Neighbor of an Uzbek / TUE 8-20-24 / Curly-haired friend of Charlie Brown / Superscript by a brand name / Longtime Heat coach Spoelstra / Offices with partitioned workspaces, in slang

Constructor: Sam Buchbinder

Relative difficulty: Easy

THEME: THE SOUND OF MUSIC (59A: Best Picture winner of 1965 ... or a description of the ends of 17-, 30- and 45-Across?) — musical instrument homophones:

Theme answers:

• TRADEMARK SYMBOL (cymbal) (17A: Superscript by a brand name)
• AIR FORCE BASE (bass) (30A: Fighter jet's landing spot)
• GOLDMAN SACHS (sax) (45A: Investment banking giant)

Word of the Day: Tajikistan (34A: Neighbor of an Uzbek = TAJIK) —

Tajikistan, officially the Republic of Tajikistan, is a landlocked country in Central Asia. Dushanbe is the capital and most populous city. Tajikistan is bordered by Afghanistan to the south, Uzbekistan to the west, Kyrgyzstan to the north, and China to the east. It is separated from Pakistan by Afghanistan's Wakhan Corridor. It has a population of approximately ten million. [...] The country has been led by Emomali Rahmon since 1994, who heads an authoritarian regime and whose human rights record has been criticised. // Tajikistan is a presidential republic consisting of four provinces. Tajiks form the ethnic majority in the country, and their national language is Tajik, a variety of Persian. Russian is used as the official inter-ethnic language. While the state is constitutionally secular, Islam is nominally adhered to by 97.5% of the population. (wikipedia)

• • •

Short write-up today, as it's the first day of my Fall semester and ... let's just say I am completely unprepared have a few details left to iron out in my syllabuses (that's right, syllabuses, none of this fake-Latin plural baloney). The main thing I felt while solving this was "wow this is easy" and "this fill feels ... of YORE" (19D: Days long ago). There's nothing particularly awful about it, it just felt stale, like 2014-normal instead of 2024-normal. The feeling started off with CAB IT, which, surprisingly (I found out just now), has only been appearing in the puzzle since 2015 (!?). Feels like a mid-century expression. Maybe I'm thinking of LEG IT, which feels related (and has occasionally been clued as [Walked, slangily] since at least 2001). Weird for CAB IT to flourish only in the Age of Uber, but then maybe not weird, since, as we know, the NYTXW is typically belated in all things. After CAB IT there was a flood of short mediocrity: OCTET EST OXO AHEM EEK CCCP CRO and FRIEDA, just to stay in the top part of the grid. I like Peanuts ... no, who am I kidding, I love Peanuts, but every time I see FRIEDA I think "man, that is a minor character" and "oh this is one of those deals where the constructor probably thought that was how Frida Kahlo spelled her name, and then, when the grid was finished and the cluing began, realized ... nope. Gotta resort to the tertiary Peanuts character” (26D: Curly-haired friend of Charlie Brown). The bottom half of the grid is equally dull (APSES, HAHA, HEE), if maybe a little less so. There's some Scrabble-f***ing in the SW that gets you a "Z," but it's hard to believe it was worth it—why would you deliberately put TMZ in your grid if you didn't have to? Bizarre. Anyway, I had no idea what the theme was, the puzzle was easy, the fill was tired: this was 90% of my experience today.

The theme is cuteish. Pretty straightforward. Those last words are all words that "sound" like "music"al instruments. The theme answers themselves are kind of bland, but the theme is consistent, it works, there's a bit of an "aha" on the back end, no real complaints. Like the fill, it's pretty straightforward, but unlike the fill, we get some playfulness at least. The hardest part of the puzzle for me BY FAR (please clap for my callback to yesterday's puzzle) was TAJIK because LOL central Asian geography is among my top Jeopardy! / trivia / test-taking nightmares. I could easily be conned into believing in a fake -stan, and the fact that any of them are right next to China (which my brain has in a completely other part of the world) is disorienting. Today, I invented a -stan: TAZIKSTAN. My Uzbek neighbor was a TAZIK. This (obviously) is because of ... Khazakhstan? [Looks it up] Damn! So close. Almost spelled that right on the first try: it's actually Kazakhstan, which is (comparatively) enormous but someone doesn't even abut Tajikistan!? So I invented a neighbor for the Uzbek: the TAZIK. Good alien name, incorrect earthling name. Luckily there are no such things as ZELLYBEANS (are there?).

[this'll get you going in the morning!]

