Stimulating drug, informally / WED 1-17-24 / Bit of traditional Polynesian attire / Subject of a hairy hoax / Potter's area of expertise / Question often preceded by "But ..." / Product once advertised with the slogan "Everything you love about coffee without everything you don't" / Accelerated path of advancement

Constructor: Morton J. Mendelson

Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium

THEME: dropped down — theme answers are two-word phrases where the last letter of the first word and the first letter of the second word are shared ... literally, by the same square: the first word proceeds Across to its last letter, and then the second word drops down from that same letter:

Theme answers:

• FAS[T / T]RACK (1A: Accelerated path of advancement)
• SPLI[T  T]ICKET (5A: Ballot with votes for multiple parties)
• HOL[D / D]EAR (10A: Cherish)
• GRAS[S / S]KIRT (35A: Bit of traditional Polynesian attire)
• TEASE[R / R]ATE (28A: Promotion for a new credit account, maybe)
• PE[P / P]ILL (32A: Stimulating drug, informally)
• BULLE[T / T]RAINS (47A: Ultra-rapid transit options)
• STRI[P / P]OKER (53A / 57D): Game that everyone but one person barely loses?) ("barely" here = "nakedly")

Word of the Day: SANKA (24A: Product once advertised with the slogan "Everything you love about coffee without everything you don't") —

Sanka is a brand of instant decaffeinated coffee, sold around the world, and was one of the earliest decaffeinated varieties. Sanka is distributed in the United States by Kraft Heinz. // Decaffeinated coffee was developed in 1903 by a team of researchers led by Ludwig Roselius in Bremen, Germany. It was first sold in Germany and many other European countries in 1905–1906 under the name Kaffee HAG (short for Kaffee Handels-Aktien-Gesellschaft, or Coffee Trading Public Company). In France, the brand name became Sanka, derived from the French words sans caféine ("without caffeine"). The brand came to the United States in 1909–1910, where it was first marketed under the name "Dekafa" or "Dekofa" by an American sales agent. // In 1914, Roselius founded his own company, Kaffee Hag Corporation, in New York. When Kaffee Hag was confiscated by the Alien Property Custodian during World War I and sold to an American firm, Roselius lost not only his company, but also the American trademark rights to the name. To re-establish his product, he began to use the Sanka brand name in America. [...] The intensive American advertising campaigns included the 1927 broadcasts of Sanka After-Dinner Hour (or Sanka Music, Sanka After-Dinner Music, Sanka Music Hour, and Sanka After-Dinner Coffee Hour), heard at 6:30 pm Tuesdays on New York's WEAF. Sanka was a sponsor of I Love Lucy, The Twilight Zone, and The Andy Griffith Show during their respective runs on CBS television in the 1950s and early 1960s. The Andy Griffith Show Sanka sponsor spots featured the cast members. It was also a sponsor of The Goldbergs (1920s to about 1960 on radio and television, unrelated to the U.S. 2013 ABC television series) where, on many episodes, Mrs. Goldberg (Gertrude Berg) would address the camera and talk to the TV audience and tell them about Sanka coffee. After the sales pitch, she would walk away, usually from the window, and start the show. // With such promotion, Sanka became a nationwide sales success, with General Foods Corporation taking over distribution in 1928 as a defensive measure, since Sanka directly competed with its noncaffeine coffee substitute Postum. The bright orange label that made Sanka easily identifiable to consumers found its way into coffee shops around the country in the form of the decaf coffee pot. Coffee pots with a bright orange handle are a direct result of the American public's association of the color orange with Sanka, no matter which brand of coffee is actually served. Businesses that serve rival Folgers decaffeinated coffee usually have green-handled pots. (wikipedia) (my emphasis)

• • •

This is the 17th day of January, and so far in 2024, 15.5 of the puzzles have been made by men to just 1.5 by women. And where solo constructions are concerned, the M/W split is a grim 14 to 0 now. This discrepancy was a blip a week ago, but it's bigger than a blip now, and if you look back in December, things weren't much better. Women are publishing puzzles every day. Just not here. It's very weird. And it's hard to see why. It's not like the puzzles we've been treated to this year have been so great that they just Had to be published. Today's puzzle certainly did not. It's like a rejected Thursday theme that they decided not to reject, but to run on Wednesday instead. You've got a trick ... but no rationale. No revealer. No point. Just a downward turn, which anyone who's been solving puzzles long enough has seen before, probably multiple times. OK, there's a letter-sharing part to the trick. So? What is the point of all this? The point appears to be ... volume. Like, "put enough theme stuff in there and maybe no one will notice that there's actually no point to any of this." Because that's really all this theme has going for it—there's ... a lot of it. But a lot of "who cares?" is still "who cares?" Maybe moreso.

[THE CYRKLE! Put that in your grid and smoke it!]

