Heavily edit with beauty filters, as a photo, in modern lingo / TUE 10-14-25 / Savory South Asian rice cake / Apples, pears and quinces, botanically / Skewered dish served with peanut sauce

Constructor: Stella Zawistowski

Relative difficulty: Medium

THEME: Terms of endearment — familiar two-word phrases are reimagined as responses to questions from one's significant other: first word = the response, second word = a term of endearment

Theme answers:

• SUMMER, LOVE (17A: "In what season are the Olympics during leap years, sweetie?" "___")
• ALFALFA, HONEY (26A: "Which 'Little Rascals' character has a cowlick, sugar?" ("___")
• MEDIA, DARLING (42A: "What are oils and watercolors examples of, dear?" "___")
• BEANIE, BABY (56A: "What do you call a close-fitting hat, doll? "___")

Word of the Day: IDLI (45D: Savory South Asian rice cake) —

 

Idli or idly (/ˈɪdliː/; plural: idlis) is a type of savoury rice cake, originating from South India, popular as a breakfast food in India and in Sri Lanka. The cakes are made by steaming a batter consisting of fermented de-husked black lentils and rice. The fermentation process breaks down the starches so that they are more readily metabolised by the body.

Idli has several variations, including rava idli, which is made from semolina. (wikipedia)

• • •

["CLOCHE, BABY!"]

Very short write-up today because ugh I start teaching not one but two "mini" courses today, which is not a thing I even knew existed before this summer, and I those are in addition to the course I'm already teaching, and I had a significant tech / communication failure this weekend, which means ... whatever, it's all a mess. It'll be better by the end of the week, but right now it's organizational chaos. So I gotta deal with the puzzle fast so I can go make coffee and worry about it all until school starts at 8am. Annnnnyway, this is a really original concept, I think, even if I have no (real) idea what ALFALFA HONEY is. I mean, I can infer what it is ... honey from bees who eat alfalfa nectar. Just like MANUKA HONEY (mmmm, if you've been to NZ, maybe you know) is from bees who eat manuka nectar. We eat a lot of honey in this house. Or some. None of it is ALFALFA HONEY. But so you have to use a marginal honey type in order to make the symmetry work, so what? It's fine. What's not as fine are some of the questions in the clues. It's totally reasonable to forget the name of Alfalfa from Little Rascals, but "What are oils and watercolors examples of?"?!??? First of all, they're paints. The only sane response to that question is "PAINTS, DARLING." Second of all, if the answer is really MEDIA (or paints), does your partner really not know that term? That's ... interesting. The Olympics question is worded in a completely implausible way. "Are the Summer Olympics in leap years or non-leap years?" feels like the more natural way to ask that question. But I think I was distracted most by the phrasing of the clue on "BEANIE, BABY." "What do you call a close-fitting hat, doll?" Me: "CLOCHE! It's a CLOCHE." I mean, if you're gonna not know a hat name, it's far (far) more likely that you would not know CLOCHE. Everyone knows the term "beanie." Who is asking babe about "beanie?" That's just sad.

The two words that are most likely to throw people today are YASSIFY (23A: Heavily edit with beauty filters, as a photo, in modern lingo) and IDLI. The latter has appeared in the puzzle twice before, but never this early in the week, and the former is (unsurprisingly) a debut. I know the term YASSIFY (though I'm not sure I could've told you *precisely* what it meant), but it didn't matter much if I knew it because I had its first and last letters already in place before I ever looked at the clue, so it just sort of wrote itself in. Nothing else it could've been. From Merriam Webster dot com:

Yassify is likely a combination of yass, an interjection (used to [express] great excitement or enthusiasm for a thing) that arose in New York City’s Ballroom scene, a Black and Latino LGBTQ+ subculture, and the suffix ify, “make or form into.”

As for IDLI ... remembering it was probably my biggest triumph of the day. I feel like I'm constantly trying to remember short food names that have come into (my) crossword consciousness only recently, and they keep falling out of my brain. I mean, ask me how to spell BIRYANI? Is that right? Hey, it is! Wow, I'm on a roll (which is not how you eat BIRYANI) (is it? no, pretty sure it's not). I think the puzzle did give me the initial "I" as a head start, but I got IDLI from there and I feel pretty good about it. I had less luck in the west, where I whiffed on far more ordinary (to me) things. The big error du jour was EDUCATION for ERUDITION (32D: Quality of a scholar). This led me to imagine (briefly) that an updo exposed your ENDS (?) (like the ends ... of your hair?). I also had SEEDS and not RINDS at 46A: Watermelon leftovers, a much more understandable error, and that helped gunk things up for a bit. LORD before LADY Bridgerton (40D: Noble title on TV's "Bridgerton"). I also needed help getting from [Moral justification] to RIGHTNESS, which just seems like another word for "correctness." Had not thought of the word as having a moral component. "Righteous," sure. But RIGHTNESS was slightly unexpected.