Lightning round:

• 43D: Iconic outfit for a noted chairman (MAO SUIT) — I had RED SUIT, confusing it (I assume) with Mao's Little Red Book. This is a pretty (bygone) communist puzzle. The MAO SUIT. The member of a former Soviet republic (TAJIK), the Letters on old Soviet rockets (CCCP). This may be part of what's making the puzzle feel a little bit "of YORE."
• 21A: Losing line in tic-tac-toe (OXO) — as I've said before, not a fan of the "tic-tac-toe" line of cluing when actual things (here, a kitchenware brand) are readily available. [Losing line in tic-tac-toe] is bottom of the barrel stuff. Why go there if you don't have to go there. Reserve it for XXO or OOX or whatever. Better, yet, never use losing tic-tac-toe lines in your grid. Ever. 
• 37A: Longtime Heat coach Spoelstra (ERIK) — just as the puzzle is heavy on the bygone Communism, it's also heavy on the basketball. ERIK Spoelstra here, and then the NBA (61D: Org. associated with the John Tesh instrumental "Roundball Rock"). and then the March Madness clue on UVA (63D: 2019 March Madness champs, for short). Not sure why you go to the basketball well that third time when you absolutely don't have to. I guess it makes UVA harder for a significant non-sports-loving subset of solvers. I think it's better to vary your frame of reference.
• 51D: "Wonderwall" group (OASIS) — anyway, here's "Wonderwall"

See you next time.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld 

P.S. OK so once again the promised "short write-up" did not exactly materialize. Someday.

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Coffeecake with cross-sectional swirls / MON 7-3-23 / Professionals who work with graphic designers / Video game franchise whose players gather natural resources

Constructor: Sam Buchbinder

Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium

THEME: "OFF TO A GOOD START" (38A: Having initial success ... as suggested by the beginnings of 17-, 24-, 47- and 60-Across) — first words (i.e. "starts") of the themers are all rough synonyms of "good":

Theme answers:

• KIND OF BLUE (17A: Miles Davis classic that's the all-time best-selling jazz album)
• "JUST YOU WAIT" (24A: "Oh, I'm not messing around!")
• UPRIGHT BASS (47A: Big member of the string section)
• NOBLE GASES (60A: Neon, argon and krypton)

Word of the Day: MINECRAFT (3D: Video game franchise whose players gather natural resources) —

Minecraft is a 2011 sandbox game developed by Mojang Studios. The game was created by Markus "Notch" Persson in the Java programming language. Following several early private testing versions, it was first made public in May 2009 before being fully released in November 2011, with Notch stepping down and Jens "Jeb" Bergensten taking over development. Minecraft is the best-selling video game in history, with over 238 million copies sold and nearly 140 million monthly active players as of 2021 and has been ported to several platforms.

In Minecraft, players explore a blocky, procedurally generated, three-dimensional world with virtually infinite terrain and may discover and extract raw materials, craft tools and items, and build structures, earthworks, and machines. Depending on their chosen game mode, players can fight hostile mobs, as well as cooperate with or compete against other players in the same world. Game modes include a survival mode (in which players must acquire resources to build in the world and maintain health) and a creative mode (in which players have unlimited resources and access to flight). The game's large community also offers a wide variety of user-generated content, such as modifications, servers, skins, texture packs, and custom maps, which add new game mechanics and possibilities. (wikipedia)

• • •

I posted a picture of KIND OF BLUE a few days back, alongside the definition of "modal jazz." Fun to see it pop up again here today. Makes a nice complement to UPRIGHT BASS. Paul Chambers plays UPRIGHT BASS on KIND OF BLUE, in case anyone asks you, which ... you never know. Those were my two favorite themers, for sure, and my favorite answers overall. The theme itself is a pretty standard "first words"-type puzzle, with a revealer that plays on words in a familiar phrase. A fine example of its kind. Importantly, the "good" words do not mean "good" in their respective phrases, so that only by reference to the revealer can you see the "good" meaning, and the pattern. I DUG this one a reasonable amount. I think I DUG the theme more than the fill. The longer Downs are reasonably strong—DUMB WAITER is the real winner there. The shorter fill gets a bit gunky in places (DAHS ULAN ERS EENSY OUIS ATEAM) and there are a bunch of repeaters (ALOHA HANOI etc.), but it's pretty solid and varied, especially for a reasonably theme-dense puzzle. From a Downs-only solving perspective, the real bear for me today was ART EDITORS, yeeeesh. Don't really know ... what those are, though I can guess. I mean, it's inferable. Just not a phrase I'm used to seeing, and the clue really didn't help much (27D: Professionals who work with graphic designers). I had the ART part but then a lot of blankness. The "I" and the "T" eventually went in because those Acrosses became undeniable, but still, I had to stare and squint a bit before my brain turned up EDITORS. ARGH!

