Something a Brazilian is unlikely to wax / SUN 10-22-23 / Pairing for an entrecôte or filet mignon, perhaps / Basis for a fortuneteller's romantic prediction / Components of some kitschy clocks / Bowlful with Thai basil and bean sprouts / Clichéd name for a lab assistant

Constructor: Robert Ryan

Relative difficulty: Easy

THEME: "You're Onto Something" — -URE is added on to ... something—namely, familiar phrases, thereby creating wacky phrases, which are clued wackily (i.e. "?"-style):

Theme answers:

• DOESN'T GIVE A FIGURE (23A: Acts coy in salary negotiations?)
• WASHINGTON POSTURE (36A: Public stance on a member of Congress?)
• PASTURE CARING (49A: Shepherd's job, essentially?)
• ALLURE TOO WELL (63A: Turn more heads than intended?)
• NO MEAN FEATURE (74A: Newspaper write-up that's light on criticism?)
• ADVENTURE CALENDAR (92A: Bungee jumping on Tuesday, skydiving on Wednesday, etc.?)
• ENDURE ON A HIGH NOTE (107A: Show off one's vocal range and stamina?)

Word of the Day: LOVELINE (81D: Basis for a fortuneteller's romantic prediction) —

a crease on the palm; palmists say it indicates your emotional nature (vocabulary.com)

• • •

This is the kind of thing that would've passed muster 30 years ago, but doesn't feel really up to snuff today. I can only imagine that the title (?) was the hook for this one—it does literally describe what's going on in the theme. But the title ... no one solves the title. It's just there. The answers, those are the things that matter, and these answers ... the gimmick is straightforward, obvious, even, and the wackiness never gets above lower-case "w." None of the wordplay feels particularly clever or inventive, let alone funny. Turns out you can add -URE to a lot of words to make different words. There are plenty that aren't even being used here (press / pressure, dent / denture, etc.). But changing one word to another word by adding letters to the end is not inherently funny. And slamming the same letters onto word after word after word means that the answers really really need to be funny for the entire enterprise to avoid becoming monotonous. The meaning change brought about by the spelling change has to be jarring, radical, genuinely surprising. NO MEAN FEATURE ... isn't any of those things. No one even says "doesn't give a fig," so the whole theme feels disappointing and dated, right from the beginning. WASHINGTON POSTURE changes the vowel sound of the original word (POST) in a weird, anomalous way, and when you're noticing these kinds of small details, you know the theme is not doing its job, wackiness-wise. Ideally, I would shrug off such inconsistencies because the puns are so good. But no such luck today. Seems slightly surprising that this puzzle made the cut, given how many submissions the folks at the NYTXW claim to get. The Sunday stack must really be hurting. 

The fill on this one did nothing to improve the overall quality of the grid. Lots of gunky little conglomerations of short fill, from ECRU ERAT in the west, to WIIU ADDR in the NW, to the fraternal twins AER RAE in the center, to OF AN ERA—a sad stand-alone prepositional phrase if ever there was one. ORA INRE! TEL ABET! It's hard to find the fun today. I love Ronnie SPECTOR, so seeing her next to GROUCHO and (aptly) MADCAPS was kinda fun. The NE was maybe my favorite section. I don't know how much currency VIN ROUGE has, but I enjoyed the fact that my HS/college French came in handy (VIN ROUGE = "red wine") (16D: Pairing for an entrecôte or filet mignon, perhaps). I also love EPHEMERA (as a word, as a physical phenomenon), and have exclaimed some variation on "I'M A MORON!" too many times to count, frequently while solving ("DEAR ME!" less often). So that corner had a nice energy. But there was not nearly enough of that. Too much ELSA AGER and TEENIE NITERS, not enough CODE BLUE LOVELINE. Speaking of CODE BLUE LOVELINE, that corner had the one square in the puzzle that made me wince and cock my head to the side a little. I don't really keep up on all the [letter]-CLASSes of Mercedes, so I was very (Very lucky) that I knew what SBA LOANS were—specifically, what SBA stood for (Small Business Administration) (79D: Govt. funds for mom-and-pop shops). I'd written E-CLASS for the Mercedes clue at first and was trying to talk myself into EBA LOANS when I decided to pull the "E" and then remembered the "S"-CLASS (79A: Top-of-the-line Mercedes). Not a great cross. Not a KATNAK- (Th) or IDODENEO-level (Sat) bad cross, but not great either.

