62A What "should be made by filling a glass with gin, then waving it in the general direction of Italy," per Noël Coward - THU 3-31-22 - Marginalia - chess:check::go:_____ - reader's jottings

Constructor: OLIVER ROEDER

Relative difficulty: MEDIUM

THEME: MARGINALIA (letters are missing at the edges of the puzzle)

Word of the Day: DRY MARTINI (62A What "should be made by filling a glass with gin, then waving it in the general direction of Italy," per Noël Coward) —

The martini is a cocktail made with gin and vermouth, and garnished with an olive or a lemon twist. Over the years, the martini has become one of the best-known mixed alcoholic beverages. H. L. Mencken called the martini "the only American invention as perfect as the sonnet," and E. B. White called it "the elixir of quietude". (wikipedia)

• • •

Greetings, CrossWorld - my name is Whit and I have the honor of stepping in to blog for Rex today. It's my second time here. I suppose this came about because I was tweeting about the first time I guest-blogged, way back in 2019. When I published that blog, my wife's uncle called her up - I don't think they had ever discussed crosswords or crossword blogs before - to ask if that was her husband writing for Rex Parker. Then, a few days later, I ran into someone who works with my wife, and he also asked if that was me. He said, rather dryly, "Was that you writing on Rex Parker? I don't care for him." A loyal readership, anyway you can get it.

(This is my dog. She's a good dog.)

I'm glad to be back. Let's get to the puzzle.

Theme answers:

• ATED (1A Beat in chess - MATED)
• HIMO (10A Classic Jumbotron Shout-out - HIMOM)
• RTTEACHER (20A Educator in a Smock - ARTTEACHER)
• MEDUS (22A Figure seen on Athena's shield - MEDUSA)
• ACEHORSE (32A Thoroughbred, eg. - RACEHORSE)
• PGATOU (36A FedEx Cup Organizer - PGATOUR)
• OBLETS (46A Some drinking vessels - GOBLETS)
• NOPARKIN (48A Kind of zone in a city - NOPARKING)
• CEMAN (59A Profession in an O'Neill Title - ICEMAN)
• DRYMARTIN (62A What "should be made by filling a glass with gin, then waving it in the general direction of Italy," per Noël Coward - DRYMARTINI
• ERDY (70A Geekish - NERDY)
• EPSO (72A Big name in printers - EPSON)

This took me 18 minutes, give or take, which is on the high end of my stats for a Thursday. I confess that I don't care for this type of puzzle. The approach - slicing off those first and last letters for the theme answers - usually feels less like a feat and more like a trick. And I get kinda testy with crosswords when I know the answer but I can't make it fit. I like a clean solve, folks. But I will tip my hat, because there's more going on with those missing letters than I first realized. Each clue on the across is missing the same letter, and put together, those missing letters spell: M-A-R-G-I-N. Still a trick, but more on the clever side than I expected. And the theme answers themselves were all pretty good - I liked RACEHORSE and ARTTEACHER (I'm just writing out the actual word here, it looks silly otherwise.) I picked DRYMARTINI as the word of the day because I a) love martinis and b) love to see Coward get a shout-out in the crossword. I read Phillip Hoare's (HOAR - 14A Frost) biography a few years back and very much enjoyed it, though he only addresses the one thing everyone knows about Noël Coward - that funny little diacritic - very obliquely. And, like, that's half the reason you'd pick up that book to start, right? Tell me about how I can get one of those in my name! (Turns out he just decided to do it. Not much of a story.) 

(The man had style!)

Apart from the theme answers, though, answers were very short and kind of clunky. I liked IMAMS (40A Muslim leaders) - Ramadan starts tomorrow, Eid Mubarak - and ISLAS (18A Sorna y Nublar, en "Jurassic Park") because dinosaurs chomping on people is fun to think about, but other than that, the fill didn't have much kick. RATON (43A Get into trouble, in a way) is clunky. TOYOU (53A Two-word tribute) is clunky. CANI (69A "Pretty please?" is clunky. And the way the grid was laid out meant that everything felt tight.

Man, I think I'm kinda down on this puzzle.

But I'm not down on the blog! This was fun to write and it was fun to think about the puzzle this way. I hope Rex will have me back again.

Bullets:

• 65A: Kid-lit character with a green suit and gold crown (BABAR) — Babar rules. Always happy to see Babar floating around the world. He lives in Celesteville, and his wife is named Celeste, so I like to imagine that there is a complicated matriarchal power structure in Elephantland and Babar is a puppet king.
• 68A: Chess:check::go:____ (ATARI) — I did not know that was where the word Atari comes from. Apparently Go is one of the hardest games in the world to master. I know that I paid 99 cents for a phone app and then immediately gave up trying to learn.
• 21D: Reader's jottings, e.g. (ANNOTATION) — I realize I haven't really talked about any of the downs, and I think that's because I mostly solved this on the across clues. There's some meat to the down answers and the puzzle can stretch its legs there. I might have been more pleased if I'd taken the all-downs approach.
• 44D: Scan options for the claustrophobic (OPENMRIS) — Who isn't claustrophobic in an MRI machine? 