Beyond that, just a couple Downs-only glitches. SUMO / JUDO is a kealoa* that I never considered. Is SUMO an Olympic sport? If not, why not? I would tune in for that. Anyway, I wrote in SUMO before JUDO (24D: Olympic sport from Japan). I hesitated at the ERS/ORS dilemma, for obvious reasons (36D: Locales staffed by M.D.s). Found LOUSY oddly difficult to come up with (8D: Pretty terrible), mostly because AR-O and LE-N could've been many things, and when I looked at OUI- I actually thought maybe I had something wrong. Then I figured the only thing that could go at the end of OUI- was an "S" and yup, correct. LOUSY became clear after that. The stickiest Downs-only moment, after ART EDITORS, was BABKA! Give me five letters, a "B" start, and a clue related to "coffeecake," and, well, to be blunt: BUNDT (51D: Coffeecake with cross-section swirls). 

Other things:

• 13D: Embarrassing sound to suddenly make while laughing (SNORT) — who's embarrassed? I know several snort-laughers and they don't seem embarrassed. *You* should be embarrassed. They're laughing at you, after all.
• 19A: The "M" of MSG (MONO-) — because MADISON wouldn't fit
• 32D: Shout that might give you goose bumps ("BOO!") — absolutely not. Goose bumps are a reaction to eeriness, not shock. If you startle me, I don't get goose bumps; I get angry. 
• 30D: Alien's ride, for short (UFO) — this clue is many layers of hilarious. Like, first, we're using slang ("ride") to talk about alien vehicles? Also, UFO? If you know that it's carrying aliens, then you have identified it. It's just an FO now.

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. 

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Heavy chorus instrument in Il Trovatore / TUE 5-31-22 / Group targeted for destruction in Independence Day / Classical queen who cursed a Trojan fleet / Request to someone dressing your submarine sandwich / Brand with flavor Cookie Cobblestone / Competition favoring flexible contestants / Powder-based beverage

Constructor: Sam Buchbinder and Brad Wilber

Relative difficulty: Medium (normal Tuesday)

THEME: LET'S PUT A PIN IN IT (38A: Suggestion to defer discussion ... and what might be said of 17-, 25-, 46- and 60-Across) — places where one might put a "pin" (of one kind or another):

Theme answers:

• VOODOO DOLL (17A: Figure in many hexes)
• CLOTH DIAPER (25A: Alternative to Huggies or Luvs)
• BOWLING LANE (46A: Place for splits and spares)
• ATM MACHINE (60A: $$$ dispenser)

Word of the Day: "I LOST It at the Movies" (7D: "___ It at the Movies" (collection of Pauline Kael reviews) —

I Lost It at the Movies is a 1965 book that serves as a compendium of movie reviews written by Pauline Kael, later a film critic from The New Yorker, from 1954 to 1965. The book was published prior to Kael's long stint at The New Yorker; as a result, the pieces in the book are culled from radio broadcasts that she did while she was at KPFA, as well as numerous periodicals, including Moviegoer, the Massachusetts Review, Sight and Sound, Film Culture, Film Quarterly and Partisan Review. It contains her negative review of the then widely acclaimed West Side Story, glowing reviews of other movies such as The Golden Coach and Seven Samurai, as well as longer polemical essays such as her largely negative critical responses to Siegfried Kracauer's Theory of Film and Andrew Sarris's Film Culture essay Notes on the Auteur Theory, 1962. The book was a bestseller upon its first release, and is now published by Marion Boyars Publishers.

Kael's first book is characterized by an approach where she would often quote contemporary critics such as Bosley Crowther and Dwight Macdonald as a springboard to debunk their assertions while advancing her own ideas. This approach was later abandoned in her subsequent reviews, but is notably referred to in Macdonald's book, Dwight Macdonald On Movies (1969).

