Landmass once surrounded by the superocean Panthalassa / THU 11-24-22 / Folk-rock quartet whose name derives from its members' last initials / 2006 Beyoncé album released fittingly on Sept. 4 / Turn of the century financial crisis / Savage X Fenty product / Iconic Voyager 1 photograph taken 3.7 billion miles from Earth / Singer with the debut single My Bologna 1979

Constructor: Pao Roy

Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium

THEME: DOT THE I'S (56A: Pay attention to details ... or a hint to filling in seven of this puzzle's squares) — a "DOT" rebus in which the "DOT" square always appears above the letter "I"; in the Acrosses, the letters "DOT" are part of the answers, but in the Downs, the "DOT" is just supposed to represent an actual dot (i.e. "."):

Theme answers:

• [DOT][DOT][DOT] (10A: And so on)
• PALE BLUE [DOT] (20A: Iconic Voyager 1 photograph taken 3.7 billion miles from Earth)
• POLKA [DOT] DRESSES (26A: They're spotted on Lucille Ball and Minnie Mouse)
• CONNECTS THE [DOT]S (43A: Begins to see a pattern)
• [DOT] COM CRASH (Turn-of-the-century financial crisis)

Word of the Day: PANGAEA (9D: Landmass once surrounded by the superocean Panthalassa) —

Pangaea or Pangea(/pænˈdʒiː.ə/) was a supercontinent that existed during the late Paleozoic and early Mesozoic eras. It assembled from the earlier continental units of Gondwana, Euramerica and Siberia during the Carboniferous approximately 335 million years ago, and began to break apart about 200 million years ago, at the end of the Triassic and beginning of the Jurassic. In contrast to the present Earth and its distribution of continental mass, Pangaea was centred on the equator and surrounded by the superocean Panthalassa and the Paleo-Tethys and subsequent Tethys Oceans. Pangaea is the most recent supercontinent to have existed and the first to be reconstructed by geologists. (wikipedia)

• • •

Hello once again from Thanksgiving Vacation. My mom is busy in the kitchen roasting pecans for the pie and trying figure out the recipe for cranberry sauce, and since the kitchen is basically adjacent to my writing space, I can see I am going to have some difficulty keeping myself focused on the puzzle. I just heard my mom say to her longtime partner, "I need to keep my mind focused on what I'm doing," and, well, yes, same. I'll do my best. And yet I keep hearing him making "suggestions" to my mom about how to cook things, did he just meet her!? (reader, he did not). I mean, you can talk to my mom about anything, she is very open-minded, but the last thing you wanna do is offer unsolicited advice over her shoulder as she's cooking. Vermouth in the cranberries!? This is no time for improvisation! The woman knows what she is doing and is Not about to take suggestions from the peanut gallery. Now mom is making fun of the "certified biodynamic" label on the cranberry packaging, good for her. OK, sorry, I know, puzzle, puzzle, OK, here we go ... puzzle! Nope, her partner is now singing "Alice's Restaurant," so I'm gonna have to pause for a bit until that subsides. . . OK, here we go. . . now!

The theme was very easy to uncover, and as soon as I uncovered it, I thought "Oh I've definitely seen this theme before. And recently too." Turns out I was both right and not quite right. The DOT THE I'S theme we got earlier this year (Thursday, Feb. 10, 2022) was not i-dentical to this one, but it was close. In that one, the letter "I" turned completely into a "DOT" (so "dotting the i's" meant literally turning i's into "DOT"s). Here, of course, the "DOT"s appear above the i's, which makes more sense on a literal level, but was not nearly so interesting as the weirder, more complicated February version. What both puzzles have in common, admirably, is that the theme applies to literally every "I" in the puzzle, not just the "I"s that appear in specially designated theme answers. But in this one, "DOT" always appears as the word "dot," whereas in the February one, the letters "DOT" were mostly buried inside longer answers (like YOU DO THE MATH and TORPEDO TUBE). Today's puzzle just gave you phrases with the word "DOT" in them. Less interesting, though DOT COM CRASH is pretty snazzy, and DOT DOT DOT is a nice thematic flourish (even if you would never actually do the "I" in IRA (always a capital) (10D: Nest egg option, for short). Overall, this puzzle was fine, but it felt like a pale (blue dot) version of the very very similar puzzle that came out earlier this year.