OK, that's it. See you next time. Oh, and happy birthday to my (manuka) honey :) We're always asking each other (cryptic) crossword clues, so I hope this birthday puzzle resonates for her, at least a little (my questions aren't this dumb, though, are they, honey? ... are they!?)

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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Texter's astonishment, spelled cutesily / MON 10-23-23 / Recycling option that collects paper, plastics and metals together / Listing of disciplinary infractions / Fixed-term bank offering that pays well / Easy to eat, as some grapes and watermelons

Constructor: Stella Zawistowski

Relative difficulty: Easy (solved Downs-only)

THEME: recorded music: a history  — last words of theme answers take you through a timeline of musical media, from RECORD and TAPE to CD and finally STREAMING [with corresponding timeframe in brackets at the end of each theme answer clue]:

Theme answers:

• PERMANENT RECORD (17A: Listing of disciplinary infractions [1950s to early 1980s]
• MASKING TAPE (26A: Tan adhesive [1970s to early 1990s])
• HIGH-YIELD CD (45A: Fixed-term bank offering that pays well [1990s to 2000s])
• SINGLE STREAMING (57A: Recycling option that collects paper, plastics and metals together [2010s to present])

Word of the Day: SINGLE STREAMING (57A) —

Single-stream (also known as “fully commingled” or "single-sort") recycling refers to a system in which all paper fibers, plastics, metals, and other containers are mixed in a collection truck, instead of being sorted by the depositor into separate commodities (newspaper, paperboard, corrugated fiberboard, plastic, glass, etc.) and handled separately throughout the collection process. In single-stream, both the collection and processing systems are designed to handle this fully commingled mixture of recyclables, with materials being separated for reuse at a materials recovery facility.

The single-stream option replaces the dual-stream option, which is where people separate certain recyclable materials and place them in separate containers for collection. Typically, dual-stream has partial commingled materials such as glass, plastic and metals in one stream separated from paper products in the other stream. From an end consumer perspective, single-stream is easier to participate in. However, single-stream recycling has disadvantages, including the output of lower quality plastics and paper to recyclers. This lower quality material has to be processed more downstream. The increased flow of decreased quality recyclables from Europe and North America in part due to single-stream recycling was part of China's motivation for launching its Operation National Sword policy. (wikipedia)

• • •

[this RECORD, by a guy with
a very cool name, is streaming
on YouTube]

This is a very cute theme idea that gets marred a bit in the execution. The worst marring is totally self-inflicted—that is, it's entirely a question of the cluing, specifically those brackets at the end indicating recording medium relevance. At least I think that's what those dates are. I don't actually know. Because they're not... what's the word ... accurate. I guess they're supposed to be very broad, very general time frames in which the recording medium in question had its heyday. But ... I mean, let's start with RECORD. You've got [1950s to early 1980s] there in the brackets, but that's wrong at the back end by several years, and it's wrong at the front end by [... counts on fingers ... runs out of fingers ...] half a century? Something like that. RECORDs have been around since the late 19th century. I think the puzzle means specifically "LP RECORD"s, which come into prominence starting in the late '40s, but, well, it doesn't say "LP"; it says RECORD, so ... taking the puzzle at its word, "1950s" is way, way off. Further: CDs went mainstream in the mid-80s. When I got to college in '87, I was one of the few people on my dorm hall with a CD player, but within a year, they were Everywhere, so "1990s" is a few years late for the CD. People still bought CDs in the 2010s. And of course all of these media are still around, some of them weirdly resurgent (ask me about my growing *new* cassette collection). I don't really truly deeply care that the brackets are off, but I do care that they're off and I'm not sure exactly what they're supposed to indicate. The brackety bits all feel just a little too fast and loose and ... off. Slightly awonk. 