When an interviewer asked her in later years as to what she had "lost", as indicated in the title, Kael averred: "There are so many kinds of innocence to be lost at the movies." It is the first in a series of titles of books that would have a deliberately erotic connotation, typifying the sensual relation Kael perceived herself as having with the movies, as opposed to the theoretical bent that some among her colleagues had. (wikipedia)

• • •

The fill in this one is pretty plain, so everything is really riding on that revealer, and thankfully it delivers. It's one of those idioms I've never used and am only aware of from representations of business or other types of meetings on television or in the movies. Maybe I've heard it a jillion times at meetings I've been in and, like most business-speak, I've tuned it out. Is putting a pin in "it" different from tabling "it"? Nope, "Table" means "postpone consideration of," so I guess someone somewhere just decided the idiom needed livening up. Anyway, it should be a familiar enough expression to most people, and the set of themers covers the "pin" bases very nicely, with VOODOO DOLL expressing the theme most literally or precisely, and the meaning of "pin" getting slightly, uh, bendier from there on: safety pin, bowling pin, PIN number, which is by far my favorite context for "pin" here, mostly because I envisioned the literalists going nuts over the phrase ATM MACHINE ("redundant!," they cried, "the 'M' already stands for 'machine'!"), without realizing that the brilliance of ATM MACHINE as a famously redundant expression here is that the PIN that is relevant here is involved in *yet another* famously redundant expression, namely PIN NUMBER ("redun-... [chokes, sputters] ... -dant! The 'N' .... the ... 'N'!"). So either you're double-mad or you see it as a kind of redundancy joke. I choose option B.

Lots of 3s 4s and 5s today so not much room to get any pizazz into the grid. POOL PARTY sounds fun right about now, but I'm gonna need more than just one ONION RING if we're gonna really get things hopping. I don't love I LOST as fill, but I love the clue. It's a genuinely famous collection of reviews, and I like the New York(er)-ness of the answer. There are good and bad ways for the NYTXW to be obsessed with its home city. This is a good way (Kael wrote for The New Yorker for decades, those decades being primarily the '70s and '80s). There were one too many crossreference clues in this puzzle for my taste, which is to say there were two. PIE / PAN I didn't mind, as those answers intersect, so I didn't have to go looking all over hell and gone to find the other part. The two parts of ICE / CUBE are also relatively close to each other, but having had one crossreference already by the time I got there, I was full. Could've been worse. Could've gone with ARM / REST for the crossreference trifecta. Speaking of ARM, feels like ART or ARC would be better there, which is to say I would never go with a SIM (narrow, old video game-related singular suitable only for xword emergencies, IMHO), when I could get an ordinary word like SIT or SIC in there and clue it All Kinds of Ways. Ordinary words with broad cluing potential > narrowly specific proper nouns if those narrowly specific proper nouns are, themselves, crosswordese of a sort. The reason I'm spending time on this largely unimportant corner is that the SIM clue had "Member of ... family" in it, and so having SI-, I wrote in SIS (and could just as easily have written in SIB). Not real thrilled about cluing ambiguity around an answer that should have, and could have easily, been a different answer. 

More things:

• 2D: $$$ (MOOLA) — wrote in MONEY. I like that "$$$" appears in this grid twice (see the ATM MACHINE clue). I feel like the puzzle is low-key winking at us a bunch, and today I somehow don't mind.
• 9D: Clumsy (MALADROIT) — pretty high-falutin' word for a Tuesday. Had the MAL- and still needed a bunch of crosses to remember that MALADROIT (a fine word, actually) existed. 
• 37D: Wreck room? (STY) — didn't really get this at all ("the pigs just live there ... it's not a 'wreck' to them!") until I realized that STY here is just a metaphor for a messy room, of course.
• 47D: Shade of some turning leaves (OCHER) — my least favorite fall color, first because it just sounds / looks bad ... like a disease that okra would have ... and second because I can never spell it confidently, probably because it can be spelled two ways: OCHRE / OCHER. The OCHRE spelling is preferred in Britain and other non-US places, but while the NYTXW indicates Britishness for many -RE-spelled words (LITRE, for instance), it never does so for OCHRE, so you just have to guess.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld 

P.S. important updates:

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Poor cell connection? / SAT 4-9-22 / Devices used to sterilize medical equipment / Garment of the Middle East / Chinese food also called nagaimo / R&B artist with the 3x platinum 1995 debut album Miss Thang / It turns red in Exodus

Constructor: Sam Buchbinder

Relative difficulty: Medium (proper Saturday)

THEME: none 

Word of the Day: AUTOCLAVES (29D: Devices used to sterilize medical equipment) —

An autoclave is a machine used to carry out industrial and scientific processes requiring elevated temperature and pressure in relation to ambient pressure and/or temperature. Autoclaves are used before surgical procedures to perform sterilization and in the chemical industry to cure coatings and vulcanize rubber and for hydrothermal synthesis. Industrial autoclaves are used in industrial applications, especially in the manufacturing of composites.