Other things: a list:

• 10D: Porpoise, in old usage (SEA HOG) — like, how old? Seems like maybe pretty old, and possibly mythological. I thought SEA COW, remembered that was an *actual* alternate name for a manatee, and so pivoted to ... SEA HAG. I still want it to be SEA HAG.
• 20A: Greyhound's competition (DOG RACE) — sooo much trouble parsing this one, mainly because I thought the clue was asking for a bus line.
• 86A: It can be a strain on the pupils (COURSE LOAD) — one of the puzzle's tougher moments. Also, one of the highlights. Hard to see this clue as anything but ocular, given that there's no "?" on it, and that if you were actually referring to students, you'd say "It can be a strain on pupils," not "the pupils." I had -OURSEL- and thought the answer was something about YOURSELF (??). That first letter was eluding me because I forgot about Amal CLOONEY, as I am wont to do from time to time (especially between crosswords, which is the only place I ever hear about her) (I mean she's clearly legitimately famous, I just ... don't follow legal stuff / celebrity stuff closely, I guess) (86D: ___ Foundation for Justice (international human rights group)).
• 24D: Something a Brazilian is unlikely to wax (SKI) —Hey-o! Not where I thought this clue was going. I guess they don't really ski in Brazil ... 'cause it's warm? No reason a Brazilian couldn't hop over to Chile—lots of great skiing there. But plausibility isn't really the point of this clue, is it? If you're unfamiliar with the concept of the "Brazilian wax" (the basis for the misdirection / wordplay in this clue) here's everything you might want to know, possibly more.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld  

P.S. Thanks so much to the readers who've recently sent me postcards for my Reader Postcard Collection. Got a promo postcard for a reader's book, a postcard from a gallery exhibition about baseball caps (!), and a couple of nautical postcards (wildly different in tone and style). 

I like to think this one is a visual representation of the blog—Am I the spearer? The shark? The struggling naked person? Tag yourself!

[Watson and the Shark (1778), John Singleton Copley]

I get lots of feedback on the blog, but postcard feedback is maybe my favorite kind. So slow! So inefficient! It's how a proper Victorian would comment on blog posts. When it comes to postcards, if you've got anything even vaguely cinema-related, that's my real postcard passion, but any card is a treat. Hell, non-junk mail of any kind is a treat. If you do send a postcard and would like a (random!) postcard in return, be sure to include your address (mine is in the blog sidebar, as always). Anyway, Lee, Will, Judy & Barry, Lynn, I'm grateful for these, thanks.

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Joel's smuggling partner in HBO's The Last of Us / SUN 5-21-23 / Pirate fodder once / Equipment used to make pizza slices and french fries / Auto racing champion Sébastien / Animal that resembles a raccoon more than a bear despite its name / Classic Hasbro toy that debuted in 1964 / Japanese fried pork cutlet / Brussels administrative official, informally

Constructor: Robert Ryan

Relative difficulty: Medium (Easy theme, some challenging fill)

THEME: "Stitchin' Time" — familiar phrases that follow a "___ IN ___" pattern are imagined as if the "IN" were fused to the first word in the phrase, as a slangy, g-droppin' "-ing":

Theme answers:

• PARTNERIN' CRIME (23A: Bigamy, legally speakin'?)
• CHECKIN' DESK (36A: Where copy editors are workin'?)
• WAITIN' LINE (56A: "Enjoyin' your meal?" or "I'll be servin' you today"?)
• ENDIN' TEARS (83A: Reaction to the climax of a heartbreakin' movie?)
• MOTHERIN' LAW (102A: Statute regulatin' surrogacy?)
• BACKIN' BUSINESS (117A: Financin' Broadway shows?)
• TALKIN' CIRCLES (16D: Bubbles featurin' comic book dialogue?)
• RESPONDIN' KIND (55D: One tendin' to reply quickly?)

