Group of obsessive followers, as of a TV show / MON 8-14-23 / Exceed the limit à la Spinal Tap / Longtime Dancing With the Stars judge Goodman

Constructor: Simon Marotte and Trenton Lee Stewart

Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium (Downs-Only)

THEME: ONE AND DONE (62A: Never to be repeated ... or an apt pronouncement after following the instructions sequentially in 17-, 25-, 39- and 49-Across) — theme answers are familiar phrases, which, taken together, form a kind of arithmetic problem, the answer to which is ONE (so, when you are DONE solving the problem, the answer you get will be ONE)
Theme answers:

• GO TO ELEVEN (11) (17A: Step 1: Exceed the limit à la Spinal Tap) 
• PLUS ONE (11 + 1= 12) (25A: Step 2: Partygoer's guest)
• TAKE TEN (12 - 10 = 2) (39A: Step 3: Go on a brief break)
• HALF OFF (2 / 2 = 1) (49A: Step 4: Hefty sales discount)

Word of the Day: Pusha T (27D: Emulates Cardi B or Pusha T = RAPS) —

Terrence LeVarr Thornton (born May 13, 1977), better known by his stage name Pusha T, is an American rapper, songwriter, and record executive. He rose to prominence as one-half of the Virginia-based hip hop duo Clipse, which was mainly active from 1994 to 2010, alongside his older brother No Malice. As Clipse, the two released three studio albums upon signing to Pharrell's Star Trak Entertainment; the albums spawned hit singles including "Grindin'" and "When the Last Time" (both 2002).

In September 2010, Pusha T signed a deal with Kanye West's GOOD Music imprint, under the aegis of Def Jam Recordings. Later that year, he was featured on West's single "Runaway," which peaked at number 12 on the Billboard Hot 100. In 2011, he released his first solo project, the mixtape Fear of God, which was followed up with his debut solo album, My Name Is My Name, released in 2013. In November 2015, West appointed Pusha T to take over his role as president of GOOD Music, where he remained one of its flagship artists until parting ways with the label in 2022. 

Pusha T has released a further four solo albums: King Push – Darkest Before Dawn: The Prelude (2015), Daytona (2018), and It's Almost Dry (2022), all receiving widespread critical acclaim; the latter was Pusha T's first number one debut on the Billboard 200. (wikipedia)

• • •

Just back from a local fundraiser for VINES, a community garden / urban farming organization here in Binghamton. Ate lots of good food made by local restaurants using VINES produce, hung out with some people I hadn't seen in a while, picked up a couple of bottles of wine ("for charity!" I reasoned), and generally had a nice end-of-summer time. Plus, they gave me a special "You Are Old Enough To Drink"-type bracelet, which made me feel about 30 years younger, like I was clubbing or something (a thing I have literally never done, do they still call it that?):

[Nobody actually checked my ID so I’m guessing
they "Verified" my "Age" by just looking at my neck
skin and going "oh, yeah, very much over 21"]

So, I chose today's "Word of the Day" so that when you (inevitably) run into PUSHAT someday, in some future puzzle, you cannot say that you've "never heard of him." You have now officially heard of him. Today's "Word of the Day" is for everyone who boohoos every time a rapper appears in the grid. CARDI B, you have seen, and stored away in your memory banks (probably), but now you've got PUSHA T to add to said banks. If you read the wikipedia entry, you can see that his longevity and success make him more than crossworthy. This is part of what I do. Just out here providing a rap education public service for you all, thank me later (!). As for this puzzle, it's math, there it is, I did the math, it works, the end. Pretty straightforward, not terribly exciting. The repeated ONE is a little ugly (PLUS ONE, ONE AND DONE), but few are likely to notice, let alone care. The thing about the Spinal Tap answer (part of an iconic line that comes at the end of an unforgettable exchange) is that ... "GO TO ELEVEN" doesn't really mean "exceed the limit." The point of the "eleven" line, what makes it absurd, is that the dials on his amp actually GO TO ELEVEN. That is, ELEVEN *is* the "limit." The inability of Nigel to understand the interviewer's question (namely: "Why don't you just make ten louder and make ten be the top number and make that a little louder?"), his failure to understand the very premise of the question: that's the joke. That's what makes it funny. Anyway, in the movie, eleven is the limit. It does not "exceed the limit." I guess that, metaphorically, one might use "GO TO ELEVEN" to mean "exceed the limit," but more accurately it just means to max out. And the main reason you'd say it would be to remind everyone of this funny scene, which is funny, here, see for yourself:

The Downs-only solve was hard for me today in only one place—THRILL RIDE (29D: Roller coaster, e.g.). The corresponding (i.e. symmetrical) long Down was an out-and-out gimme, but once I made my way around the grid and ended up in the SW corner, I found myself staring, somewhat despairingly, at this:

Now, if you look closely, you can see the mistake that kept me stuck for a bit. I misread the clue at 49D: "___ it occurred to you ...?") and wrote in "HAS IT" instead of "HASN'T" (so much more natural does "has it occurred to you...?" sound to my ears than "hasn't it occurred to you...?"). So I was looking at I-NE at 64-Across and that could only be IONE ... but when I put an "N" in there, well, that did not help me get to THRILL RIDE. And if you look at all the other blanks I had where THRILL RIDE was supposed to go, you can see that multiple letters made sense for every square. Was it SPARES SPIRES or SPORES? ACRE or ACHE? RATS RAGS RAMS etc.? Wasn't looking good there. And then I double-checked "HAS IT," saw my error, and then was able to rolodex through letters at the end of the answer to see RIDE and from there pick up THRILL RIDE. Phew. Close call. But in the end, I finally got that ONE troublesome answer AND I was DONE. I do admire how hard the puzzle is trying to convince you that it is exciting (HIGH-OCTANE! THRILL RIDE). Thumbs up for those answers in their roles as hype men.

Not much else to comment on here. The only hesitations I had while solving Downs-only were at SIVA (never that sure about god names) and "IF ONLY..." (kept wanting the phrase to start with the pronoun "I" but "I" was in the cross as well as in the clue (47D: "I wish!"), so I just waited for crosses to make some kind of sense of that answer. Eventually, they obliged. I liked FANDOM and OVERLOOK, and thought the grid was clean, if not exactly the promised THRILL RIDE. See you tomorrow.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

Read more...

Brazilian actress Sonia / MON 3-27-23 / Stark daughter on Game of Thrones / Cold War contest featuring Sputnik and Apollo / Crude outbuilding

Constructor: Simon Marotte and Trenton Lee Stewart

Relative difficulty: Easy? Sure, easy

THEME: A completely implausible game of 20 Questions where all the answers are bands whose names follow the pattern [verb]ING [noun] —

Theme answers:

• COUNTING CROWS (19A: "Does the name contain an animal?" YES. "Is it a band fronted by Adam Duritz?" YES!)
• SMASHING PUMPKINS (31A: With 45-Across, "Does the name contain a vegetable?" YES. "Is it a band fronted by Billy Corgan?" YES!)
• ROLLING STONES (59A: "Does the name contain a mineral?" YES. "Is it a band fronted by Mick Jagger?" YES!)

Word of the Day: COUNTING CROWS (19A) —

Counting Crows is an American rock band from San Francisco, California. Formed in 1991, the band consists of guitarist David Bryson, drummer Jim Bogios, vocalist Adam Duritz, keyboardist Charlie Gillingham, multi-instrumentalist David Immerglück, bass guitarist Millard Powers, and guitarist Dan Vickrey. Past members include the drummers Steve Bowman (1991–1994) and Ben Mize (1994–2002), and bass guitarist Matt Malley (1991–2005).

Counting Crows gained popularity following the release of its first album, August and Everything After(1993). With the breakthrough hit single "Mr. Jones" (1993), the album sold more than 7 million copies in the United States. The band received two Grammy Awards nominations in 1994, one for "Best Rock Performance by a Duo or Group with Vocal" (for "Round Here") and one for "Best New Artist". The follow-up album, Recovering the Satellites, reached number one on the US Billboard 200 album chart and reached number one in several other countries. All but one of their subsequent albums reached the top 10 on the Billboard 200 list.