Further, the fill is mostly stale, from the era when people drank SANKA and called uppers "PEP / PILLS." Some of it is solid, adequate, innocuous stuff (ASK AFTER, KEPT FIT), but it's hard to get excited about plural LEGATOS or the oddly formal, not-quite-a-square-dance-move "DO AS I DO" or the mid-century befuddled-by-abstract-expressionism query "IS IT ART?" That clue says [Question often preceded by "But ..."] but "often" is doing a lot of work there, since no one who is not in a New Yorker cartoon has asked that question since 1970. Sigh. The fill is not terrible, but it's not good either. Lots and lots of the short familiar stuff. A real A-ONE ODIE grid. I liked the colloquiparadoxical "YEAH, NO," but sadly, "YEAH, NO" is pretty much how I felt about the puzzle as a whole.

The theme was easy to pick up. Here I am, picking it up:

I ran into a few more of these downturners and kept wondering what the big payoff was going to be. Because surely there would be a payoff? Surely there would be some clever phrase that would make all this shrug-worthy downturning seem worthwhile. Something to give it all a rationale. But no. I was waiting for GODOT today ... but he didn't show (as is apparently his wont). They should call this puzzle "Waiting for NODAT." ("But why would anyone wait for that?" "Exactly!")

Bullets:

• 39D: Bend the truth, say (TELL A FIB) — I frequently TELL A FIB right after I EAT A SANDWICH. It's a weird tic I have (seriously, why wasn't this TELL A LIE, which at least has some claim to standalone status?)
• 67A: Silently acknowledge (NOD AT) — I think a better clue here would have been [Possible response to a dis?]
• 18A: Potter's area of expertise (MAGIC) — classic "hide-the-capital-letter" trick (put the capitalized word first and it doesn't register as a proper noun)
• 15A: Pre-nursing homes? (UTERI) — because babies (who frequently "nurse") have their "homes" in UTERI ... before they are born ... so, "pre-nursing." Stop me if this gets too recondite for you.
• 50A: Orcinus ___ (marine species) (ORCA) — cannot decide if this is stupid or brilliant. The clue basically gives you 75% of ORCA in the first clue word, making you (me) think ... "well, there's no way it's gonna be ORCA then." Stupid/brilliant!
• 8A: Kind of terrier (IRISH) — had the "H," wrote in WELSH. Weird that both my wrong terrier and the correct terrier were nationalities of the British Isles. 

[sad, omitted WELSH terrier]

• 64D: Kilmer of Batman fame (VAL) — maybe to you, but to me he will always be [Kilmer of "Real Genius" fame]

[1985, d. Martha Coolidge! Filmed largely on location at Pomona College, chirp chirp!]

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

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World traveler since 1985 / THU 2-7-19 / Progenitor of Edomites in Bible / Sir William medical pioneer / Latin word on dollar bill / Opposite of staccato

Constructor: Morton J. Mendelson

Relative difficulty: Challenging (a hilarious and arduous 8:03)

THEME: GO OVER THE EDGE (58A: Flip out ... or a hint to eight answers in this puzzle) — the letters "GO" can be found (or imagined, I guess) "over the edge" (i.e. outside the bounds) of this puzzle
Theme answers:

• TAKES TWO TO TAN(GO) (20A: "No one can get in a fight by himself," informally) ("informally"? Is that clue phrase "formal"???)
• "(GO)OD NIGHT, IRENE"(32A: Classic song with the lyric "I'll see you in my dreams")
• CARMEN SAN DIE(GO) (42A: World traveler since 1985)
• (GO)LD TEETH (5D: Some expensive dental work)
• (GO)SLINGS (13D: Babies in a pond) (*in*!!!!!!!????)
• "CHICA(GO)" (55D: Second-longest-running Broadway musical ever (after "Phantom of the Opera")
• AGES A(GO) (57D: A very long time back)
• (GO)LF GAME (47A: What's honed on the range?)

Word of the Day: Sir William OSLER (69A: Sir William ___, medical pioneer) —

Sir William Osler, 1st Baronet, FRS FRCP (/ˈɒzlər/; July 12, 1849 – December 29, 1919) was a Canadian physician and one of the four founding professors of Johns Hopkins Hospital. Osler created the first residency program for specialty training of physicians, and he was the first to bring medical students out of the lecture hall for bedside clinical training.^[He has frequently been described as the Father of Modern Medicine and one of the "greatest diagnosticians ever to wield a stethoscope".Osler was a person of many interests, who in addition to being a physician, was a bibliophile, historian, author, and renowned practical joker. One of his achievements was the founding of the History of Medicine Society (previously section) of the Royal Society of Medicine, London. (wikipedia)