The other thing that mars the otherwise well-conceived theme is SINGLE STREAMING. This is a ... terminology / phrasing issue. I solved this Downs-only and I can tell you that I just stared at SINGLE STREAMING, and then stared some more, and still had no idea what it could mean. None. I was mildly surprised when I completed the grid to find that it was all correct. SINGLE ...STREAMING? So of course I then looked at the clue, and learned that it has something to do with recycling. OK, fine, but ... even when I looked it up, the phrase SINGLE STREAMING did not appear to be what people were calling this particular "recycling option." As you can see from the "Word of the Day" entry (above), seems like "single-stream" is typically an adjective used to modify "recycling." "Single streaming" redirects to "Single-stream recycling" at wikipedia, and when I google ["single streaming"] I mainly get (musical) singles that are (musically) streaming. So I didn't know a word, and then learned a word, but then it seems it's not really the word that's commonly used? Weird. "Our city has SINGLE STREAMING..." I dunno, I guess I can hear that. Maybe it's a colloquialism that just hasn't hit me yet. We must have SINGLE STREAMING where I live, as we definitely don't sort our recyclables. Hmm. Anyway, the basic music medium time-lapse theme, I like a lot–it's a solid early-week concept. And the grid is pretty clean. Except ESTAB., that's awful in a not-terribly-demanding Monday grid (32A: Abbr. before a year on a business sign). Both otherwise, clean. The spelled-out OH EM GEE is even original and funny (41D: Texter's astonishment, spelled cutesily). So it's a qualified thumbs-up, I think. 

As for the specifics of the Downs-only solving experience, no real problems to speak of. Pretty straightforward. PARTIAL TO was by far (far far) the hardest answer to parse (3D: Having a liking for), but even that one just took a little extra time, a little extra pressure from surrounding fill. Slowed me, but didn't stop my forward progress at all. I made exactly two errors, one of them entirely stupid, i.e. I had the ice cream as TOM & Jerry's (35D: ___ & Jerry's => BEN). Since "ice cream" is not in the clue, I don't feel as bad as I might, but I still feel pretty bad. TOM & Jerry are an iconic duo, but the apostrophe ess should've told me BEN. In fact, I know that as I was writing in TOM, I was definitely thinking "ice cream," so my brain wires just got crossed. And then TOM showed up, mockingly, just two columns over! (33D: Star of the "Mission: Impossible" films => TOM CRUISE). The other mistake I made was a little more understandable—I wrote in PILL where ITCH was supposed to go (52D: Wool sweater annoyance). I currently have a beloved sweater that is pilling in annoying ways, so ... that's where that answer came from. I hope it's nice sweater weather where you live, and that your day is both pill-less and ITCH-less. See you tomorrow.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

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Unidentifiable protein / MON 11-22-21 / Toy that goes up slow and comes down fast / Shpeak indishtinctly / Member of a DC squad

Constructor: Stella Zawistowski

Relative difficulty: Medium (normal Monday)

THEME: GENRE (67A: What the start of 17-, 29-, 45- or 61-Across is, in bookstore) — themers start with the genres FANTASY, MYSTERY, WESTERN, and ROMANCE:

Theme answers:

• FANTASY BASEBALL 917A: Pastime for armchair sports enthusiasts)
• MYSTERY MEAT (29A: Unidentifiable protein)
• WESTERN WALL (45A: Holy site in Jerusalem)
• ROMANCE LANGUAGE (61A: Spanish or French, but not German)

Word of the Day: St. OLAF College (40D: Minnesota's St. ___ College) —

St. Olaf College is a private liberal arts college in Northfield, Minnesota. The school was founded in 1874 by a group of Norwegian-American pastors and farmers led by Pastor Bernt Julius Muus. The college is named after the King and the Patron Saint Olaf II of Norway and is affiliated with the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. The college was visited by King Olav in 1987 and King Harald V and Queen Sonja of Norway in 2011.

As of 2017, the college enrolled 3,035 undergraduate students and 256 faculty. The campus, including its 325-acre natural lands, lies 2 miles west of the city of Northfield, Minnesota; Northfield is also the home of its neighbor and friendly rival Carleton College. Between 1995 and 2020, 154 St. Olaf graduates were named Fulbright Scholars and 35 received Goldwater Scholarships. Of the nation's baccalaureate colleges, St. Olaf ranks 12th in the number of graduates who have gone on to earn doctorate degrees. (wikipedia)

