Show where the term "Debbie Downer" originated, in brief / WED 1-15-2025 / Fashion photographer Richard / Popular wine from Bordeaux / Mess kitchen implement

Constructor: Parker Higgins

Relative difficulty: Medium

THEME: Common "X for Y" phrases are re-parsed so the verbs become nouns

Theme answers:

• [Look for trouble] for STINK EYE
  • "Look" as in "facial expression"
• [Good for nothing] for FREEBIE
  • "Good" as in "item you can buy"
• [Open for business] for DEAR SIR OR MADAM
  • "Open" as in "the opening of a letter"
• [Fit for a king] for REGALIA
  • "Fit" as in "outfit" (this might be a more modern term, see, e.g. "fit check"
• [Run for the hills] for SKI SLOPE
  • "Run" as in "stretch of land"

Word of the Day: PEORIA (Illinois city whose name serves as shorthand for mainstream taste) —

Peoria is a city in and the county seat of Peoria County, Illinois, United States. Located on the Illinois River, the city had a population of 113,150 as of the 2020 census, making it the eighth-most populous city in Illinois. 

The city is associated with the phrase "Will it play in Peoria?", which may have originated from the vaudeville era and is often spuriously attributed to Groucho Marx. [wiki]

• • •

Good morning everyone! Malaika here, for a slightly delayed Malaika MWednesday. I solved this puzzle while listening to Waxahatchee's new album-- I recommend for fans of Joni Mitchell, the Indigo Girls, etc.

What a treat to open the crossword app and see Parker's name! From my experience with his puzzles, he is really excellent at wordplay that is a little more clever than the average puzzle, while still being ultimately fun to solve (as opposed to an opportunity for the constructor to show off). Although, outside of the theme, Parker did show off a little bit here, by including pairs of fun, long down answers that had nothing to do with the theme: PREBOARDED, MINIWHEATS, BREAKS EVEN, and SCAVENGERS. This is tricky to do when the down entries have to cross through two theme answers (FREEBIE and OR MADAM on the right, and DEAR SIR and REGALIA on the left), but he pulled it off very cleanly. It's a nice touch in a puzzle where the theme answers themselves are shorter than the standard.

It's impressive to have a set of five symmetrical theme answers that totally nail the re-parsing, and I wonder if Parker had a list of fifty of these from which he plucked the best ones. I don't find any of these stretchy, although I am very used to using "fit" as a noun. I'm not sure if that is new slang or something that's been around for a while, but I have only heard it starting around 2019, so others who do not have a Gen Z younger sister constantly keeping them up-to-date on what the youths are saying might not be familiar. I do think my favorite here is [Good for nothing], because I think it's funny to imagine someone giving me something for free and me screaming "Good for nothing!!" at them.

Shoutout to my Gen Z Sister whose face I will not post without permission

There were a couple of proper nouns I wasn't familiar with here. PEORIA and AVEDON both required every single crossing for me to get, as I've never heard of either before. If someone didn't know RAMI Malek or the phrase TETE-a-TETE, I could see them getting stuck. PADRE / ARCO also could have been a tough cross, although it wasn't a problem for me.

Outside of the theme, the puzzle is bursting with fun clues. [Got on first?] for PRE-BOARDED is a textbook example of how to elevate a pretty boring entry with an excellent clue. [Gig makeup?] makes you think of a setlist, or even stage makeup, but the answer, MEGS, is referring to megabytes which make up a gigabyte. And [Where you might dress up for a court appearance, informally?] for REN FAIRE is talking about royal court, not a modern-day legal courtroom. I'm sure there were others as well! Let me know your favorites in the comments.

Bullets:

• [Parthenon's place] for ATHENS — I had a history teacher who told us that you can remember Parthenon vs Pantheon by remembering that Italy makes pizzas in pans and thus is home to the Pantheon, and today that helped me with this crossword, so thank you Mr. Bell!
• [One who parties hearty] for RAVER — This struck me as kind of old-fashioned and quaint phrasing when compared with the 22 year olds I know who are going to raves!
• [Triangular pastries] for SAMOSAS — I have seen some publications make an effort to stop indicating the country of origin on many food entries. I think this tends to make the entries a little harder. I've never thought of a samosa as a pastry although I suppose it is! Now I really really want a samosa.
• [Vertex of an infamous triangle] for BERMUDA — I am flying to Bermuda soon and would not like to be reminded of the Bermuda Triangle's existence!!!
• [Parker House products] for ROLLS — If this was on purpose, it is very cute of Parker to sneak his name into the puzzle.