Word of the Day: TONKATSU (109A: Japanese fried pork cutlet) —

Tonkatsu (豚カツ, とんかつ or トンカツ, pronounced [toŋkatsɯ]; "pork cutlet") is a Japanese dish that consists of a breaded, deep-fried pork cutlet. It involves coating slices of pork with panko (bread crumbs), and then frying them in oil. The two main types are fillet and loin. Tonkatsu is also the basis of other dishes such as katsukarē and katsudon. // The word tonkatsu is a combination of the Sino-Japanese word ton (豚) meaning "pig", and katsu (カツ), which is a shortened form of katsuretsu (カツレツ), an old transliteration of the English word cutlet. (wikipedia)

• • •

This was grim. Here is the exact point where I let out a literal "oh ... no":

As you can see: pretty early. I grasped the gimmick and suddenly realized that I would have to endure a Sunday-sized expanse of this corny wordplay. This *exact* kind of corny wordplay, this one "joke," over and over and over. It feels very much a like a theme that might've played 25 years ago, that I might've actually seen 25 years ago. It's very tired, dad-joke-level wordplay, and I realized, as I filled that first themer in, that nothing awaited me in that vast, vast, yawningly empty grid but more of the same. It was a bad feeling. And, not that it matters, but the title absolutely gives the whole game away, before you've ever even started. Not that the theme would've been hard to unravel—it's not exactly complicated. But still, that title makes the whole endeavor feel even more remedial and phoned-in. Also, the nature of the theme made the theme answers all very, very easy to get. The puzzle tried to compensate for this easiness by making the clues on the non-theme fill harder, and I wish I could say this was pleasing, it mostly wasn't. Just added a feeling of slogginess to an already inherently unhappy experience. I think I was most impressed by the clue on BLANK CDS (28A: Pirate fodder, once). That was brutal in a way that I could ultimately appreciate. I could not appreciate most of the rest of this. Really hard to appreciate something like EUROCRAT, yuck (64A: Brussels administrative official, informally). ONE-TOED *and* STRIKE ONE. YES AND NO *and* NO HIT (practically on top of each other). This one didn't feel like it was trying hard enough. Sunday being Sunday, i.e. regrettable, once again. 

I struggled most in the BLANK CDS area, unsure of the "B" in LOEB (who?) (13D: Auto racing champion Sébastien) and needing every other cross to be able to see BLANK CDS. Real trouble with the -CRAT part of EUROCRAT because wow what a stupid word. I own Vans but struggled with SKOOL for sure (79D: Vans Old ___ (classic sneaker)), as well as with that clue for SKIS, wtf (87A: Equipment used to make "pizza slices" or "French fries"). Skiing lingo, eh? I used to ski when I was a kid. I missed those terms. Or they just weren't using them yet (see below). Had ATILT before ASKEW, so that whole little SKOOL section was a mess. Also, that OPCITS section—OPCITS? (103D: Some cross-references in a research paper, informally). "Informally"? No one has ever, ever, ever used "op cit" "informally." The idea that awkwardly pluralizing your Latin bibliog. terms is "informal" is Hi-Larious. That really mucked up that lower section for me. And yet none of this was very hard. It was more of a hassle, largely joyless, something you had to do to get from beginning to end. BLANK CDS and TONKATSU—symmetrical exceptions to the otherwise bleak quality of most of the rest of the grid. I'd rather not spend any more time dwelling on this one, so I won't. 

Well, maybe I'll explain a few things, in case that might be useful to someone:

• Looks like "pizza slices" and "french fries" are just what I knew as "snowplow" and "parallel skiing"—has to do with the shape your skis make as you turn / descend:

• Wednesday is named for the god ODIN (also Woden) (8D: Wednesday eponym)
• IMACS rhymes with IMAX (17D: Products with screens ... or a homophone of a type of big screen)
• "Of the cloth" is a religious term meaning "ordained"; LAY refers to the unordained (we often use LAY metaphorically, e.g. "to put something in layman's terms") (29D: Not of the cloth)
• At the end of the actual title "Citizen Kane" is a SILENT "E" (that "e" in "Kane") (51D: What's found at the end of "Citizen Kane"?)
• The PEA causes insomnia in the fairy tale "The Princess and the Pea" (70D: Cause of insomnia in a fairy tale)

You probably didn't need all that, but there it is. Good day.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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Wisconsin politico Tony / SUN 3-19-23 / Adventure-seeking travelers, in old usage / Tone deafness medically / Third-largest city of Turkey / Fool from the Yiddish / Texas terminus of I-35 / Predecessor of USB drive / Clay figures in Jewish lore

Constructor: Robert Ryan

Relative difficulty: Challenging

THEME: "Give Me a Break" — Words clued as if they were two words ... I think that's it.

