and the answer appears to be TR- and I'm like "huh?" and then later "D'oh! Right. The theme!" The revealer is in a super dumb place. Was there really no way to get it into the 64-Across position, where it belongs. I mean, it's gonna be difficult with 48-Down starting with "B" and ending in "P," in five letters, but presumably you'd've tried to put POP-UP AD in the correct / final position **before** building the rest of your grid. I don't really understand. I double-don't understand putting ZAMUNDA in here. That is ... not a famous thing. At all. My eyes just picked up "Fictional African kingdom" and I already had -NDA so I just wrote in WAKANDA (actually famous). But instead I got this other kingdom, from a movie that I have seen more than once, and yet ... the name of the kingdom: nowhere to be found. I feel really, truly, terribly bad for people who aren't familiar with the word BEZEL, 'cause no way in hell you're getting that "Z" otherwise. Betting a bunch of people try BEVEL. It's essentially an uncrossed letter, as (I repeat) ZAMUNDA is not famous, and none of its letters are inferrable. Not great.


EDA and TES, also bad. ORA EKE ALO ATEN, not helping. "I HAVE IT" is at least odd, as I know it as "I've got it!" or something like that. I HAVE IT sounds archaic / stilted. I do like POWERED ON and LED ASTRAY, and the clue on BATCAVE is kinda cute, with it "DC" misdirection (38A: Secret DC headquarters). I found this puzzle a bit tough up top, as neither ADDRESS (1A: Discuss, as an issue) nor PERIDOT (15A: Birthstone for most Leos) came to me very easily (for different reasons), and then the same was true for ORINOCO (16A: Noted piranha habitat) and WANDERS (18A: Rambles) on the other side of the grid (I wanted NATTERS and probably had NADDERS (!) in there at some point). The clue on POEM is absurd, as you could argue that any song is a POEM (12D: "The Star-Spangled Banner," basically). So: theme good, but overall solving experience, less so. Oh well, at least Erik (Agard) won again on "Jeopardy" tonight and the World Series game looks like it's gonna be a thriller, so I'm gonna go round off my night by watching that. Bye.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

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