Their hit singles include the aforementioned "Mr. Jones" as well as "Rain King", "A Long December", "Hanginaround", and a cover version of Joni Mitchell's "Big Yellow Taxi". Counting Crows received a 2004 Academy Award nomination for the single "Accidentally in Love", which was included in the film Shrek 2. The band has sold more than 20 million albums and is known for its dynamic live performances. Billboard has also ranked the band as the 8th greatest Adult Alternative Artist of all time. (wikipedia)

• • •

"Wow, we're really committing to this '90s bands thing, aren't we? Yesterday, THIRD EYE BLIND, and now ... this." That was my main thought after first COUNTING CROWS and then SMASHING PUMPKINS came into view. Then came ROLLING STONES and the apparent thematic consistency went out the window. But OK, "blanking blanks" bands, that's almost a thing. Then, I looked at the actual theme clues (oh, right, so I was solving Downs-only, as per my normal Monday habit, sorry to bury the lede). I don't ... I don't know ... I can hardly begin to describe the number of ways that this theme does not work. First, that is not how you play "20 Questions." That's not even how you play "Animal, Vegetable, Mineral." In the latter, the answerer *tells* the questioner at the start of the game what category (A, V, or M) the object falls under. There is no scenario in which a questioner would ask "Does the name contain an animal?" Also, "Does the name..."??? This implies that somehow the range of answers has already been pre-limited to names, which is also not how "20 Q" or "AVM" works. If you're just playing "20 Q," you might use your first Q to ask "Animal, Vegetable, or Mineral?" but you'd never ask anything remotely resembling these questions. The entire imagined context for the game is bizarre, and the game itself resembles nothing humans actually play. 

The very (impressively) narrow category of the actual themers (i.e. bands with names that follow the [verb]ING [nouns] pattern) loses all its tightness once it's been shoe-horned into this contrived game scenario. Why would such a game play out in a series of "[verb]ING [nouns]" bands??? Two more problems that make this theme D.O.A. First, it's *THE* ROLLING STONES. The other bands are perfect as is, but the name of the band is *THE* ROLLING STONES, so it's technically clued inaccurately. Lastly, pumpkins are not vegetables, they are fruits. Yes, if you were *actually* playing "Animal Vegetable Mineral" (which, as we've established, you definitely aren't), then "PUMPKINS" would fall under "Vegetable" because it fits that category much better than the others. But the question as you have dreamed it up here is "Does the name contain a vegetable?" and since we are dealing with PUMPKINS the answer is "absolutely not." I feel like if you'd just stuck to the "[verb]ING [nouns]" rock band thing and clued ROLLING STONES "with 'The'" and found a different overall cluing gimmick, you might have something here. But the attempt to force this to be a game of "Animal Vegetable Mineral" just doesn't come off on the page. It's like the clues were written by AI and not by humans who had actually played human games before.

The grid is just fine–clean and smooth, and my only objection is to SANSA. My ongoing grudge against all "GOT"-related fill just won't die. Do you know how many damn names we're gonna be dealing with from that show (for god knows how many years)? LANNISTER and STARK and NED, sure, but then not just SANSA but DAENERYS TYRION CERSEI JON SNOW ARYA ROBB BRAN and god help you when they get into the tertiary characters. I'm not a fan of how deep into the "Star Wars" universe I have to crawl to learn all the crossword names, but at least "Star Wars" has some right: it's an institution, a universe that spans almost a half-century of movies, TV shows, products etc. etc. "GOT," big as it was, never had an audience larger than the average audience of "Home Improvement" circa 1993 (36.3 million viewers / week!), and how many of those characters' names do you remember? Uh ... Wilson? Was that someone? Sigh. I cleared out that NE corner and plugged the puzzle into my own construction software and whaddya know, SANSA rose straight to the top of suggestions for me too. It's just ... sometimes you gotta override your machine helper monkeys. 

Maybe SANSA is no worse than BRAGA, I don't know (52D: Brazilian actress Sonia). But Sonia BRAGA is a real person, and I know her, so I'm more favorably inclined toward her. From a Downs-only perspective, SANSA is miserable if you don't know it ("TANSA? TARSA?"), but I managed to pull it from somewhere. No other part of the grid gave me any trouble—about the easiest Downs-only solve I've had to date. I needed to infer a bunch of Acrosses in order to see SLIDESHOW (35D: TED talk accompaniment, often), but that's fairly normal where longer Downs are concerned. I was slowed, but not stymied or flummoxed or otherwise stopped. SPACE RACE was easier to come by (3D: Cold War contest featuring Sputnik and Apollo). That's all, see you tomorrow.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

Read more...