• • •

This is a perfectly good Monday theme concept with perfectly good Monday theme answers. Really wish the clues had been better, more accurate, more specific, more fun. The clue on FANTASY BASEBALL was annoying because there's nothing "baseball" about it at all. "Sports enthusiasts" makes it sound general, so FANTASY SPORTS or FANTASY LEAGUES or something like that seemed most plausible. FANTASY FOOTBALL also definitely exists. Would it hurt you to baseball up the clue a little, or at all? Maybe the cluer thought "pastime" somehow evoked "national pastime," which baseball somehow technically still is, but "pastime" is just a word and didn't evoke baseball for me at all. Colorful clues help Mondays be fun instead of just perfunctory walks in the park. Don't skimp on detail and specificity! The clue on MYSTERY MEAT was even worse. Give me a context! Where would I hear that! Give me some sense of the revulsion such a "meat" usually evokes. Paint a dang picture! But no, we get the mystery clue [Unidentifiable protein]. That's just [synonym for 'mystery'] + [synonym for 'meat']—not cleverness or humor or thoughtfulness at all. Just a waste of an entertaining cluing opportunity. The revealer was also disappointing, in that it was anticlimactic and probably totally unnecessary. I can look at the themers and see the GENREs pretty easily. If GENRE is all you got for a revealer, why not just not have one? Even the clue on GENRE feels like it misses the mark. FANTASY, MYSTERY etc., those GENREs whether you're "in a bookstore" or not. It's not like, as a set, you would ever mistake them for anything but GENREs. They are GENREs no matter where you are, no matter what art form you're talking about. Movies, for instance. All this redundancy and awkwardness could be avoided by the elimination of the revealer entirely. The fact that GENRE is not even in the final Across position makes it that much more awkward. It's sad to see a good theme idea mishandled in the details like this.

The fill is fine, though I honestly stopped to take a deep breath of dread when I hit ESTAB. before I'd even exited the NW corner. Felt like a fill omen, and a bad one. But it was just one bad abbrev., no biggie. What was a biggie, though, was all the UP nonsense. BUTTON UP and OPENS UP are too close to each other for a repeat of "UP," given that UP appears in the same position both times (the preposition following a verb). But what was a minor ding becomes a major one when you throw UP BOW into the bargain. UP UP UP, three UPs ... you're out. Three UP three down. Whatever, I'll work on the baseball metaphor later, the point is that littering your grid with UPs is negligent. It suggests a failure of polish. An inattention to detail. A "meh, good enough" attitude. And bah to that, I say. 

The clue on SLED wants very much to be good (22A: Toy that goes up slow and comes down fast), but it isn't because the SLED doesn't go "up" slow or at all without being carried (presumably by a human), whereas it goes down all on its own, due to gravity, whether a human is on it or not. Clue plays too fast and loose with the question of agency, i.e. the question of who or what is actually doing the action. Plus how do you know how fast I take my SLED up the hill!? You don't know me! Only thing I had any trouble with today was "WAS IT YOU?" (just slow to put it together) (5D: Question to a suspected culprit); COIFFEUR (I spelled St. OLAF with a "V," sadly), and "I NEVER!" which I had as "INDEED!" (57A: "The very idea!"). Oh, and of course I wrote in CPU instead of UPC because that's a thing I do. Happy Sagittarius season to all who celebrate (me!). 

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

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Black hairstyle with square-shaped sections / FRI 9-24-21 / Find satisfaction slangily / Sibilant sobriquet for Summertime singer Sarah / Galaxy array / What genes do biologically / Component of many sandstone features in the Southwest / Nickname in Israeli politics

Constructor: Stella Zawistowski

Relative difficulty: Easy

THEME: none 

Word of the Day: MONOPLANE (58A: Aircraft with low drag) —

A monoplane is a fixed-wing aircraft configuration with a single main wing plane, in contrast to a biplane or other multiplane, which have multiple wings.

A monoplane has inherently the highest efficiency and lowest drag of any wing configuration and is the simplest to build. However, during the early years of flight, these advantages were offset by its greater weight and lower manoeuvrability, making it relatively rare until the 1930s. Since then, the monoplane has been the most common form for a fixed-wing aircraft. (wikipedia)

• • •

This is fine, though only BOX BRAIDS (17A: Black hairstyle with square-shaped sections) and GET SOME (41D: Find satisfaction, slangily) seem really original and snappy. Something about the boxy build of this grid makes it feel restricted somehow. The 9 stacks ... I'm just not sure how interesting those can be. I'd rather have longer answers lacing through the grid all over the place than these just-OK short stacks in the corners, with little else of interest in the grid. In fact, the bulk of the rest of the grid is 4s and 5s. All four other sections are just 5x5 or 4x5, and they're adequate, but there's no real interest there. "IMAGINE THAT" livens things up a bit, but overall this felt a little listless to me. But it was super duper easy. I had a lot of little missteps, but nothing that held me up for any real length of time. Not terribly happy to start with the awful and corrupt Israeli prime minister nickname, but thankfully, the overall vibe of the puzzle improved considerably from there. Björk > BIBI. BÊTE NOIRE > BIBI. BOX BRAIDS > BIBI (actually, BOX BRAIDS *is* (aurally) BIBI, in that it is a "B. + B." answer ... yes, my brain is indeed a HOTBED of bad puns and other dumb thoughts, you are correct).