Speaking of déjà vu, did we not just have this clue for LOLA (14A: Actress Kirke of "Mozart in the Jungle")?? (we did); and HSBC in exactly the same grid position!? (we did). I thought we had PALE BLUE DOT very recently as well, but that was actually well over a year ago now. My favorite thing about today's puzzle was either WEIRD AL, or seeing the word HORNY (13A: Aroused, informally) just one day after I used the word "HORNY" in my discussion of RANDY. I also like that PALE BLUE DOT very nearly T-bones PANGAEA. Those two have a nice whole-wide-world kind of synergy. I also like seeing that it still remains next to impossible for clue writers to lay off the cutesy "?" clues for ELOPE (64A: Not get reception?). Some things never change. Like mom's Thanksgiving dinner. Never changes. Always perfect. I need to go prepare (i.e. sleep / fast). Enjoy your day, whatever you eat.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld 

P.S. CSNY stands for Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young (52D: Folk-rock quartet whose name derives from its members' last initials)

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Southern cornmeal dish / FRI 6-17-22 / 1987 Lionel Richie hit / Whose work may be all play / Comic who said I'm not addicted to cocaine I just like the way it smells / Popular poster

Constructor: Pao Roy

Relative difficulty: Easy (maybe Easy-Medium)

THEME: none 

Word of the Day: PALADINS (10D: Heroic knights) —

\The Paladins (or Twelve Peers) are twelve fictional knights of legend, the foremost members of Charlemagne's court in the 8th century. They first appear in the medieval (12th century) chanson de geste cycle of the Matter of France, where they play a similar role to the Knights of the Round Table in Arthurian romance. In these romantic portrayals, the chivalric paladins represent Christianity against a Saracen (Muslim) invasion of Europe. The names of the paladins vary between sources, but there are always twelve of them (a number with Christian associations) led by Roland (spelled Orlando in later Italian sources). The paladins' most influential appearance is in The Song of Roland, written between 1050 and 1115, which narrates the heroic death of Roland at the Battle of Roncevaux Pass.

The legend is based on the historical Umayyad invasion of Gaul and subsequent conflict in the Marca Hispanica between the Frankish Empire and the Emirate of Córdoba. The term paladinis from Old French, deriving from the Latin comes palatinus (count palatine), a title given to close retainers.

The paladins remained a popular subject throughout medieval French literature. Literature of the Italian Renaissance (15th and 16th centuries) introduced more fantasy elements into the legend, which later became a popular subject for operas in the Baroque music of the 16th and 17th centuries. During the 19th and early 20th centuries the term was reused outside fiction for small numbers of close military confidants serving national leaders. Modern depictions of paladins are often an individual knight-errant holy warrior or combat healer, influenced by the paladin character class that appeared in Dungeons & Dragons in 1975. (wikipedia)

• • •

PLOT TWIST: I loved this one. ON A SIDE NOTE: I did not love ON A SIDE NOTE. The more I look at it, the more plausible it seems, sadly (for me), but as I was solving, that was the one answer I had the most trouble parsing. I was trying to parse it from its opening letters, and that's the problem: the opening letters feel extraneous. If I use that phrase, or hear that phrase, I feel like it just comes in the form, "SIDE NOTE ..." The "ON A" was ??? and then even after I had NOTE I didn't really get it. Mr. DEEDS to the rescue there, for sure (34D: Mr. of film). I have three frowny faces written in the margin of my puzzle next to ON A (!) SIDE NOTE. Most of the rest of the margins are filled with "good"s and asterisks and "!!!" and smiley faces. Oh, looks like I have an arrow pointing from the frowny faces to SOU ... but SOU (extremely old-school crosswordese) is extremely tolerable when it's not part of a crosswordese avalanche and is being used deliberately and strategically to hold larger, more interesting parts of the puzzle together (as it is here). Definitely got a good dose of that whoosh-whoosh feeling I look forward to on Fridays. I even got it from a "?" clue, as 27D: One with sound judgment? sent me plunging down the west side of the grid off of just the "AU-." And in the places where I did struggle (a bit), there was a payoff that made it worth it. I'm thinking primarily of the NE, where I threw "IT'S A DATE" over to the east side of the grid, filled a bunch of the 4-letter answers above it, and *still* couldn't make any of those long Downs work. Considered pulling "IT'S A DATE" because I wanted GALAHADS for PALADINS, couldn't figure out what word was supposed to follow DRAMA, and had no idea what was going on with -AKETA- at 12D. But I hung in there, realized the complicated-sounding "file type" was just PDF (10A: File type used in paper-to-digital archiving), and was rewarded for my patience with both PALADINS (ah, the figures from "The Matter of France" in medieval literature *and* the D&D character class, I know them both pretty well), and FAKE TATTOO, which is just fabulous. That is, the answer is solid, but that clue was fabulous, for sure (12D: "Mom" for a day, say). Really enjoyed this from start to finish, with very few bumps along the way.

