Cousins of grommets / WED 3-4-26 / Spicy chip brand / "Star Wars" droid, informally / Saucer crew, in brief / Delicacy that's often slurped / "Slow down there, big guy" / Cassette successors

Constructor: Wayne Bergman

Relative difficulty: Medium

[9A: "Star Wars" droid, informally]

THEME: List, interrupted — idiomatic phrases where the first word can mean "remove" or "omit," clued via lists wherein one element has been removed / omitted:

Theme answers:

• MISS THE MARK (3D: Twain, ___, Hamill, Wahlberg)
• SKIP A BEAT (7D: Metro, ___, Sports, Lifestyle)
• CUT A RUG (25A: Persian, ___, Oriental, Navajo)
• TAKE THE CAKE (11D: Red velvet, ___, Black Forest, angel food)
• PULL SOME STRINGS (55A: Violin, ___, cello, ___)

Word of the Day: CUT A RUG (25A) —

To dance, especially in a vigorous manner and in one of the dance styles of the first half of the twentieth century. (wiktionary)

• • •

This one had me at MISS THE MARK, and then PULL SOME STRINGS came along and upped the ante, making me admire the theme even more. The whole cluing concept here struck me as very original and genuinely entertaining, as well as interesting from a solving standpoint—you have to find the connections among the list elements and then also find an idiomatic phrase that might describe the list's omission. This made solving the theme answers a lot of fun. It also made things slightly treacherous in that fat, isolated upper-middle section, where two themers cross each other. That bit was like a self-contained puzzle—accessible only via narrow points of entry on the sides and at the bottom—and so it was hard to work my way in. Basically had to start with the 3s at the top of that section (ESP, AKA) and work down from there. Easy enough to see that RUGs were what the 25A clue was going for, but BEATs!? That was a little harder to get from the clue (7D: Metro, ___, Sports, Lifestyle). Those are sections of a newspaper to me ... which, yes, are technically "beats" that a news reporter might be on. Remember newspapers? Remember news? Good times. Anyway, not complaining about SKIP A BEAT at all, just saying it took some thought. Biggest screwup in that section for me came from writing in LPS for 25D: Cassette successors (CDS). Maybe I was thinking "predecessors"? I don't know. I think of CDS as [LP successors], but maybe there's some idea that the two formats in question are small and portable? Whatever. I just screwed up, which definitely affected my ability to get into that fat upper-middle part. It's a testament to the theme's quality that my frustration in that section didn't lead to any sour feelings toward the puzzle. CUT A RUG! Of course. Always aha, never ugh today.

Well, never ugh with the theme material. There was some ugh with the fill, but not enough to spoil the solve. You do have a lot of 3s today, and there's never anything good to say about 3s. They're just ... there, at best. RAH UAE ESP AKA TEL ORE HUR. But there was nothing unusual or particularly ugly about today's 3s, and in the slightly longer stuff, only ESAI and ARTOO gave me that "ugh, you again?" And when the fill gets a little longer, things get genuinely interesting. You can take "OK, I SEE" and throw it in the ocean (same with all jury-rigged "OH-" and "OK-" and "UH-" phrases) but PAPERLESS and RECOMMITS and SAKE BAR and even TOILET LID (32D: Head covering?), I like, and "EASY TIGER" really wins the day. The fact that the constructor managed to squeeze such a great phrase into that already thematically dense upper-middle section is really impressive. 

Outside of the upper-middle, things were pretty straightforward and deal-with-able. Hardest answer for me to come up with was CAR LOT, which has a clever but (for me) absolutely brutal clue (46A: Mini mart?). Mini is a make of car, which I always forget ... or fail to see when crossword clues decide to use it in a punny fashion. I had almost all the letters in place and still had no idea what the clue was going for "CARLO-, CARLO- ... CARLOS? Who is this CARLOS and why is he a "Mini mart?"). 

Bullets:

• 9A: "Star Wars" droid, informally (ARTOO) — hate when the name is written out phonetically like this. Always stupid-looking. Ah well. We made it well over a week without a Star Wars reference. Ten days, to be precise. That nearly equaled the longest such streak of the year (which is currently eleven—Jan. 4-Jan. 15)
• 19A: Spicy chip brand (TAKIS) — this snack (flavored rolled tortilla chips, shaped like little taquitos) has really come on strong in recent years. The first ever appearance came only in February of last year (!), despite the fact that TAKIS have been around since 2001. Today's was the fifth appearance (three in the singular, two in the plural).