I hope you all have a restful long weekend!

xoxo Malaika

[Follow Rex Parker on BlueSky and Facebook]

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2024 Charli XCX album with a lime green cover / THU 9-12-2024 / Petrichor is the aroma produced by this / "Fathoms ___" (opening song of "The Little Mermaid")

Constructor: Parker Higgins

Relative difficulty: no idea how difficult the theme is, I solved this without looking at the theme entries because the puzzle itself is very easy; hooray for themes where the entries are valid words + phrases in the grid, so you can fill them in from crosses

THEME: it's actually not a hard theme; phrases of the form "X and Y" are repurposed with Y as the clue and the entry being "X + (word that means "companion")"; see below

Word of the Day: RAIN [Petrichor is the aroma produced by this] — look, I'm not gonna post a definition per se here, but "petrichor" is my favorite word, and tbh I'd go so far as to say it's the prettiest word in the English language; anyway, it comes from the Greek words "petra" (rock) and "ichor" (this is a crossword staple, you already know it's the blood of the gods), which tells you just how beautiful that scent really is, and why I love both the scent and the word...

• • •

Hey hi howdy hello, Christopher Adams once again filling in for Rex on a Thursday where the theme is...well, it's not what I would've thought for a Thursday. Could pass for a Wednesday, maybe a Tuesday even. I wonder if OTAKU is the reason why this is a Thursday; to me it's not a difficult word, but YMMV wildly there, and Will Shortz is definitely not the target demographic for it, so I can see why this was a Thursday puzzle on the logic that "it's harder than Wednesday", even if (a) I don't agree and (b) it's not the usual sort of trickiness one would expect from a Thursday.

Theme answers:

• [LIMB] for LIFE PARTNER ("life and limb")
• [FOREMOST] for FIRST MATE ("first and foremost")
• [READY] for GOOD BUDDY ("good and ready")
• [DINE] for WINE PAIRING ("wine and dine")

Gonna be honest, I don't remember most of the solve; words filled themselves in, clues didn't offer much resistance, and I was at the right level of tired that I skipped over clues I couldn't fill in immediately. Hence the figuring out of the theme post-solve; if this were a trickier puzzle, I would've had to stop and figure things out, but very little in this puzzle put up a resistance, and even the parts that did got much easier once I had a letter or two in place from clues that really were that easy.

And still, a fun puzzle, a nice aha moment deciphering the theme post-solve, some fun phrases (AM I TOO LATE, ALASKA ROLL, some theme entries) scattered throughout, as well as fun clues (BRAT, NFL, OGRE, etc.). Even the clues that were straightforward often felt fun and (more importantly) felt like they were written by an actual constructor: BERET, RAIN, PETS, etc. Overall an enjoyable puzzle; it's not at all what I wanted or expected from a Thursday, but when it's a fun, clean solve, you can't complain too much about it not being tricksy or difficult.

 

40A: [Insert, as a video in a post]

52D: [2024 Charli XCX album with a lime green cover] BRAT (but brat summer is over, so now we're pumpkin that; also, per charli, "kamala is brat", please register to vote, and vote for kamala)

Olio:

• RISES [Gets ready for the national anthem, maybe] — The "maybe" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. I do not care to have the national anthem played at sporting events. To put it bluntly: it's jingoistic. It has no place at domestic sporting events, full stop, and I hate how it's been co-opted and turned into a big deal in a post-9/11 world. It's the same sort of "patriotism" (there needs to be more quote marks there) that gave us a certain strain of country music that I also abhor and also wish would go away. I fully support those who refuse to stand for the national anthem (especially in a country that often does not stand for or support you), and even more fully support movements to stop playing the damn thing, period.
• BELOW ["Fathoms ___" (opening song of "The Little Mermaid")] — Did not know the title of this song, but I love the clue because it's fun, you learn something, and you can get the answer immediately even without knowing it; it's the sort of thing I enjoy including when I write trivia, for those reasons.
• OCTET [Large wedding band, say] — Gonna be honest, filled in the -ET at the end immediately and let the downs disambiguate between OCTET and NONET and anything else it might've been.
• SPAYS [Neuters] — How many of you read this clue/answer pair in Bob Barker's (or Drew Carey's) voice?