Although ... can I really say I "enjoy" an answer like INFLUENCER. It's one of the worst ideas / concepts / phenomena I can think of in the social media era. It bespeaks an unwarranted and youth-cultish power, primarily in the service of brands (i.e. capitalism), so it both seems nefarious and makes me sad for the youths. Every generation has its idols, so there's nothing truly new here, but somehow that idolization feels ... I dunno, weaponized by contemporary social media platforms, which are newly and uniquely able to harness it (for cash and / or to spread disinformation). The whole INFLUENCER thing feels extremely bound up with consumerism ... but again, youth culture has always been that way. Anyway, I hate the idea of the INFLUENCER, but as a *crossword answer*, I do admit it feels current and lively. I like that it sits under POOL NOODLE. Hard to look cool when you're sitting under a POOL NOODLE. Are there POOL NOODLE INFLUENCERs? If there are, well, that is a YouTube channel I might check out.

Bicycle Wheel (1913)
[36A: Like some Marcel Duchamp works (DADAIST)]

Really loved PLOT TWIST, both at the answer and clue level (1A: It was all a dream, maybe)—very nice way to start the puzzle. I wanted the LOFT to be a GARRET but of course that didn't fit (2D: Artist's pad, maybe). Then I thought "sketch pad," which is probably what the clue wanted me to do. Other clues that flummoxed me included the wonderful [Team building?], which is transparent ... once you actually see the answer (ARENA). But before then ... well, I really should've noted the lack of a hyphen in the clue (or the space between the words: looks like the term meaning "building of teams" is frequently spelled as one word, "teambuilding"). Anyway, it's literally a building for a team. Surprised by literalness! I had "GET ME!?" before "GET IT?" (18A: "Catch my drift?"), due entirely to the "my" in the clue. I was pleasantly surprised that I was able drudge up "SELA" from Mr. Richie's really ridiculously extensive pop hit catalogue. I mentally penciled it in and then discovered yes, my memory was correct, that was the title of one of his songs. Is this better or worse than [Actress Ward]? Who can say? Loved the clue on BOUT (51A: Round and round and round?)—the cluing was remarkably on point today. Did not love the clue on Richard PRYOR, which is to say I would've loved a clue that didn't evoke his addiction. If you need your clue to be edgy, you know, he's got a lot about race, including a really great bit about the cops killing Black people with impunity ...  But at least this cocaine line is his own joke about himself, not the general public or hack comedians using him as a cheap punchline, and punching bag (as they did for years and years and years). And it's a good line. And I always like seeing his name. So even this answer didn't really bring me down. I'm going to PIPE DOWN now. Bye.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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Titular Disney protagonist of 1942 / THU 4-28-22 / Illinois city that was the first home of the Chicago Bears / Send beyond the baseline of a tennis court, say / Potato-stuffed pastries / Video game with rosebud cheat code that grants free money / Muppet whose self-identified species is Whatever

Constructor: Pao Roy

Relative difficulty: Medium

THEME: 4-Down ... — in four long Down answers, the word "DOWN" is replaced with a DOWN-ward facing arrow, represented by an "I" over a "V" ... like so:

 

I

V

Theme answers:

• [DOWN]WARD-FACING DOG (1D: Part of a sun salutation, in yoga)
• GOT [DOWN] TO BUSINESS (4D: Cut the small talk)
• TRICKLE-[DOWN] THEORY (7D: Concept in Reaganomics)
• KEEPS ON THE [DOWN] LOW (10D: Handles discreetly)