Theme answers:

• DEPART/MENTALLY (23A: Zone out?) (DEPART is now a verb)
• INTRO/VERSION (34A: Beginner's edition?) (INTRO means "introductory")
• SUP/POSITION (47A: Seat at the dining table?) (the position in which you SUP)
• KIN/ESTHETIC (63A: Beauty that runs in the family?) (KIN = "family")
• MALE/FACTION (84A: Boys' club?) (a faction of men)
• CON/TEXTUALLY (98A: Swindle by instant messaging?) (CON = "swindle")
• INTER/RELATIONS (109A: Use a family crypt?) (INTER = "bury")

Word of the Day: TAB (30A: Aid for a novice guitarist) —

Tablature (or tabulature, or tab for short) is a form of musical notation indicating instrument fingering rather than musical pitches.

Tablature is common for fretted stringed instruments such as the guitar, lute or vihuela, as well as many free reed aerophones such as the harmonica. Tablature was common during the Renaissance and Baroque eras, and is commonly used today in notating many forms of music.

Three types of organ tablature were used in Europe: German, Spanish and Italian.

To distinguish standard musical notation from tablature, the former is usually called "staff notation" or just "notation". (wikipedia)

• • •

I got Naticked. [UPDATE: in the unforgiving light of the late-winter morning, I realize that this was not, in fact, a Natick—classically, a Natick involves proper nouns of some obscurity and the "bad square" (where they cross) is usually an uninferrable vowel; none of these conditions precisely apply in my case, and I *should* have been able to infer my way out of trouble—and I did infer, I just inferred ... wrong. Anyway, I'm keeping my initial hyper-indignant response up for the historical record; I remain indignant, but much less so. OK, back to the write-up.] Been a while since I've been Naticked, but at the very last square I came to ... nothing. Ran the alphabet ... nothing. No clue. Total guess. I absolutely cannot get over cluing TAB that way (completely incomprehensible to me) when that word is also crossing the ???? piece of jewelry called a BARPIN. I mean ... TA-/-ARPIN = no hope in hell. I can see—now—that the clue on BARPIN was supposed to be helping me by telling me that that it's "long" and "narrow" but that just did not scream "bar" to me at all. I didn't even know that BAR and PIN were separate words. I was looking at -ARPIN like "TARPIN? MARPIN? HTFSIK?" And TAB ... I mean, it wouldn't have helped me, but how in the hell can you clue TAB that way and not indicate in the clue that It's An Abbreviation!?!? (of "tablature"). It's the TAB clue that is absolutely baffling to me. You have to know that BARPIN is not a common thing. Not a brooch or an earring or a necklace or a bangle or a bracelet or a tiara or etc etc. Apparently I have seen BARPIN in crosswords twice before—I looked, and both those times, the crosses were all undeniable. Old Will Shortz seemed to know that BARPIN was gonna be a weird one for people, and so the crosses were all sensible and fair. But TAB, woof. Yikes. I mean, I was sure the [Aid for a novice guitarist] was a thing, like a capo or a strap or a ... I dunno, something that involved the actual playing of the instrument. That is the obscurest clue on TAB I have ever seen, and you decided to use it when TAB was crossing BARPIN!?!? The funniest thing about this cross was my guess, which will tell you a lot about how I make inferences. Now the clue for BARPIN wanted me to look at "long" and "narrow" and think BAR, but me, I've done roughly a million crosswords over more than three decades, so when I see -AR and my only clues are "long" and "narrow," well ... 

That's right, I used your little hinty clue words there ("long," "narrow") and look where it got me: GARPIN, i.e. nowhere. TAG seemed like as good of a guess for the novice guitar thingie as any. Still seems like a better guess than TAB, even now. I'm absolutely fine being the only person who crashed and burned here, if that's how it turns out, but will die on the hill of "That TAB Clue Is Terrible Editing." 