Had trouble with BÊTE NOIRE because of the "?" clue (a pretty decent "?" clue, I think) (1A: What's not to like?). Also had trouble with ORDER—something about the clue phrasing made it hard to get my head around (13D: Get to eat). I managed to tell my EPSON from my EPSOM today, so that was nice (10A: Big ink purveyor). Wrote DIVIDE before ENCODE before realizing that was dumb (10D: What genes do, biologically). Wrote SWAY before SELL and felt less bad about that one (23D: Successfully convince). No idea what a MONOPLANE was. Turns out it's just ... a plane. Literally every plane I've ever flown on in my entire life. You wouldn't bother to use the term today because it's not usefully distinctive. Had a weird lot of trouble with both PLAN and SEED, needing the first three letters of each one before I knew what the hell they were. With PLAN, I just wasn't sure of the context the clue was going for (53D: Not just live in the present), whereas with SEED, I think I just had an entirely different idea of "pip" in mind (two ideas, actually: a. a oner, a lulu, a scream, really something, "she's a real pip," that kind of pip; and b. a dot on a domino or die). Happy to learn that Sarah Vaughan was known as SASSY. I thought maybe SUNNY, but SASSY is hands-down the better nickname. I keep looking at LEMONDE and wondering why "lemonade" has been misspelled, which probably means I'm tired (blogging at night like some kind of overcaffeinated beatnik!). See you Saturday (he said, sibilantly).

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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Cheese from Wales not southeastern Pennsylvania / SAT 10-31-20 / Disney villain based on King Claudius / Battle of the Hedgerows locale / Titular children's song lyric after et la tete / European city where the first carbonated beverage was invented

Constructor: Stella Zawistowski

Relative difficulty: Medium (wireless keyboard stopped working mid-solve, so I didn't get a precise time, but I'd say 7-8 minutes? maybe? it's early, forgive me ...)

THEME: none 

Word of the Day: CAERPHILLY (56A: Cheese from Wales, not southeastern Pennsylvania) —

Caerphilly is a hard, crumbly white cheese that originated in the area around the town of Caerphilly, Wales. It is thought to have been created to provide food for the local coal miners. The Caerphilly of that period had a greater moisture content, and was made in local farms. At the start of the 20th century, competition for milk in the local area saw production decline, and Caerphilly production was gradually relocated to England.

During the Second World War, production was stopped and diverted to Cheddar in English factories. After the war, those factories began to produce Caerphilly as it was quicker to make than Cheddar, and therefore more profitable. The majority of Caerphilly is now produced in Somerset and Wiltshire. Artisan cheesemakers still make Caerphilly in the pre-war style, and these have been successful at the British Cheese Awards. (wikipedia)

• • •

First, a clue explanation: 51A: A to B, say, Abbr. is VOL. because it is an imagined volume of a dictionary or encyclopedia or something where contents are arranged alphabetically. It's possible most of you got this immediately, but it's probably that some of you were like me and had no idea what it was supposed to mean at first. And perhaps you stayed in that place of not knowing. No shame in that. I, sadly, had to figure out what the hell it meant, as it's kinda my job. And after a minute, my brain toggled off of sound volume and over to book volume. How often do clues that try to get cute by being ECHOERs (!?) of other clues (see 53A: A to B, say (STEP)) just feel forced and off? A: a lot. This ECHOER clue for VOL. is defensible, and that is the best I can say about it.

Otherwise, the only answer in this grid may as well be CAERPHILLY, because I don't remember much of anything else. Oh, except ACCENT AIGU, which looks amazing written out like that (15A: ´, in French). Big thumbs-up there. The rest just existed. All of the interest was in the clues, I guess. Anyway, the only part of the puzzle I spent any time thinking about, the only part that gave me real trouble, was CAERPHILLY, a super-outlier where general familiarity is concerned. (I don't care if you personally knew the cheese, that's Fantastic, I'm saying that fewer people by far will have heard of the cheese than will have heard of the next least familiar thing in the grid) The -PHILLY part they sort of hand to you with the "southeastern Pennsylvania" part of the clue, so that was nice. But the CAER- part ... no way to infer any of that. All crosses needed. And when you need SCUD ... well, that's an ugly word to need. Main issue here was not at all trusting the "AE" sequence. I was so doubtful of it that at one point early on I pulled LEEDS (50D: European city where the first carbonated beverage was invented) and put in LINDT, because it gave me a more plausible-looking letter sequence there (CAN- as opposed to CAE-). But then SAT PREP came in with it's "R"  and gave me CANR- and everything looked stupid again. Oh, also, LINDT is not actually a city, so there's that. (Me: "That's where the chocolate comes from ... right?"). Eventually I just had to trust that CAER- was right. And it was. And that was the memorable thing that happened during this solve.

