Cocktail served in a copper mug / MON 4-14-25 / My Chemical Romance groupie, e.g. / Feared scuba diving affliction, with "the" / Elite group whose members include Steve Martin and Geena Davis / Three-line poem from Japan

Constructor: Stacy Cooper and Ken Cohen

Relative difficulty: Easy (solved Downs-only)

THEME: "WHAT'S CRACKING?" (51A: Slangy greeting ... or a hint to the starts of 20-, 25- and 45-Across) — theme answers start with things you might crack:

Theme answers:

• CODE OF CONDUCT (20A: Rules on how to behave)
• EGGPLANT DIP (25A: Baba ghanouj, e.g.)
• KNUCKLEHEAD (45A: Goofball)

Word of the Day: MOSCOW MULE (11D: Cocktail served in a copper mug) —

A Moscow mule is a cocktail made with vodka, ginger beer, and lime juice; garnished with a slice or wedge of lime, and a sprig of mint. The drink, being a type of buck, is sometimes called vodka buck. It is popularly served in a copper mug, which takes on the cold temperature of the liquid.

Some public health advisories recommend copper mugs with a protective coating (such as stainless steel) on the inside and the lip, to reduce the risk of copper toxicity.

• • •

Lots of things off here. Let's start with the revealer, which absolutely positively without a doubt should be "WHAT'S CRACKIN'?," not "WHAT'S CRACKING?" It's a slang expression where the terminal "g" is most decidedly dropped. Look it up. It's common, and it's almost always, as far as I can tell, "g"-less. Predictive text doesn't even want the "g"—look at what happens when you do a google search:

Yes, you're offered the "cracking" version, but the top predicted search is "crackin'"—"g"-less. Here's a restaurant called "WHAT'S CRACKIN'"

It's on memes, novelty t-shirts, always "g"-less.

Respect the slang, is what I'm saying. Or sayin', I guess. CRACKING feels awkward, like someone using slang that is not native to them. Tin-eared. Boo. The other awkward thing about this theme is that the items in question are not, in fact, crackin(g). Someone (you?) is cracking them. The code doesn't crack, you crack the code. The egg doesn't crack, you crack the egg. The knuckle doesn't crack, you crack the knuckle, and by the way, you crack knuckles, plural. Whoever cracked a single knuckle? Come on, man. This theme is conceptually OK, but in terms of execution, it's half-baked. 

The rest of the grid is fine, adequate, no complaints. Well, one complaint—EMO FAN feels fake (6D: My Chemical Romance groupie, e.g.). I mean, if RAP FAN has never been used (and it hasn't) then there's no way EMO FAN is ok. ROCK FAN, JAZZ FAN, MUSIC FAN, none of them have ever appeared in the NYTXW. EMO BOY is a thing, EMO KID is a very much a thing, EMO FAN is weak sauce. If you want to be modern and colloquial, you have to hit your mark. This one appears to have gotten by on "meh, good enough." Disappointing.

This was on the easier side, as Downs-only solves go. Really had trouble with IPADAPPS, mainly because I knew I was dealing with APPS, but nothing about those APPS seemed particularly IPADish, and APPS wouldn't work in the first spaces, and APPLICATIONS was too long ... so I kind of had to solve around it until the letters involved became clear. Then there was the back end (the FAN part) of EMO FAN, that was weird. I had to work out how to spell LAH-DI-DAH (it has appeared in the NYTXW as LADIDA as recently as 2023, and I wasn't entirely sure LA(H)-DI-DA(H) was right in the first place). I got LACUNA very easily, but also didn't fully trust it because LAH-DI-DAH that is a pretty fancy vocabulary word for a Monday puzzle—although maybe not as fancy as I thought: this is its third early-week appearance (out of 10 total appearances in the Modern Era). MOSCOW MULE and GODFATHERS were gimmes. When both your longest Downs are gimmes, it's probably gonna be an easy Downs-only solve. And it was. None of the short stuff gave me any trouble at all (to its credit, the short stuff is rock solid and virtually cringe-free).

Bullets points:

• 31A: "Fuzzy Wuzzy ___ a bear ..." ("WAS") — this is an extremely silly clue for "WAS," but I'm into it. You can't do a lot with WAS, so why not pull up the randomest quote you can think of? Way better than ["As I ___ saying..."], say.

• 41A: 2003 Will Ferrell Christmas movie (ELF) — just solved a puzzle where this movie was clued as something like [Buddy comedy of 2003?] and I thought that was really clever (Buddy is the name of Ferrell's character). Props to whoever's puzzle that was (I'm doing like 10 puzzles a day now, no way I'm gonna be able to remember who did what).
• 50A: Like diamonds and calculus problems (HARD) — this felt condescending. Calculus is not always HARD. Well, math calculus isn't. Non-math calculus (def. 3a, here) = hardened mineral salts, so yeah, that is ... HARD, I guess, by definition.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on BlueSky and Facebook]

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