Yours truly, Christopher Adams, Court Jester of CrossWorld

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Hawaiian wood used to build the earliest surfboards / WED 5-17-23 / Inits in Congress beginning in 2019 / Unisex fragrance launched in 1994 / Old English for better or worse / Perform spectacularly colloquially

Constructor: Parker Higgins

Relative difficulty: Medium

THEME: DOES THE SPLITS (33A: Performs a gymnastics movie requiring flexibility ... or enters answers into this puzzle's four shaded parts) — words that can precede "SPLIT" in familiar phrases are found "split" across black squares four times:

Theme answers:

• MAKES EVEN / TENOR (16A: Brings to a tie / 17A: High low voice)
• CUBAN / ANACONDAS (27A: Grilled ham-and-cheese sandwich / 28A: Amazon swimmers)
• ASPIRES TO / CK ONE (43A: Aims for / 47A: Unisex fragrance launched in 1994)
• SLICK / ETYMOLOGY (55A: Certain ocean pollution / 56A: Old English, for better or worse?)

Word of the Day: OTSEGO Lake (31D: New York lake that's the source of the Susquehanna River) —

Otsego Lake is a 4,046-acre (16.37 km²) lake located in Otsego County in the U.S. state of New York. It is the source of the Susquehanna River and largest lake in Otsego County. The Village of Cooperstown is located at the lake's southern end. Glimmerglass State Park is located on the lake's northeastern shore, and includes Hyde Hall, a large mansion constructed in 1817, that overlooks the lake. The Glimmerglass Opera, opened in June 1987, is located on the western shore.

Between 10,000 and 12,000 years ago, glaciers of the Wisconsin glaciation filled the valley. Otsego Lake was formed when an ice tongue from a glacier carved out the Susquehanna River Valley. As the glaciers melted slowly, they filled in the valley they carved out. The lake takes its name from the Iroquois Indians, who inhabited the area around the lake in and before the 17th century. The name Otsego is from a Mohawk or Oneida word meaning "place of the rock", referring to the large boulder near the lake's outlet, today known as Council Rock. (wikipedia)

• • •

My apologies for what will have to be a fairly short* and somewhat tentative write-up today. I went to see Richard Thompson (again) last night, in Homer, NY (about 70 miles west of OTSEGO Lake on State Route 80) and I didn't get home til late, and by "late" I mean 11pm, and yes, you are right to heckle me for calling 11pm "late," but when that means you won't actually get to *sleep* til midnight and the alarm goes off at 4:15am, trust me, it's late. So I'm sitting here on precisely that much sleep, and just doing everything ... methodically. The cats were like "come ON!" but I was like "look I'm not descending these stairs until you are well and truly clear of my feet, so ... go play or something ... oh, you're just going to mill around my feet even more? ... you know if I die on these stairs, you won't get fed, you know that, right?" Etc. I approached the puzzle with the same amount of caution, just one letter at a time, no racing, not even opinion-having, just ... getting it done. I said this was going to be short and I've already got a full-paragraph preamble going. Sorry about that. The point is that I have no confident feelings about this puzzle. I was able to grasp the theme and finish with no errors, and these were my only goals. But let's see if I can't say something about the whole endeavor. Well, the theme does what it says it does. My only issue (not even sure it rises to the status of "issue") is that SEVEN-TEN doesn't feel properly "split" ... which is a weird thing to say, I know, since technically it's precisely split, with the SEVEN (pin) over here [points here] and the TEN (pin) over there [points there], just like in the bowling scenario for which it's named, but since the split doesn't "split" any words in two, it feels like an outlier compared to the other themers. Now that I think about it, I don't think I have an "issue" after all. That themer is executed differently, yes, but necessarily so, I think. You could only split one of those words and then you'd be leaving just the one word unsplit. I think that themer gets the good old "Bowling Exemption" (a thing I just made up). The difference between six hours sleep and four hours sleep is Remarkable...