Other things:

• 28A: Post-marathon treatment, maybe (ICE BATH) — started with an ICE PACK
• 25D: Crispy order at a Japanese restaurant (TEMPURA) — easy, and yet ... I had the "U" and "A" first and was dead certain I was going to be dealing with some kind of TUNA. Not smart.
• 39A: Protective wear around shellfish (BIB) — had the first "B" and reflexively, confidently wrote in BRA. My head had a picture of a BIB in it, but my fingers went "nah, it's BRA, trust us." Anyway, handle shellfish braless at your peril!
• 42A: Route for pulling a boat (TOW PATH) — wanted SEA LANE or SEA something, which made getting into that SW corner slightly tricky. Luckily that section had ALOUETTE, which was a gimme (34D: Titular children's song lyric after "Et la tête!"). Wait, did I say "luckily"? Because...
• 59A: Battle of the Hedgerows locale (ST. LO) — well, ALOUETTE gave me the "T" and so my brain went "four letters, "T" in second position, sounds British ... ETON!" Who knows what they do at ETON! It seems like a fictional place to me. A wizarding school, 

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

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Norse goddess of fate / TUE 7-14-20 / Dark yellowish green / Muckraking journalist Jacob

Constructor: Stella Zawistowski

Relative difficulty: Challenging (no idea how long it took me ... stopped several times out of boredom / annoyance ... felt harder than normal for a Tuesday)

THEME: PLONK — jk ... looks like ordinary phrases where the first word is also the name of a Broadway show, clued as if they somehow referred to said show:

Theme answers:

• RENT FREEZE (17A: Super-cold spell on the set of a 1996 Broadway musical?)
• HAIR SHIRT (11D: Souvenir from a 1968 Broadway musical?)
• ANNIE HALL (34D: Performance venue for a 1977 Broadway musical?)
• WICKED GOOD (58A: Positive, albeit terse, review of a 2003 Broadway musical?)

Word of the Day: NORN (56A: Norse goddess of fate) —

The Norns (Old Norse: norn, plural: nornir) in Norse mythology are female beings who rule the destiny of gods and men. They roughly correspond to other controllers of humans' destiny, such as the Fates, elsewhere in European mythology. (wikipedia)

• • •

Theme seems extremely weak. Part of the reason I found the puzzle hard was I assumed the theme was actually doing something ... Got RENT FREEZE and thought it was RENT FREE with -ZE added for some wacky reason. Then I kept waiting for some big idea to gel, for Anything to happen beyond "first words are Broadway shows," but that moment never came. Concept seemed hackneyed and the clues seemed anemic. Where's COMPANY CAR? NINE WEST? GYPSY MOTH? CHICAGO BEARS? Huge shrug for all of today's themers and their clues. And then the fill was just ragged through the middle there. The phrase "all wet" is so olden that I don't even really know what it means, so WRONG was actually a mild surprise. PLONK could've been any sound effect, as far as I was concerned. I had CLONK and CLANK and god knows what else in there. Huge let-down to have actual answer be something as ugly and random as PLONK. I think of PLONK as ... either something akin to PLUNK (i.e. put something down heavily) or else cheap wine. Would not have associated it with "old pianos." CRACK could've been lots of stuff including BREAK (35A: Succumb to pressure). It was the awful vagueness coupled with the non-aha moment when I finally "got" it that made solving this one (esp. the middle section) particularly miserable.


Whole SE corner was a mystery. Had OCHER / OCHRE at 62A: Dark, yellowish green (OLIVE). Barely heard of NORN (yuck), and I surely won't be the only one. Surprised to see NORN on a Tuesday. Could not come up with TRIANGLE from that clue (39D: Word with love or right). GOOD part of WICKED GOOD was not clear. Wouldn't know a TELEX if it bit me (though I've heard of them). Everything felt confusing and ye olde. And the modern stuff was just awkwardly clued. I "find" Alexa ... in (?) ECHO (51A: Where to find Amazon's Alexa). I've used Alexa. I have never owned an ECHO. Everything from stem to stern in this thing just clonked (or plonked) for me. Theme weak and thin (and not nearly funny / wacky enough), fill stale, cluing often vague, clunky, or not right for the day of the week. WHOLE HOG and SHERLOCK are fine answers, but mostly this one was a total miss for me.