• 31A: Saucer crew, in brief (ETS) — ok ETS and flying saucers aren't real, and the clue should probably indicate fictionality somehow, but I love the phrase "saucer crew" so much that I don't care. Two words that belong nowhere near each other ... near each other. Nice.
• 50A: Where you might drink from a junmai glass (SAKE BAR) — lotsa Japanese material today. SUMO wrestlers at the SAKE BAR wearing OBIS. Actually, SUMOs don't wear OBIS. Instead, the wrestlers, known as RIKISHI, wear loincloths called MAWASHI (total number of NYTXW appearances for RIKISHI and MAWASHI: zero).
• 64A: Pay for play, perhaps (TYPO) — another clever clue. Surface meaning is very convincing / misleading. But no, the answer is not (say) ANTE. You have to imagine "pay" and "play" in scare quotes, indicating you are dealing with them as words alone—their particular meaning doesn't matter, grammatically. 
• 13D: Delicacy that's often slurped (OYSTER) — the only food I can think of that I want absolutely nothing to do with. "Slurping" is unpleasant generally, but somehow slurping ramen, say, seems fine, while slurping an OYSTER ... gag.
• 39D: Cousins of grommets (EYELETS) — sincere first thought: "... Wallaces?"

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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Neighborhood intersected by Pomona Fwy / THU 3-19-20 / Parsley relative / Jeans that have been summerized / Play area at some fast food restaurants / Ralphie's ammo in 1983's Christmas Story

Constructor: Wayne Bergman and Gary Otting

Relative difficulty: Easy 

THEME: SHORT CUT (36D: Timesaver ... as a computer user would see in four answers in this puzzle?) — familiar phrases where one word is replaced by its equivalent computer short-cut command:

Theme answers:

• CTRL-C RIGHT (i.e. copyright) (19A: Protection from piracy)
• CTRL-X OFFS (i.e. cut-offs) (15D: Jeans that have been summerized)
• NICE CTRL-F (i.e. "nice find!") (28D: "Way to go!," to an antiques buyer)
• TOOTH CTRL-V (i.e. toothpaste) (49A: Crest, e.g.)

Word of the Day: MAME (13A: Broadway auntie) —

Mame is a musical with the book by Jerome Lawrence and Robert Edwin Lee and music and lyrics by Jerry Herman. Originally titled My Best Girl, it is based on the 1955 novel Auntie Mame by Patrick Dennis and a 1956 Broadway play, by Lawrence and Lee, that starred Rosalind Russell. Set in New York City and spanning the Great Depression and World War II, it focuses on eccentric bohemian Mame Dennis, whose famous motto is "Life is a banquet and most poor sons of bitches are starving to death." Her fabulous life with her wealthy friends is interrupted when the young son of her late brother arrives to live with her. They cope with the Depression in a series of adventures.

In 1958, a film titled Auntie Mame, based on the play, was released by Warner Bros. Pictures, once again starring Rosalind Russell in the title role. Russell was nominated for an Academy Award and won a Golden Globe for her portrayal.

The musical opened on Broadway in 1966, starring Angela Lansbury and Bea Arthur. The production became a hit and spawned a 1974 film with Lucille Ball in the title role and Arthur reprising her supporting role, as well as a London production, a Broadway revival, and a 40th anniversary revival at the Kennedy Center in 2006. (wikipedia)

• • •

Took one look at this grid and thought "uh oh"—something about the dearth of longer answers and preponderance of short fill just did not bode well. By the time I hit the second themer and thus figured out what was even going on with the first themer, I wanted to quit. I would've stopped solving this right then and there if it weren't my job to finish and then write about every damn puzzle. My only thought was "so it's just gonna be a bunch of CTRL-commands ... with CTRL-[some letter] in my grid a couple more times replacing ordinary words? That's it?" And that was it. Do you know how unsatisfying it is to look at CTRLCRIGHT? Or to know that the letter string CTRL is waiting for you in at least two more answers? Or to run into the revealer in some wonky asymmetrical out-of-the-way place (36D??)? I have a feeling the ultra-easiness of this puzzle is going to make people feel powerful, which will lead them to like this puzzle way, way more than it deserves. The fill is less than thrilling (see CFLAT, EASTLA, SRO, SUEY, RHODY, REBOX, V-DAY ... which btw is not a thing: VE-DAY is a thing, VJ-DAY too; V-DAY is baloney). Then there's the fact that many of us work on Macs where none of these commands are appropriate. I use the "command" key for all these functions. And to top it all off, STROM Thurmond? Clued as if he were merely a "longtime senator" and not a virulent racist and prominent segregationist? No. No. Pass.


The only "trouble" I had today was figuring out what the CTRLC letter string meant. Once I got CTRLXOFFS, I realized the command in that case was "cut," which made me realize the command in the first case was "copy." After that, the only issue was trying to figure out the bizarre NICECTRLF clue. "Nice ..." Nice what? That phrase "... to an antique buyer" wasn't helping me at all. I've heard the phrase "nice find" before, but never from an ... antique buyer, was it? Also, copy cut and paste all feel related, and find feels like an outlier ... you aren't doing anything to a text with "find." Whatever, the whole thing was just not interesting to me at all. If the NYT is sitting on a reserve of super-fun puzzles, I call on them to release those puzzles now. I believe it is in the national interest to do so. Take care, everyone.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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