• • •

I know I keep harping on "pleasure" and maybe it's the overexposure to Marie Kondo but I don't think it's too much to ask of a crossword puzzle that it spark joy! Spark it! Spark, you stupid puzzle! Seriously, though, what is going on here, and also what year is it? I felt like I was in the dungeon of some crossword sadist circa 1944. I guess CARMEN SAN DIE(GO) didn't exist back then, but "(GO)OD NIGHT, IRENE" sure did, and maybe that's when "kids" (??) drew LOTS (??) (5A: Things kids sometimes draw). I could not have been less on a puzzle's wavelength than I was on this one's. Every clue felt like pulling teeth. Well, not all. Good ol' ECO. But WIND is [Air condition?]?. By what alchemy? ATBAT is just *a* stat? And not even a stat, but a "datum" (come on, what are you doing with this lingo, man?) (61A: Diamond datum). And NTS? NTS? NTS? What ... what? What are those? I see they've appeared in the grid before. But not for four years. Let's commit to at least four more. And then there's the clue for AC/DC (14A: Band with a slash in its name), which ... OK, I guess when you type it out, you use a "slash," but ... it's not a slash:

[Otto kinda looks like the guitarist Slash, which really brings this whole AC/DC clue full circle]

But the real problem here, the thing that caused me the most pain and exhaustion, is the theme. Where to start? It seems like a not bad idea, in theory. I've definitely (many times) seen themes based on answers running over the edge of the grid—parts of answers, or letter strings that form words, or whatever, that you have to imagine. Fine, whatever. It's been done, but why not do it again, if you can do it well? And I guess that's kind of the ground-zero problem here. Is the revealer good enough to justify this? Gotta say No. I have never heard someone say "I'm going to GO OVER THE EDGE!" It's just ... in the Uncanny Valley of phrases. Like, it's phrase-like, but it's not current or on-the-money or good. Defensible, but it does not snap. So odd is it, to my ear, that I had GO OVER THE ... and still had no idea. OVER THE TOP? MOON? HEDGE? Oh my GOD was that movie title a pun!?!?!? I am laughing so hard right now. You are watching me discover a 13-year-old pun in real time. Wow. I took my daughter to see that in the theater in 2006. Wow. Wow. OK. Nice. Annnnnyway, the placement of the GOs was interesting, by which I mean ridiculous. You've got the nice symmetrical long Acrosses, good, good, and then ... bleeping chaos!? It's like someone's just throwing wet socks at you. No, I don't know why I chose that metaphor, it just came to me, and it feels right. Where are the other "GO"s? Who can say? They aren't symmetrical. They are all over the map. How do you even know? Discovering them was painful and dreary, and honestly at the end, I didn't even know if I'd found them all. I was going to make SLINGS the Word of the Day (seriously), because I figured it was some olde-timey term for baby frogs or something (?). (GO)SLINGS are not *in* ponds, they are *on* them. Unless they drowned and sank, which is terribly sad, like this puzzle.


Honestly, I thought "CHICA" was a musical and I thought SLINGS were young frogs and I thought maybe LD TEETH glowed in your mouth? Instead of "AHA!" I kept emitting more of a low groan of unsureness. Also, I kept having to endure stuff like ORDO (!?) and ECU. Ideas have to be executed well. The best ideas are useless—ruined—when the execution is poor. The end.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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Bird with forcepslike bill / WED 9-28-16 / Vashem Israel's Holocaust memorial / Bunt villainess in On Her Majesty's Secret Service / Specialty skillet / Murder crows turkeys

Constructor: Morton J. Mendelson

Relative difficulty: Challenging

THEME: Across/Down answers that share a first letter also share a clue

Theme answers:

• ZEST / ZILCH [Zip]
• STERN / SPONSOR [Back]
• BEAK / BANK NOTE [Bill]
• GRIN / GIRDER [Beam]
• STY / SELL [Dump]
• SEVER / SHARE [Cut]
• AFRESH / AT AN END [Over]
• SCREEN / SKIN [Hide]
• TAKE FIVE / TAME [Break]

Word of the Day: PORTO (15A: City north of Lisboa) —

Porto (Portuguese pronunciation: [ˈpoɾtu]; also known as Oporto in English) is the second largest city in Portugal after Lisbon and one of the major urban areas of the Iberian Peninsula. The urban area of Porto, which extends beyond the administrative limits of the city, has a population of 1.4 million (2011) in an area of 389 km² (150 sq mi), making it the second-largest urban area in Portugal. Porto Metropolitan Area, on the other hand, includes an estimated 1.8 million people. It is recognized as a gamma-level global city by the Globalization and World Cities (GaWC) Study Group, the only Portuguese city besides Lisbon to be recognised as a global city. (wikipedia)

• • •

Wow, this was bad. Worse than yesterday. This is as bad a two-day stretch as I can remember. Not just bad. Old. Like, really stale, written 20+ years ago old. Yesterday, a word ladder with not a lot of sense and a grid with awful fill. Today, a theme ... that has even less internal logic, and a grid with fill that's nearly as YAD. Sorry, bad. Bad. This is a cry for help. The best constructors in America simply aren't giving their best work to the NYT any more. In some cases, those constructors aren't giving Any of their work. Think of constructors you used to love whose names you rarely if ever see any more. Good chance they have, for various reasons (at least some of which has to do w/ slow production schedule and insultingly low pay) moved on. So we're getting hack work. Not always. But way too often. So what if every time an Across and Down share a first letter, they get the same clue? Who cares? Nine times this happens. What is the pattern? Do the clues spell out a message? Why Am I Suffering Through This Stupid Exercise?