Signed, Whit Vann, Pretender to the Baronage of the Southwest Corner of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

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Late media columnist David / THU 8-19-21 / 1970 John Wayne film / Operatic daughter of the king Amonasro / Extraneous computer programs that slow down a system / Home to the golden pavilion known as Kinkaku-ji / Vaping device informally

Constructor: Oliver Roeder

Relative difficulty: Easy

THEME: CEREAL BOX (36A: Life preserver? ... or a hint to six squares in this puzzle) — an "OAT" rebus (where "OAT" (a cereal) appears inside its own box six times):

The Oats!:

• CUT-THROAT (2D: Dog-eat-dog) / MOATS (32A: Castle defenses)
• CROATIA / GOATEE (7D: Facial feature named for an animal)
• HOUSEBOATS (30A: Mobile homes of a sort) / UNDER OATH (12D: Sworn)
• FIT TO A TEE (52A: Be perfectly sized)/ BLOATWARE (43D: Extraneous computer programs that slow down a system)
• COAT-OF-ARMS (46A: Heraldic symbol) / LOATHSOME (40D: Repulsive)
• THE GOAT (60A: Best ever, in sports slang) / OATES (61D: National Book Award winner for "Them," 1970)

Word of the Day: Robert FOGEL (52D: Economics Nobelist Robert) —

Robert William Fogel (/ˈfoʊɡəl/; July 1, 1926 – June 11, 2013) was an American economic historian and scientist, and winner (with Douglass North) of the 1993 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. As of his death, he was the Charles R. Walgreen Distinguished Service Professor of American Institutions and director of the Center for Population Economics (CPE) at the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business. He is best known as an advocate of new economic history (cliometrics) – the use of quantitative methods in history. (wikipedia)

• • •

Kind of a one-note puzzle ... ... ... (yeah, you get it)

Seriously, there's just one OAT in the box, first of all, which is, let's say, unlikely, and then there are only oats, no other cereals — should've been called OAT BOX, not CEREAL BOX. Then of course "Life" is not a great cereal to use in the revealer of your one-oat puzzle because while it is made by the Quaker OATs company and was at one point made primarily of OATs, it now contains wheat flour, corn flour, and rice flour, and is marketed as "Life Original Multigrain Cereal." But as someone who once made a SLICED / CHEESE Thursday puzzle where all the cheeses involved were not, in reality, sliceable, I can't complain too much about the fact that Life doesn't match up that well with OATs. It's clearly here solely for the groany pun in the revealer clue. Was the entire puzzle built around that pun? Was that the ... germ ... of this puzzle? (sorry, wheat pun, wrong venue). It's not a great payoff. Mostly I found the theme overly simple and rote. I found the first OAT easily—had CUT, knew it had to be CUT-THROAT, and then just waited to find out which part of THROAT was going to be shoved into a rebus square. Once I got OAT, I sort of hoped that other grains awaited, but then I hit the CROATIAn GOATEE, and that dream died. OAT OAT OAT, straight down the line. There was some fun going on the Easter OAT hunt, I guess (never knew where they were going to pop up), but the only OAT answer I really liked was THE GOAT (stands for Greatest Of All Time, in case the term is unknown to you). Seems like BLOATWARE is the most original, but that term means nothing to me, so it was hard to be too excited about it. Except for MOILS (oof), the grid seems solid enough. Ironically, there just wasn't enough life (!) in the theme for me. So upside-down to have the Tuesday and Wednesday themes excite me more than the Thursday.

This puzzle was definitely harder than yesterday's, but adjusted for day-of-the-week expectations, it was still very easy. Didn't struggle anywhere, despite the fact this puzzle unleashed a hell of a lot of proper nouns. Only two of said names gave me any trouble: with LOGAN, I already had LOGA- in place before I ever saw the clue; with FOGEL, things were definitely harder. Not a household name, or (in LOGAN's case) a Boston airport or ... I don't know, a Run ... anyway, not a recognizable name, so I needed every cross and even at -OGEL I half-assumed the answer would be VOGEL (by far the more common name). That HIREE / FOGEL / MOILS section was the only one that caused any perceptible slow-down today. Again, as with yesterday, I mostly read clues / filled in answers, with very little intervening "hmmm" time. 

Puzzle felt very dude-heavy. About twice as many men as women in this thing (five women, ten men—if you count John Wayne). It's not the count that matters so much here as the prominence of the names. Lots of unusual / marquee names for the guys (THE ROCK! Full-named AL GORE!), whereas the women are the kind of ordinary, incidental crosswordese you'd accidentally pick up during the filling of any grid (TERI PEET AIDA NINA). Joyce Carol OATES is the exception here, but her name is actually the tiniest of the lot today, and anyway, it's not exactly new to crosswords. There was just a FORTUNE / FOGEL / "Succession" / dudes-with-$$$ vibe to this one that wasn't really my thing. And I'd've changed DOUG Jones to DOUR, not so much because I particularly dislike the former Alabama senator as because I like the word DOUR. And again, the puzzle just did not need yet another guy's name. 

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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