Many autoclaves are used to sterilize equipment and supplies by subjecting them to pressurized saturated steam at 121 °C (250 °F) for around 15–20 minutes depending on the size of the load and the contents. The autoclave was invented by Charles Chamberland in 1879, although a precursor known as the steam digester was created by Denis Papin in 1679. The name comes from Greek auto-, ultimately meaning self, and Latin clavis meaning key, thus a self-locking device. (wikipedia)

• • •

I thought this was a really solid Saturday puzzle, and I really enjoyed solving it ... which made the fact that I ended with an error that much more depressing. All the joy just leaked out of me as I (carefully, fruitlessly) double-checked the grid, hit "Reveal All," and then realized by stupid-but-understandable (by-me) error. The mistake is my fault, not the puzzle's, but it is a direct result of a "?" clue, so it feels ... mean and personal. Ah well. So, I had the bulk of the puzzle solved, everything from the NW to the SE, and I'd already thrown two Acrosses into the SW, so I left that area and went up to work on the much-more-difficult-to-get-into NE. After my failure to get *any* of those short Acrosses up top (except, tentatively, APBS), or any of the longer Downs, I went all the way to the dregs of that section, to the little answers at the bottom ... and promptly put in wrong answers For Both. Wanted LGS for GES and then BRIE for PATÉ. But because I wasn't sure of my first instincts, I let my mind wander to second instincts, and then I could see: PATÉ over GES just fit. I didn't *know* it was right, but I knew. And then ACTED UP confirmed it (11D: Caused a ruckus), and I sighed in relief; not a huge fan of these cut-off corners where you can feel so desperately trapped, so getting ACTED UP made me feel like yes, I've got this. Then I looked at the -AG at the end of 12D: Poor cell connection? Now it's very very important that I looked *here* first and not at 30A: People of Burundi first ... but since at that point I didn't have the initial "T" maybe looking there wouldn't have helped. Anyway, I know very well that TUTSI are a people, and I believe that if I had had the "TU-" in place and looked there first, I would've written in TUTSI. But I looked at 12D: Poor cell connection? first, and with the "P" beginning and the "AG" ending, I thought about connectivity problems and wrote in the one word I most strongly associate with said problems: LAG. Completely convinced myself that PHONE LAG was a thing. And then when the People of Burundi ended up being TULSI, I just thought, "huh, that must be the people they named her after, I did not know that." That is, if TULSI hadn't been an actual famous human being's name, no way I'm going with TULSI. But it is, and I did, the end. Just a perfect storm of misunderstanding and bad luck. I actually thought my wrong letter was the LAT / TULSI crossing! LAT felt very, very ... well, it felt right (short for "latitude") but as a little abbr., it also felt like maybe I was missing a different possibility. Awful all around. All because of a "?" clue.

Before all this disaster, though, I remember really liking the puzzle, especially the opening. I mean...

Always an amazing feeling to open like this—fantastic answer in the first position, no help needed from crosses. And then to follow that up with my wife's home country, the best place on earth, NEW ZEALAND ... I was so happy then (he said, wistfully remembering the time before PHONE LAG). 

Much easier to move through the NW, center, and SE because they aren't locked off from the rest of the puzzle the way the NE and SW corners are. So as I said, I chewed a path diagonally right through the grid down to the SE section. I made a little error here, trying to get into the SW section:

But BERRA (44A: Who famously said "I really didn't say everything I said") quickly made it clear: not an ANT fair or ANT film, but an ART fair/film. That corner was done inside a minute. And then came the NE, which we've already been over at gruesome length. 

ANT film

Didn't know AUTOCLAVES, but everything else in the puzzle is at least reasonably familiar. Nice for a puzzle to get its difficulty from cluing and not from obscurities. Like the clue on BAD TASTE—very tough, very Saturday, very good (13D: What you find kitsch in). And you get a little "aha ... clever" moment to boot. The best clues are the ones that trick you and make you like it. The SILENT O clue was also a bit like this (21A: Amoeba feature). I had a little trouble in the middle of the grid when, despite having several letters, I couldn't get 37A: Bishop's group or 42A: It might be captured on a safari. I also wrote in SSR before KGB, which made matters worse (38D: Cold War inits.). I ended up pulling out correct answers (CNN POLL! CENSUS DATA!!!) just so I could start the middle over with fresh eyes. Then I put those answers back in, took out SSR, pondered on the various meanings of Bishop, though "is there a person named Bishop?" and *finally* got RAT PACK (it's Joey Bishop, kids—before even *my* time, and down the RAT PACK hierarchy, for sure, but ... yep, it's Joey). Struggled a bit with KAFTAN but only because I thought the [Approving inits.] were ADA, not FDA. Floss, not pharmaceuticals. Anyway ... good times. Until they were bad times. See you tomorrow.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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Stay outdoors overnight with some of the comforts of home / TUE 7-20-21 / Bygone holder of Apple pics / Kind of headlight on older cars / Old-time comic Caesar / Actress Hedy of old Hollywood / Jerry's partner in cartoondom / Observation deck feature not for the squeamish