The fill felt a little rough to me, but again, I don't trust myself today, so I'm not going to stand on any of the following assertions too strongly. There seemed a lot of short fill, which can kind of gunk up a grid (with stuff like ASTO and AAH and SAO and ONO GDP YAS etc.), and some of the longer fill seemed wasted, but which I mean not as flashy or original or nice as I usually like the long non-thematic stuff to be. IONIA is a very crosswordesey entry, so IONIAN SEA just seems like crosswordese wearing platform shoes. Not better, just ... taller. Not a fan of OPERANDI on its own. A Latin phrase ... part? Pass. MODUS OPERANDI would rule, but OPERANDI on its own just seems sad. I kept waiting for the longer answers to surprise and amuse me, but my favorite answer ended up being just six letters long (KILL IT!). There was just something a little ... anemic about the grid, on the whole. Other observations: a weird lot of plurals, not all of which are great as plurals. This is possibly an observation I could only make at super-slow speed, but UNRESTS got my attention (not a word you usually see in the plural) and then PUMAS and YENS and EDIFICES and AHAS came at me real fast, with AHAS again giving me that feeling of "in the plural, really?" I think I'm just mildly mad at UNRESTS and AHAS, and that's making me *notice* other plurals I wouldn't otherwise pay attention to. I also noticed a lot (Lot) of geography, which is fine, but man it seems very ... niche? LOMA LINDA?! (62A: San Bernardino suburb whose name means "beautiful hill")!? LO(ma)L(inda). I didn't even know San Bernardino *had* "suburbs" and I lived pretty close to there for four years of my life. The name LOMA LINDA is very familiar to me, but couldn't have placed it on a California map if you'd paid me. And OTSEGO! I mean, few answers are as "right up my alley, almost literally" as that one, but still, seems slightly Yikes for non-NYers (and maybe even for some NYCers who never get out of the city). Like IONIAN SEA (more geography), these place names seem like they are here for their vowel-heaviness and not for any intrinsic interest. And yet I can't say they bother me. Seeing "Susquehanna River" in the clue for OTSEGO felt like the puzzle giving me a friendly wink—the Susquehanna runs right through town. I'm less than a mile from said river as I type this. Were you winking at me, Parker Higgins!? Well, whether you were or not, I appreciate that clue, thanks.

Sticking points? CANARD definitely slowed me down (11D: Unfounded rumor). Not a vocab word I was capable of retrieving easily this morning. The RAYS clue is good (18D: Sunshine, so to speak), but again, my brain just couldn't process it quickly / easily / at all, and so that made the CANARD section a tiny bit harder. I had SEED before SUET (61A: Makeup of many birdfeed cakes). I've heard of KEA and LOA but (unless it's a campground) not KOA, so that was interesting (2D: Hawaiian wood used to build the earliest surfboards). I think that's all the things I am able to say at this juncture in the journey of this morning. My best to you and yours and particularly your pets if you have them. If you do have them, please ask them who is a good boy / girl and when they don't answer just smush them and tell them that I say "YOU ARE!" They'll understand. See you tomorrow.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld 

*this turned out to be a lie, I know

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Good or bad vacuum review / THU 6-16-22 / Eventgoers / One performing a palm print analysis / Trochee's counterpart / Facts First sloganeer / Setting for memorable cable car scene in Moonraker / Leads as a D&D campaign / Biblical patriarch with two-syllable name / That's a goldang lie! / Tree in the etymology of gin

Constructor: Parker Higgins and Ross Trudeau

Relative difficulty: Well, I thought it was Easy, but early social media response indicates otherwise, so who knows?

THEME: "That TTTTTTT Show" (i.e. "That 7 T's Show" i.e. "That '70s Show") — OK, that's not the theme, but that is an example of how this theme works: what *sounds* like an enumeration of letters (four N's, eight O's, two T's, ten D's, respectively) is represented in the grid by that Actual Number Of Letters. So:

Theme answers:

• NNNNIC SCIENTIST = "forensic scientist" (NNNNIC => "four N's" + -IC => "forensic")
• TOMOOOOOOOO = "tomatoes" (TOMOOOOOOOO =>  TOM + "eight O's" => "tomatoes")
• CUTIE PATT = "cutie patooties" (PATT => PA- + "two Ts" => "patooties")
• ADDDDDDDDDD = "attendees" (ADDDDDDDDDD => A- + "10 D's" => "attendees")

Word of the Day: "Moonraker" (54A: Setting for the memorable cable car scene in "Moonraker" => RIO) —

Moonraker is a 1979 spy-fi film, the eleventh in the James Bond series produced by Eon Productions, and the fourth to star Roger Moore as the fictional MI6 agent James Bond. The third and final film in the series to be directed by Lewis Gilbert, it co-stars Lois Chiles, Michael Lonsdale, Corinne Cléry, and Richard Kiel. Bond investigates the theft of a Space Shuttle, leading him to Hugo Drax, the owner of the Shuttle's manufacturing firm. Along with space scientist Dr. Holly Goodhead, Bond follows the trail from California to Venice, Rio de Janeiro, the Amazon rainforest, and finally into outer space to prevent a plot to wipe out the world population and to recreate humanity with a master race. (wikipedia)

