Rex Parker Does the NYT Crossword Puzzle: The Wave Learning Festival Crossword Class

Constructor: Daniel Larsen and The Wave Learning Festival Crossword Class

Relative difficulty: Medium (2:59)

THEME: two-word phrases where both words are "-ITE" rhymes

Theme answers:

FIGHT NIGHT (17A: Time to watch boxing on TV)
WHITE KNIGHT (30A: One rushing in to save the day)
BRIGHT LIGHT (47A: It makes your pupils constrict)
QUITE RIGHT (64A: "Precisely!")

Word of the Day: BUBBLE TEA (33D: Foamy drink invented in Taiwan) —

Bubble tea (also known as pearl milk tea, bubble milk tea, or boba) (Chinese: 珍珠奶茶; pinyin: zhēn zhū nǎi chá; 波霸奶茶; bō bà nǎi chá or 泡泡茶; pào pào chá) is a tea-based drink invented in Taiwan in the 1980s that includes chewy tapioca balls ("boba" or "pearls") or a wide range of other toppings.
Ice-blended versions are frozen and put into a blender, resulting in a slushy consistency.^[3]There are many varieties of the drink with a wide range of flavors. The two most popular varieties are black pearl milk tea and green pearl milk tea. (wikipedia)

• • •

Look, I don't know what the backstory is here, but this isn't a NYTXW-worthy theme. It's way, way, way too basic. Maybe, *maybe*, if the theme answers were, on their own, really vibrant phrases, you could get away with this, but as is, this isn't playful or interesting enough for *any* major daily crossword, let alone the "best puzzle in the world" or whatever. And the fill is oddly old and cruddy for a Monday. As I've said before, you can often gauge the overall quality of the puzzle before you're out of the NW corner, and that corner today, yeesh. I love baseball and knew OLIVA (2D: Tony who played for 15 seasons with the Minnesota Twins), but that is dated baseball crosswordese (esp. for a Monday), and LIGER and EVERSO had me worried that the fill was not headed anywhere good. It's certainly not much worse than average, I guess, but I expect much cleaner on a Monday. I mean, every Across from LANAI on down in the SW is just straight out of crossword central casting. The puzzle is also clumsily built, with giant Friday/Saturday-like corners in the NE and SW, as if the puzzle were trying to be a themeless and an easy Monday themed puzzle simultaneously, but succeeding at neither. Actually, the big corners are far better done than the themed portion of the puzzle. No idea how you can have that much wide open space and still end up at the maximum word count (78), but this puzzle did it. It just didn't feel like an experienced or careful hand was at the helm. I don't get it. If somehow a bunch of fourth-graders made this, then sure, I'll feel a little bad. But I never read constructor's notes at the Times' site and I'm not going to start today. This just isn't up to (what should be) NYTXW standards, theme-wise.

Are we still expected to know things about "Desperate Housewives"? When will that show's "currency" run out? I outlived the "Ally McBeal" era (when you would occasionally be asked to know tertiary characters on that show for some reason), but sadly it seems the "Desperate Housewives" era is still upon us. Anyway, I didn't know BREE (38A: One of the housewives on "Desperate Housewives"). Beyond that, and OLIVA, there's not much here that's going to throw anyone off their game. I weirdly don't like NIGHT and KNIGHT being successive last words in theme phrases. Feels like cheating. They're homophones. After I got them, I was like, "How many other homophones are there??" But then that wasn't the theme after all. I also think that there should be *no* other "-ight"-sounding words in the grid, outside of the themers, for the sake of elegance. So I'm finding EVITE slightly annoying. In short: keep the NE / SW corners, tear out everything else, and make a themeless. Thank you, goodbye.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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