Constructor: Sam Buchbinder

Relative difficulty: Medium (with an oversized grid, 15x16)

THEME: WOMEN'S GYMNASTICS (6D: Olympic sport whose all-around competition is composed of the last parts of 19-, 26-, 44- and 52-Across) — last words of themers are all WOMEN'S GYMNASTICS events:

Theme answers:

• SEALED BEAM (19A: Kind of headlight on older cars)
• GLASS FLOOR (26A: Observation deck feature not for the squeamish)
• IN THE VAULT (44A: Stored deeply and securely)
• KIT KAT BARS (52A: Chocolaty treats that you might "break me off a piece of")

Word of the Day: NELLA Larsen, Harlem Renaissance novelist (4D) —

Nellallitea "Nella" Larsen (born Nellie Walker; April 13, 1891 – March 30, 1964) was an American novelist. Working as a nurse and a librarian, she published two novels, Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929), and a few short stories. Though her literary output was scant, she earned recognition by her contemporaries.

A revival of interest in her writing has occurred since the late 20th century, when issues of racial and sexual identity have been studied. Her works have been the subjects of numerous academic studies, and she is now widely lauded as "not only the premier novelist of the Harlem Renaissance, but also an important figure in American modernism." (wikipedia) 

Passing is a novel by American author Nella Larsen, first published in 1929. Set primarily in the Harlem neighborhood of New York City in the 1920s, the story centers on the reunion of two childhood friends—Clare Kendry and Irene Redfield—and their increasing fascination with each other's lives. The title refers to the practice of "racial passing", and is a key element of the novel; Clare Kendry's attempt to pass as white for her husband, John (Jack) Bellew, is its most significant depiction in the novel, and a catalyst for the tragic events.

Larsen's exploration of race was informed by her own mixed racial heritage and the increasingly common practice of racial passing in the 1920s. Praised upon publication, the novel has since been celebrated in modern scholarship for its complex depiction of race, gender and sexuality, and is the subject of considerable scholarly criticism. As one of only two novels that Larsen wrote, Passing has been significant in placing its author at the forefront of several literary canons. (wikipedia)

• • •

Well, the Olympics have started, so this is timely. Looks like WOMEN'S GYMNASTICS competition gets started in earnest next week. I like the idea of this theme. The really noteworthy aspect of the grid is architectural—namely, that the revealer drives right down through every single one of the themers. A very tricky thing to get all those crosses worked out while maintaining theme-answer symmetry. Maybe that's why some of the theme answers feel a little wobbly. SEALED BEAM, yeesh, no idea. I don't know how "old" these alleged "older cars" have to be to have these headlights, but I've never heard of them. Got SEALED B- and wrote in SEALED BULB. There are many other ___ BEAM phrases, but because this set of themers has to not only fit symmetrically in the grid, but also have the crossing letters for WOMEN'S GYMNASTICS in the right place, the constructor clearly had to get, let's say, inventive. "Inventive" is the charitable word for it. Again, BANK VAULT is definitely something. IN THE VAULT ... hrrrmm, yes, that is a prepositional phrase, but it's vague and not particularly vivid and you might say someone won the gold medal IN THE VAULT, and so it's not really far enough away from gymnastics to make a good themer phrase today (it's important that the themers do not evoke gymnastics in any way; see, for instance, especially, KIT KAT BARS). Again with FLOOR, we can imagine lots of floors, but the one we get is GLASS ... and GLASS FLOOR is indeed a feature of some observation decks (so I hear), but I know the phrase "glass-bottom boat" and so I was looking for something complete and snappy like that. This is all to say that the theme idea is sound, and making the revealer a center Down that runs through all the other themers is kind of impressive, but it definitely and discernibly affects the quality of said themers. It's just very hard to build a theme this way. That the puzzle pulls it off without too much awkwardness is remarkable.