Word of the Day: ANA Lily Amirpour (52D: Filmmaker ___ Lily Amirpour) —

Ana Lily Amirpour (Persian: آنا لیلی امیرپور) is an English-born American film director, screenwriter, producer and actress. She is best known for her feature film debut A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, self-described as "the first Iranian vampire spaghetti western" that made its debut at the Sundance Film Festival in 2014, and which was based on a previous short film that she wrote and directed, which won Best Short Film at the 2012 Noor Iranian Film Festival. (wikipedia)

• • •

Ironic that I ended on ICK because I really liked this puzzle a lot. I like the weird way it unfolded. I was able to make significant progress even without seeing the theme, and then I hit a patch that made me go "whaaaaat?" It was like digging a tunnel and expecting eventually to come to the end but then on the way running into an alien skeleton. What ... is ... this? In this case, "this" was the "IV" above "LOW" in an answer I knew had to be about keeping something on the DOWN LOW. But DOWN wouldn't fit. And what the hell is with the "V" ... can that answer be anything but VIE? (50A: Struggle). The reason this was all so puzzling is that I had made it halfway through the damn puzzle with no obvious sign of a theme and no major trouble, so I thought I'd just fill in some normal-ish-looking answers and then find the connection at the end, or maybe ... my puzzle would do some kind of Thursday trick at the end, like, I don't know, levitate or start spinning in circles or change colors or something. How was I able to get halfway through this damn thing without any idea about the theme? Well, it all comes back to yoga.

Even if you have never practiced yoga in your life, you are likely familiar with the pose called "downward-facing dog" (or "down dog" or "dog pose") (in Sanskrit, "adho mukha svanasana"). Palms on floor, feet on floor, ass in the air, roughly.

And yes, downward-facing dog is part of a sun salutation. But you know what else is part of a sun salutation? Well, yeah, you probably do by now, if you looked at the partially-filled grid I just posted: it's UPWARD-FACING DOG. And UPWARD-FACING DOG fit! So I didn't blink. I just kept right on going down into the SW and counterclockwise around the grid until I ended up running into IVLOW (!?). Then I thought, "wait, what's the theme?" Then I looked at UPWARD-FACING DOG and thought, "OK, that's UP, this is ... DOWN ... somehow ... ooh, it's a DOWN arrow, so UP must actually be an UP arrow!" So I tried that, and that didn't work, and only *then* did I remember "oh yeah, DOWNWARD-FACING DOG is also available." The other two DOWN-arrow answers came pretty swiftly. The theme is simple and elegant and clever and because of the path I took to discovering it, it was genuinely surprising as well. No complaints.

I struggled very badly up front, and in retrospect it's at least a little clear why (the very first Across and Downs are "IV"-impacted). The worst mistake I made was non-theme-related: SEA / NERVE instead of ERS / VALOR. I did think "well that's a weird way to clue SEA ... why would you use the abbr. for "Seattle" when the ordinary word SEA is available?" Yes, why would you? I also had a catastrophic double-error along the west coast, as my dog with ARF (not GRR) and my "attachments" were IDOS, not PDFS (28A: Many attachments). Somehow I knew DECATUR, or could piece it together easily, and that helped me work my way out of that west coast mess. Outside of my initial encounter with the "IV" gimmick, nothing else in the grid gave me real trouble.

More:

• 33A: Enlightenment, in Buddhism (BODHI) — I know this from knowing something about Buddhism but I *know* it know it because I just watched "Point Break" (1991) for the first time, and the surfer / bank robber / life coach / gang leader played by Patrick Swayze in that movie is named BODHI. 
• 41D: Muppet whose self-identified species is "Whatever" (GONZO) — I would've said ANIMAL, but there weren't enough letters. I like this clue. I like remembering the Muppets.
• 49D: 46-Down, in French (SEPT) — I had the final "T," looked over at 46-Down, saw it had five letters, and figured, "ah, the old ETAT / STATE pairing. Classic! But ... how is Nitrogen a STATE? Oh well, your chemistry knowledge sucks, just trust the puzzle. Nitrogen STATE!"
• 19A: Hosp. hookups (IVS) — OK, I do have one complaint about the theme, or related to the theme, and it's that this answer really has no place in the grid. You can't (shouldn't) use "IV" to represent DOWN and then also have standalone "IVS" in the grid. It's ... distracting. It evokes the theme, but it's not part of the theme, and it's not in a theme position. Better to scrap it. But this is an exceedingly minor point. An aesthetic blemish of small proportions. If "DOWN" had been in one of the Across answers, I'd've barked (ARF! I mean GRR!) about that too. 