"Friends" and "Frasier" are specifically sitcoms, so needing all the crosses just to get ... SHOW (?)??? This is the kind of weird combo of hard and disappointing that this puzzle managed to be at many different points. The saying of "no thanks" to something and the SKIPPING of it are completely different acts (43A: Saying "No thanks" to, say). There's just a weird lot of common / borderline crosswordese stuff. Seems like with a theme this (relatively) light, the fill wouldn't be so IRR AROD RIIS ESTA TELEX ORES ORSO ACTI ANTE AXLE etc. The worst of the short fill, though, was the GPO / EEOC crossing. Truly awful, if only because their crossing *initialisms*, which means if you don't know what the letters ... stand for ... you have no hope. I knew EEOC (Equal Employment Opportunity Commission), so never really noticed GPO, which ... I don't think I've ever seen in a crossword. General Post Office? Oof, if I google [GPO] I get the US Government Publishing Office. Do they ... "collect letters"? No ... looks like this clue is definitely referring to General Post Office, which is ... British? Or maybe they have them everywhere? This is only the second appearance of this particular initialism in the past ten years. And that other time? Was on a Saturday. At annnny rate: GPO / EEOC is just an objectively bad crossing, on any day. Sigh. If this puzzle had a. had snazzier themers with funnier clues, b. run on a Wednesday, and c. had much cleaner fill, maybe. But as it is, no.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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1949 novel set in Wyoming Territory / SAT 6-20-20 / Sicilian town that lost bell to Fascists in literature / 1960 Miles Davis album inspired in part by flamenco music / Broadway character who sings God loves Nubia / Bird that lent its name to Toledo's Triple-A team / Danity girl group with self-titled 2006 #1 album

Constructor: Stella Zawistowski

Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium (6:49)

THEME: none

Word of the Day: Danity KANE (34D: Danity ___, girl group with a self-titled 2006 #1 album) —

Danity Kane is an American girl group composed of members Aubrey O'Day, Dawn Richard, and Shannon Bex. The group originally had five members, but Wanita "D. Woods" Woodgett left the group in 2008, and Aundrea Fimbres left in 2014. Formed on the third iteration of MTV's Making the Band reality television series in 2005, they signed to Bad Boy Records by Diddy.

Danity Kane's self-titled debut studio album was released in 2006 and achieved success in the United States, shipping a million copies domestically, while spawning two singles with top 10 single "Show Stopper" and the ballad "Ride for You." Their second studio album, Welcome to the Dollhouse, was released in 2008, following the release of their second top 10 single "Damaged". The band became the first female group in Billboard history to debut their first two albums at the top of the charts. (wikipedia)

• • •

I was braced for a hard one, as that is what Stella's name means to me, but then the hardness didn't really come. I was slower than I should've been, probably, because I tend to slow down and move methodically through puzzles that are terrors. I could've turned on the gas here and didn't, is what I'm saying. And I still came in under 7 on a Saturday, which is to say I came in with a roughly normal *Friday* time. And I liked it. I like Friday puzzles. I like spending 6-8 minutes on a puzzle filled with  interesting longer answers and some thoughtfully tough clues. And so I liked this. The only part that made me even a little mad was the KANE / KAYE krossing—two proper names of not tremendous fame, crossing at a vowel ... that's dicey. But in the end (the very end, actually), the "A" was the only reasonable guess. Everything else about this grid seems very much in order. Oh, ADANO is icky crosswordese (8D: Sicilian town that lost a bell to Fascists, in literature), but that's such a minor thing, really, in the face of so much good. Love the central Across ("SKETCHES OF SPAIN"), though I initially forgot about its existence (despite *owning it*) (33A: 1960 Miles Davis album inspired in part by flamenco music). Having the -TCHES part in place, I really really wanted to make "BITCHES BREW" happen, but ... way too many squares. Also love ALL-NIGHTER and HAPPY PLACE, and METEORIC and "MANEATER"—make it fun, it's all I ask. Oh, and make it smooth. This was both.