It played harder than usual both because it was just bigger than usual, and so took longer than usual, but also because 1-Across was an annoying dumb trap. At least I think it was. Five letters, [Part of a sandal], I went for STRAP. I want to believe there are millions like me who did same. (I frequently want to believe millions are like me, only to end up badly mistaken, but this has not stopped me hoping ... someday.) The STRAP-for-THONG thing doesn't end up making a huge difference, as crosses prove you wrong pretty quickly, which is why I say it's annoying. I just found myself thinking "Why did you do that? No one uses THONG that way. Come on..." The fill is OK—GLAMP at least lets you know that the puzzle is alive and breathing, that the constructor was trying (31A: Stay outdoors overnight with some of the comforts of home). Still, it seems like it could've been somewhat more polished. Everything from GET A TIP (hard oof) down into the SW corner could really use a do-over. I do not understand how you opt for IPHOTO down there instead of IPHONE. Why would you choose the "Bygone" over the ongoing. It narrows cluing possibilities so much and makes the answer feel much more niche-y. You can change it really easily, but honestly, there's not much down there worth saving. GETATIP SHO APBIO ACTAS IPHOTO ATV SOP ... why would we be desperate to save any of this? NBAMVP is nice, granted, but it's not worth the clunkiness that completely envelops it. I wish constructors gave these seemingly inconsequential corners more attention than they often do. It's true, no one's gonna hang a medal on you for really nailing a (roughly) 3x6 corner, but craft is craft and the outskirts of a puzzle are still part of the puzzle. You don't want to phone in *any* part of your routine. Yes, stick the landing, but it should *all* look good. Thank you for enduring my gymnastics metaphor. Good day.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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Gymnastics rings feat with arms fully extended / FRI 10-9-20 / throwing faddish sport / Prez with same initials as NYC landmark / Tribe that traditionally spoke Chiwere

Constructor: Sam Buchbinder

Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium (5:49)

THEME: none 

Word of the Day: ARMATA di Mare (Italian fashion label) (41A) —

 

• • •

Found this one solid, if a bit drab. Attempts at currency and hipness and slanginess occasionally felt forced (who has *ever* responded to a door knock with "WHO DAT?"??) (is AXE-throwing genuinely faddish? Was it ever?), and the longer fill could've been a lot snazzier, but the puzzle holds up OK, for the most part. Sadly, the part that didn't hold up, for me, was the part where I finished up, so I was left at the end with a pretty bad aftertaste. I'm talking about the SW corner, which is a heap of cobbled-together abbrs. (GWBUSH) and awkwardly written-out numbers (U.S. TEN) and singulars that should never be singular (MOB ... TIE? Just one?) and whatever you wanna call "AH, I SEE." Yipes and yeesh to all that. There was no other concentrated winciness, though, that I could see. ARMATA di Mare was a total "????" and of course I wrote in ARMANI there at first, but I'm gonna assume that that "fashion label" is *massive* and that I just don't know it because I don't really follow fashion labels (actually, I don't have to assume that last part because it's definitely true). CALICOES looks super-dumb with the "E" in the plural, but I guess those are the pluralizing rules ... I think I just don't like fabrics in the plural (cats in the plural, however, would've been just fine). I just didn't have the usual number of "cool!" moments while solving this one. In fact, I don't think I had a single one. Sorry, I mean, "I believe that I had NARY A ONE." Feel the quaintness!

Why are there OLIVE PITS in your Greek salad? Are most Greek salads made with unpitted olives?? Or is the idea that the pits are "left over" in the course of *making* the salad? And what is with the clue on ATE? Why!? The NYTXW relies so heavily on "groaner joke" humor in general, in so many of its themed puzzles, does it really have to steer *into* the "groaner joke" here for a simple word like ATE? Also, the "joke" ... is terrible, even from a "groaner" perspective, because ATE is a homophone of EIGHT so I assumed initially there was some actual time-of-day joke happening ("ATE a clock" / 8 o'clock???). But no, the ATE joke is the "consuming" part ... it's so bad, on so many levels. Hardest thing for me to get today was HANGS—it is a very reasonable (if highly slangy) synonym for "Chills," but wow I needed every cross. I think that's it for me today. Please enjoy the splendor of autumn!