The puzzle was kind of a nothing at the thematic level (toughish, but basic, and not particularly entertaining—hard to get excited by terms like INTERRELATIONS and SUPPOSITION etc.). Side note: MALE FACTION really doesn't work, or it's an outlier anyway, as it's the only one that involves significant pronunciation change. The puzzle overall played very hard for me, from start to finish. Just "no idea" "shrug" "nope" over and over. I mean, I made steady progress, never got truly stuck, but ugh, it was a slog. AGLARE and not AGLEAM? (22A: Shining intensely). Truly a no-win kealoa*, that one.. No idea who this Wisconsin EVERS person is (28D: Wisconsin politico Tony) (LOL, looks like he's governor, my bad). Barely heard of IZMIR (48D: Third-largest city of Turkey). Could not care less about Pink Floyd and had to endure not one but two clues about them, like it's some kind of theme? ERRANTS!? (119A: Adventure-seeking travelers, in old usage). I'm really supposed to accept that as a word? Even after you've already got ERRS in the grid!?!! (64D: Goofs up) (both words are using "err" in the sense of "to wander," don't let them fool you into thinking otherwise). Look, there are parts that are OK (HOT SAKE, IN OR OUT?, BROKEN NOSE alongside SEPIA TONES), and I thought the "breaks" in the themers were occasionally clever (DEPART MENTALLY and CON TEXTUALLY are my favorites, and had me wondering whether a whole themer set couldn't have been made out of adverbs), but there were just a lot of proper nouns I didn't know or care about and a lot of Trying Too Hard clues making everything slightly unpleasant. Also, RESEEN? PCCARD?! Is that like a sim card? The clue on NEON (35D: He can be found above it) gives us an abbr. (He) but the answer is a whole-ass spelled-out word (NEON). That's a foul and a violation. "He" corresponds with "Ne," not NEON. The editing is so slipshod today, it's stunning. The clue on ELIAS, I liked (54A: Real name that becomes a fake one by changing its first letter) (to "ALIAS," that is). Much of the rest of the cluing left me cold and/or befuddled.

EL PASO before LAREDO (1A: Texas terminus of I-35). HI-RES before HI-DEF (that one hurt) (62D: Extra-crisp, informally). What needs explaining? [Character at the center of "Dunkirk"] is KAY because that is the character (i.e. letter) at the center of the word "Dunkirk." META is just New Facebook (24D: Fortune 500 company whose logo is a blue infinity symbol). The Phoenix Suns are an NBA team (113D: Suns setting, for short). I think that's it. I hope so. See you when I see you.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld 

*kealoa = a pair of words (normally short, common answers) that can be clued identically and that share at least one letter in common (in the same position). These are answers you can't just fill in quickly because two or more answers are viable, Even With One or More Letters In Place. From the classic [Mauna ___] KEA/LOA conundrum. See also, e.g. [Heaps] ATON/ALOT, ["Git!"] "SHOO"/"SCAT," etc.

P.S. The ultra-successful "These Puzzles Fund Abortion" fundraiser is back for another round with "These Puzzl3s Fund Abortion" (This Time, There's a "3" In The Title). As before, the idea is that you donate at least $15 to one (or more) of the five abortion funds they're supporting, and you get 16 puzzles from top-flight constructors like Ada Nicolle (who made yesterday's stellar puzzle) as well as Brooke Husic, Rafael Musa, Natan Last, Rebecca Goldstein, and many more. The whole thing is organized by my good friend, newly tenured professor of bioethics Rachel Fabi (congratulate her!). Here's her tweet about the puzzle pack:

✨✨These Puzzl3s Fund Abortion is now available for presale!!!!✨✨

To be in the first wave of solvers to see the hard work of our incredible slate of constructors, donate now through https://t.co/OPOdJABLjE

Preorder puzzles will be sent on March 28!#tpfa3 #fthon23

— Rachel Fabi, PhD (@faBioethics) March 14, 2023

Give now, get puzzles in a couple weeks, you'll be glad you did—both because abortion access is a crucial (and endangered) part of our healthcare system *and* because the puzzles are sure to be fantastic.

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