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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Gossiping types / MON 9-20-21 / One-named R&B singer with the 1999 6x platinum album Unleash the Dragon / Classic arcade game set in outer space

Constructor: Pao Roy

Relative difficulty: Easy

THEME: Volcano parts, sort of — themers end with words for layers of earth, which have some tangential relationship to volcanoes ... then there are weird extra five-letter theme answers concerning what lava *is* (before and after, or rather after and before, an eruption) ... oh, and then ASHES, for some reason:

Theme answers:

• GLUTEN-FREE CRUST (17A: Pizza feature for a specialized diet)
• ASSUME THE MANTLE (34A: Take on a position, along with its responsibilities)
• ROTTEN TO THE CORE (52A: Lacking any moral compass)
• ROCKS (1A: What lava becomes after an eruption)
• MAGMA (60A: What lava is before an eruption)
• ASHES (27D: Volcanic emissions)

Word of the Day: J. COLE (48D: Rapper J. ___) —

Jermaine Lamarr Cole (born January 28, 1985) known professionally as J. Cole, is an American rapper, singer, songwriter, and record producer. Cole is regarded as one of the most influential rappers of his generation. Born on a military base in Germany and raised in Fayetteville, North Carolina, Cole initially gained recognition as a rapper following the release of his debut mixtape, The Come Up, in early 2007. Intent on further pursuing a musical career, he went on to release two additional mixtapes, The Warm Up (2009) and Friday Night Lights (2010) both to critical acclaim, after signing to Jay-Z's Roc Nation imprint in 2009.

Cole released his debut studio album, Cole World: The Sideline Story, in 2011. It debuted at number one on the US Billboard 200. His next album, Born Sinner (2013), also topped the Billboard 200. Moving into more conscious themes, 2014 Forest Hills Drive (2014) topped the Billboard 200 and earned Cole a Best Rap Album nomination at the 2015 Grammy Awards. His jazz influenced fourth album, 4 Your Eyez Only (2016), debuted at number one on the Billboard200. Cole's fifth album, KOD (2018), became his fifth number-one album on the Billboard 200 and featured a then-record six simultaneous top 20 hits on the Billboard Hot 100, tying The Beatles. His sixth studio album, The Off-Season, was released on May 14, 2021. (wikipedia)

• • •

I'm confused. The *earth* has a core, and a mantle, and a crust, and volcanos ... are part of the earth ... but in allllll the cross sections of volcanoes that I am currently looking at online, not one of them includes CRUST, MANTLE, or CORE. See, here's one:

And here's one:

No CRUST, no MANTLE, no CORE. Again, those are parts of the earth, for sure, and volcanoes are, technically, parts of the earth, so ... OK, but this MAGMA / ROCKS / ASHES stuff ... I don't know, the words all seem only loosely associated with volcanoes, and the MAGMA / ROCKS / ASHES part feels super tacked-on. Also, starting with ROCKS and ending with MAGMA feels (no, is) backwards. There's just a sloppiness here to the execution that really needs unsloppifying. Further, while I really like THEY/THEM and EGOMANIA, the fill on this is a bit on the old-fashioned / crosswordesey side. ATTA and NENE!? You're bringing back both, in the same grid? But seriously, what happened in the SW corner. Surely an editor could've spruced that thing up pretty quickly. If you wanted to the very least possible, you could change PRAY / ANO to PREY / ENO, which, currently, 72.3% of solvers agree is the better pairing.

But if you just change PAGODA to something like ONEIDA you get much more favorable letter patterns in the Downs and the whole corner gets a lot easier to make clean. ANO GTOS AONE is a lot of not-great for one little section. You gotta mind the small stuff, because if it gets ugly, then all of a sudden it isn't small stuff any more. 

I should be fair to the themers, which I think are actually quite good as stand-alone answers. Still, the theme just didn't work for me. Hope you were more into it than I was. See you tomorrow.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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