• • •

Well I'm awake in the middle of the night because of the worst thunderstorm I've ever been in in my life. It's still happening, though the rain and lightning have abated a bit. At its worst, the sky was constant flashing, like God 's streetlights were flickering, and the lightning + thunder were pure assault. I'm awake. Wife's awake. Cats are ... god knows ... all over the house, looking at me like "Why?" So I thought I better sit down and solve the puzzle and post the blog quickly, before the power goes out. While these are perhaps not ideal conditions under which to solve a puzzle, this puzzle was So Good that conditions ceased to matter. In fact, maybe they helped. Maybe the puzzle felt even More delightful than it was because it took my mind off the menacing cacophony. Kind of impressive that the puzzle was able to do that, but the wackiness involved here is such loopy, gonzo, avant-garde, NTH-degree wackiness that I could not resist. I could only succumb to the vibe. I mean, I thought "wow, it takes a ton of courage to just go with eight damn O's in a row" ... and *then* I met the 10 T's. LOL. What a ride. And the grid shape made this solving experience extra-special. The whole thing felt alien, in the best possible way. The mirror symmetry, the stacked Acrosses up top, and especially the column of three 9s at the center bottom, all gave this a look and feel that took it way, way out of the ordinary. And yet not so far that it was undoable. It was, in fact, extremely doable, though I can see (online, already) that people are not grasping the theme concept as easily as I did, and are getting, let's say, frustrated. I completely sympathize with this feeling. And I'm very sorry you didn't grasp the concept in a more timely fashion, because it made the whole solving experience a joy.

I was on this puzzle's side from 1-Across (1A: Good or bad vacuum review? = "SUCKS!"). Yeah, I know it's kind of childish, but so am I, so there. Those four N's in the first themer came together very quickly, and the only way I could make sense of them was, it turns out, the right way. Just say the number of letters out loud! Only ... at that point, I thought it was more an equation-type dealie, where I was supposed to say 4N, i.e. "foreign." So I was trying to make the "palm print analysis" performer into some kind of "foreign" person ... I had to build the rest of that answer from back to front, and then look at it again. "What's a "foreign I.C. SCIENTIST!?" And then I saw it. Boom. Truly one of the most satisfying Aha moments of the year. What I really loved was that the next themer didn't just throw me more N's!  I wasn't paying close attention to how the theme clues were marked (with quotation marks, so you know that in order to be correct, the answer must be *spoken*). So I went into the "tomato" answer trying to make it work normally. And since I had CAN instead of MAO (45A: Repeated Warhol subject), I had trouble seeing the "O"-string clearly at first. But then the "O"s kept piling up and I thought "ah, it's tomato something!" But no, once you put in 8 O's, you're out of room. It's just "tomatoes." I can't believe someone turned "tomatoes" and "attendees" into fascinating theme answers. Highly unlikely scenario. And the two T's! So wee! So cute! You got these ostentatious letter strings on the side of the grid, and then tucked down there at the bottom, just two little T's ... inside an answer that is *about* cuteness. Ha ha, there is no part of this ridiculous theme that doesn't work. 

I had little bits of trouble here and there, but nothing out of the ordinary for a Thursday. LOL'd at the "goldang" in 9D: "That's a goldang lie!" ("AIN'T SO"). Is that how HICKS talk? (HICKS felt a little icky, in that it's got an elitist / derogatory tone to it, but that was the only part of the puzzle where my joy wobbled a little ... I guess I didn't mind "HICKS" so much because it's the name of one of my favorite TV shows ... oh wait, that's "HACKS" ... nevermind). Anyway, that "goldang" answer held me up for several goldang seconds because I couldn't figure out what kind of goldang HICKSpeak they were going for. Then I put Samantha Bee on TNT (sorry, Sam) (12D: "Full Frontal With Samantha Bee" airer) ... then I couldn't make any sense out of 8D: Something that's asked (PRICE). After the top was sorted, though, the puzzle was very much a fast ride to the finish. I somehow remembered that RAJ was a character on that show I never could stand (39D: "The Big Bang Theory" role). I never saw "Moonraker," which feels like a betrayal of my gender/age cohort, but it wasn't hard to work out RIO. 

I love that the puzzle went to D&D instead of social media for DMS (49A: Leads, as a D&D campaign). The "DM" stands for "Dungeon Master," and to DM is to play that role in the game. Retro! (although people still play D&D ... it's just that in my mind, anyone playing it is automatically transported back in time to the early '80s ... a wormhole opens up the second you start playing ... it's weird). I balked a tiny bit at BUDDY MOVIES, since "BUDDY COMEDY" feels like the more correct phrase, esp. for this clue, but sure, BUDDY MOVIES, that sounds fine (26D: "Booksmart" and "Dumb and Dumber," e.g.). Certainly not "off" enough to ruin my enjoyment of this puzzle. Wow, look at that! Done with the write-up at 5am! What a ride. And the thunderstorm has (mostly) passed. And the birds are singing their "WTF!?!"s. Cool. Good day.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld 

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