["Lean and hungry type," in a Hall & Oates hit]

I knew "Golden Girls" was set in Florida but couldn't decide TAMPA or MIAMI so I let the crosses tell me (1A: Setting for "The Golden Girls"). I know "SHANE" very well as a movie (Alan Ladd! And my girlfriend Jean Arthur!), but I was not aware it was a novel, so that was embarrassingish (18A: 1949 novel set in the Wyoming Territory). I literally cried "SHANE" earlier today, in the voice of my cat, as my wife left the house and my cat put his paws up on the screen door and looked longingly after her. Had EL NIÑO before LA NIÑA, but of course I did (19A: Pacific Ocean phenomenon). I forgot Uno had a SKIP card and do not think of my PECs as near my abs, so yeah, that whole western section was rough for me. Luckily, it was also small. PTRAP sounds like a kind of music, and I needed many crosses to get it (40A: Plumbing fitting with a bend). Is ADD-A-LINE hyphenated? (58A: Cellphone account offering). I would think an additional or extra line would be the "offering." Somehow having a verb phrase as an "offering" felt weird, unless the answer is not a noun but a phrase of offering, i.e. "Say, would you like to ADD A LINE." Yeah, OK. Still feels weird, but OK. Was baffled by the clue on DECORS (59A: Looks inside?) until I got every last letter from crosses. Then I wasn't baffled, but by then not being baffled didn't really do me any good. My baker makes a great TRES Leches cake, which I am definitely buying (again) tomorrow (53D: ___ leches). Sweet dreams for me. Good night.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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Fancy term for a long prison sentence / SAT 1-25-20 / Musical family from Cremona / Olden land north of anglia / Pistolet par exemple / One-third of literary trio

Constructor: Stella Zawistowski

Relative difficulty: Medium (7-something, with another minute to hunt down an error)

THEME: none

Word of the Day: DURANCE VILE (55A: Fancy term for a long prison sentence) —

durance vile

A long prison sentence. He's a known criminal, that's why he's in durance vile. (the free dictionary (idioms))

• • •

This played very unevenly for me. Struggled to start (I feel like I say this every day—maybe that's just the norm), even though DEFAT was a gimme. Never heard of NEGGA (or "Loving," though now that I look at the movie poster, yes, I have heard of it) (3D: Actress Ruth of "Loving") and couldn't see TRUES from the clue and had no idea what a "lemniscate" is and the other Acrosses were just never gonna come. Then later, the SE corner also ground me to a halt, with its honestly ridiculously obscure DURANCE VILE. But as for the rest of the grid, I tore through it like it wasn't there. Can't believe how easy the NE was (30 seconds, tops, for the whole thing), and since PALAVER is a great word that I enjoy, and TRANSFER was a piece of cake, I also got into the SW easily and destroyed it. So two corners were slogs, and the other two I don't remember because they were so easy. I do like 5/6 of the long Acrosses in this thing, and the long Downs are more than solid, so the bones of this one are mostly good. I just wish the difficulty had been way more evenly distributed, and that DURANCE VILE had never ever shown its ridiculous face. I mean, I couldn't even find a good definition of it. Dictionaries have "durance" in them, and they say "usually in the phrase 'durance vile," but then They Do Not Tell Me What That Is. One of the references for DURANCE VILE at freedictionary.com was a book called "Endangered Phrases," which gives you some idea of its, uh, currency. I think the word "Fancy" is outright horrid here. It's meaningless. Unless ... would you use it at black tie events, when discussing your former broker's prison term? Fancy??? The term and the clue are vile. Because "durant" means "during" or "lasting" in French, I put a "T" where the "C" was supposed to go, figuring that maybe "I Love Lucy" was on (in reruns??) on TBS and the clue was just getting cute (57D: "I Love Lucy" network (CBS)). You have to treat answers that outside-common-parlance as if they were nuclear. It would be great if they weren't in the grid at all, but if you really have to use them: crosses, crosses, crosses. Mind your crosses.


Had the "A" at 19A: Burning feeling (ANGER) and wanted at least three different things, none of them ANGER: I wanted AGITA, I wanted ARSON, and I wanted ARDOR. Weirdly started this solve with LAG SOLES -ING (inferred suffix of 8D) DOWNS WAR, and then just sat there going nowhere for a bit. Then I went and got NEE MOHEL ENT, and things started to move. Worst mistake I made all day was probably EVE for NYE (56D: Dec. 31). I mean, I was close, in that NYE stands for New Year's EVE, but ... no. And since I had EVE running through what was supposed to be DURANCE VILE, well, I wasn't getting any help undoing EVE until I finally changed SLIDE to FLUME at 45D: Water park feature; then, after trying to think of *any* literary EMILs besides the titular character in "Emil and the Detectives," I eventually just got BRONTË and worked backward. EMILY. NYE. OK. Not with a bang but a whimper, as TSE says.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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