Because there are so many one-word clues doing double-duty, the puzzle plays way harder than normal. Just seeing BANK NOTE (a phrase I never use) took a Lot of crosses. So Many of the clues are lame one-worders—all the themers, but also a substantial number of others. This added to the overall tedious and dull feel of the puzzle. PORTO APSE KETT EPEE ISLET ENE etc. Yet another grid that makes me want to just list the junk. Not even any good longer answers today. None. NAMER? Come on. Do people really call groups of turkeys RAFTERs? Ever. Wife, answering my bewilderment from next room: "Those [animal collective names] were all made up by some lady in the 19th century." I'm not going to bother fact-checking that, 'cause it *feels* true and I'm American and that's enough "evidence" for us. ADES?! Are sources of vitamin C. Literally no one has ever thought or claimed that in the history of humankind. I barely know what an ADE is. Juice you add sugar to? In which case, uh, it's the juice that provides the C. No one uses ADE as anything but a suffix anyway. Crosswords are the only place where people pretend this isn't true. Dear NYT, please double the pay rate for constructors so some of the talent comes back. Pretty please. The crossword is your one true cash cow. You can afford it. Thanks.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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Titular queen of Castile in a Handel opera / THU 5-19-16 / terminer criminal court / punny quip about perp's predicament / Turing test participant / Pollock painting unit / Bygone name in Chinese politics / Modern prefix with gender / One-named Grammy winner for American Boy 2008 / Daughter of Sweeney Todd in Sondheim musical / Nautical command

Constructor: Morton J. Mendelson

Relative difficulty: Challenging (between the ... interesting ... fill and the made-up punny quip, I just couldn't find the handle)

THEME: a punny quip about a perp's predicament — THE PRIME SUSPECT / KNEW HE WAS COOKED / AFTER HE / WAS GRILLED BY THE / POLICE DETECTIVE

Word of the Day: ALMIRA (51A: Titular queen of Castile in a Handel opera) —

Almira, Königin von Castilien ("Almira, Queen of Castile", HWV 1; full title: Der in Krohnen erlangte Glücks-Wechsel, oder: Almira, Königin von Castilien) is George Frideric Handel's first opera, composed when he was 19 years old. It was first performed in Hamburg in January 1705. [...] Almira is the sole example among Handel's many operas with no role for a castrato. (wikipedia)

• • •

I can't write about this in any way that I feel good about, so I'm going to keep it very brief. This type of puzzle is not for me, but you knew that. This specific incarnation of this type of puzzle is not for me, but you knew that as well. Punny quips (esp. those with cutesy alliterative clues) aren't my bag. Never have been. Never will be. I couldn't tell you who cooks the best liver because I don't eat that stuff. This is how I feel about punny quip puzzles. I have to wonder (out loud, partly because it's kind of my job) how made-up a punny quip can be. This one feels Highly made-up. PRIME appears to be there just to make the letter count in the answer come out right, and ... I'm no joke-teller, but isn't it somewhat poor form to have your laugh word, your "punch line," come in the *middle* of your joke. Everything after GRILLED is just filler ... filler that goes on forever. Seriously, the entire last part of this quip is arbitrary and anticlimactic. "... KNEW HE WAS COOKED AFTER HE WAS GRILLED..." stop. That's it. Get it!? Yeah, you get it. But ... the "grill" part really really really needs to come at the *end* for this to be a proper joke. Maybe end the quip with "... when the detective started grilling him"? Something like that. But instead the punny quip just steps on the "joke" and then keeps on walking. It's like a malfunctioning joke-bot wrote this. Crap! I said I would keep it brief. Not for me. Moving on.


The fill. Also not for me. Please don't make me relive it. ATRI OYER ALMIRA PEE. That is all. Seriously, I have to stop. There is nothing for me here. No, wait, one last thing. I'll confess I'm not up to date on all the different astrophysics prizes there are out there (????) but if you give me 33A: Bruno ___ Prize (astrophysics award), the answer better damn well be MARS.


Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

P.S. a couple of people (in emails) have floated the idea that "PRIME" is some kind of substantive adjective for meat (e.g. prime steak, prime rib). I don't know the stand-alone usage of "PRIME," but maybe this interpretation adds to the punniness? You be the judge.

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