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld 

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Horror film director Aster / WED 4-8-20 / Real English county on which Thomas Hardy based fictional Wessex / Eschewers of military service / Clicked the double vertical bar on YouTube video / Fans that jeer home team informally

Constructor: Sam Buchbinder

Relative difficulty: Medium (untimed)

THEME: BOWLING ALLEY (16D: Where you might roll the starts of 17-, 31-, 43- and 56-Across) — first words are all bowling terms

Theme answers:

• STRIKE FORCES (17A: Quick attack groups)
• SPLIT SCREEN (31A: Like many TV news interviews)
• SPARE CHANGE (43A: Producer of jingle-jangle in the pocket)
• TURKEY BASTER (56A: Aid for a Thanksgiving chef)

Word of the Day: ARI Aster (47A: Horror director Aster) —

Ari Aster (born July 15, 1986) is an American filmmaker and screenwriter. He wrote the short film The Strange Thing About the Johnsons (2011), then wrote and directed the horror films Hereditary (2018) and Midsommar (2019). (wikipedia)

• • •

This old thing? Are we doing bowling terms again? Whyyyyyyy though? Maybe driving the revealer, BOWLING ALLEY, through all of the themers is supposed to add novelty to the concept, and ... I guess from an architectural standpoint, it's a little impressive, but from a solving standpoint, this theme is still very, very tired. SPLIT SCREEN on its own is a nice answer. If this were a themeless puzzle, I'd be singling it out for praise. But it's a themed puzzle, and this one is not good. Or, maybe it was adequate in the '90s, but it's definitely past its expiration date now. Also, I'm no bowler, but a SPLIT is more of a situation. You "pick up" a split, you don't "roll" one. A strike and spare are effects of the roll itself, whereas a "split" is just ... sitting there in front of you, even before you "roll," and then you, the bowler, have to pick it up (by, ironically, knocking pins down). Here, I'll let wikipedia help:

A split is a situation in ten pin bowling in which the first ball of a frame knocks down the headpin ("number 1 bowling pin") but leaves standing two or more non-adjacent groups of one or more pins. (wikipedia)

See. A "split" is a "situation"; it precedes your "roll." It is not, itself, something you roll. It is something, you "pick up." You roll a spare, you roll a strike, but you pick up a split. A "turkey" is three strikes in a row, which I knew, but which it took me two googles to confirm, because the first google led me here:

Turkey bowling is a sport which is based on ordinary bowling: a frozen turkey serves as a bowling ball and 10 plastic bottles of soft drinks or water are the bowling pins. The turkey is bowled down a smooth surface, for example, ice or a soap covered sheet of painters plastic (using a bar of soap). It is commonly associated with Thanksgiving. (wikipedia)

Toughest part of the puzzle for me was the NE, where I had Tom CRUISE over a DRUMKIT instead of Tom CLANCY (7A: Tom who created Jack Ryan) over a DRUMPAD (14A: Something to practice percussion on). Tom Cruise played Jack *Reacher*. John Krasinski played Jack Ryan. Glad I got that sorted, if only for today. BOOBIRDS is probably the best thing in this grid. It's certainly the thing that made me happiest (I'm a sucker for good sports slang) (16A: Fans that jeer the home team, informally). Its symmetrical counterpart, however—PULLAUEY—is probably the worst thing in this grid. First because it continues to inflict the horrible, please-don't-try-to-spell-it UEY on the world—stop normalizing UEY!—and because you flip a uey. You pull a boner. Pull a boner, pull a stunt, pull a fast one, flip a uey. Actually FLIPAU works just fine. Put that in your grid and smoke it.

Five things:

• 1D: Oodles (GOBS) — the lowest form of clue. Never cute or hard or interesting, but always confusing, because always a crap shoot: LOTS, TONS, A LOT, A TON ... apparently GOBS ... 
• 2D: Dead space? (OBIT) — I know this is not the first clue to clown around with death, giving OBIT a cutesy "?" clue, but somehow right Now I'm not really feeling the whimsy
• 3D: Howl : wolf :: bell : ___ (DEER) — wow, what? DEER howl now? I've seen a million of them, never seen one ... bell, is it? I wrote in PEAL here, completely misunderstanding and misreading the analogy
• 35A: Emmy nomination number for which Susan Lucci finally won for playing Erica Kane on "All My Children" (NINETEEN) — Wow. Timely. This was news back when soap operas still existed and people might be expected to know who acted in them; specifically, this was news in 1999. It is a bizarre and joyless and aggressively bygone way to clue NINETEEN, a wonderful prime number that deserves better.
• 65A: Cry at a revival ("I'M SAVED!") — do people actually cry this? Do revivals still exist?  Whoa, sorry. Youtube is shouting at me for my stupid questions:

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

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