Food mascot in green suit jacket / SAT 8-22-20 / Performer for whom San Diego stadium was named / Beer with triangular logo / Giuseppe leader in Italy's unification / Hangout for Dorian Gray

Constructor: Trenton Charlson

Relative difficulty: Medium (7-ish) 

THEME: none 

Word of the Day: HENRI Bergson (2D: French philosopher Bergson) —

Henri-Louis Bergson (French: [bɛʁksɔn]; 18 October 1859 – 4 January 1941) was a French philosopher who was influential in the tradition of continental philosophy, especially during the first half of the 20th century until the Second World War. Bergson is known for his arguments that processes of immediate experience and intuition are more significant than abstract rationalism and science for understanding reality.

He was awarded the 1927 Nobel Prize in Literature "in recognition of his rich and vitalizing ideas and the brilliant skill with which they have been presented". In 1930 France awarded him its highest honour, the Grand-Croix de la Legion d'honneur.

Bergson's great popularity created a controversy in France where his views were seen as opposing the secular and scientific attitude adopted by the Republic's officials. (wikipedia)

• • •

Full of things I don't care about (chess) or actively dislike (OK, maybe that's too strong a thing to say about "How I Met Your Mother," but I never understood the appeal of the show and every time it comes up in crosswords I assume the constructor is trying to kiss Will's ass since Will was featured on an episode of the show once ... I'm sure the show is fine, it just wasn't for me, kind of like this puzzle). SHAMU is off-putting because animal abuse is off-putting, and seeing the horrible DHS mentioned in the puzzle for the *second day in a row* was a downer. The grid seems largely solid, overall, but aside from containing a few of my favorite things (MAUS, LAURA Linney, Anne MEARA), it didn't give much joy today. Sputtered a bit up top in the NW and more so in the NE, but the part that really slowed me down was PAWN PROMOTION, a phrase I don't recognize at all. I'm familiar with the concept of your pawn getting turned into a queen if it makes it all the way to your opponent's back line or whatever you call it, but the PROMOTION part was a bear for me. Needed almost every cross. Math / science / chess guys assume you know the intricacies of all their ****; I don't really mind that these topics are in puzzles, since they're part of the world, but I really feel like there's more of that stuff ... to the exclusion of other stuff ... because a certain kind of man still dominates the constructor ranks. Very similar white math/sciencey guys. I know and love a few of them, but it's ... a lot. I just feel the compulsion to roll my eyes every time there's (yet another) dude byline and I have to deal with some minor mathematician or some chess terminology or whatever. And then BARNEY (I knew) ... random last name. Not too fun. Red meat for chess fans who watch CBS, but PAS my thing. Bottom half of the puzzle, esp. the SE, was Tuesday-easy.

Surprised it took me as long as it did to finish considering how many gimmes there were. SHH "HEY YA" TSETSE LAURA Linney GRETA Gerwig MAUS BASSALE SLUR ARF REM, all no-brainers. But in addition to those long central answers that I didn't fully know, I got hung up around HENRI (whom I also didn't know), and then particularly in the NE, where I stupidly wrote in HODA instead of RIPA (16A: Gifford's talk show successor). Hoda Kotb is Gifford's co-host successor ... successor to Regis in Kathie Lee's life ... Anyway, four letters, female talk show personality associated with Kathie Lee Gifford, you can kinda see how I made the mistake. Kinda. I also thought 9D: Do some fast data processing? (CRAM) was CHEW ... because after you "fast" ... you then eat ... during which, presumably, you CHEW? And the food is the "data" you are "processing"? With your teeth? Question mark? 

Lots of mistakes today. Aside from CHEW and HODA, I had HIS- before HER- (does anyone really still say "HERstory" ... feels very early '90s) (5D: Lead-in to story). I had SUNRA before SHAMU (I want to live in the world where SUNRA is the correct answer here) (4A: Performer for whom a San Diego stadium was named). I had HEIDI before HENRI and AGREE before AMITY (33D: Accord). And for 37A: Herb of the parsley family (ANISE), I had the -SE and wrote in PULSE ... yup, I sure did. That's a thing, isn't it? PULSE? [looks it up] Well, it's "the edible seeds of certain pod-bearing plants, like chickpeas and lentils," so it's *a* thing, and an edible thing at that, but it ain't related to parsley. Why would I go there and not just straight to the fairly common ANISE? I don't know. Anyway, I think that's it. Hope this puzzle resonated for at least some of you. See you tomorrow.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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Notable voyager of 1497 / FRI 8-21-20 / landmark consecrated in 1561 / Imported European wheels / Suffering from desynchronosis

Constructor: Alex Eaton-Salners

Relative difficulty: Medium-Challenging (7-something) (all of the challenge was in that lower-middle section, under the so-called "dome")

THEME: sadly, yes — sigh ... I guess the black squares are supposed to represent a single ONION DOME, even though SAINT / BASIL'S CATHEDRAL in RED SQUARE has many such domes, and even though that black-square arrangement is a pretty poor approximation of an onion dome, frankly

Word of the Day: ERDOS (15A: Paul ___, pioneer in graph theory) —

Paul Erdős (Hungarian: Erdős Pál [ˈɛrdøːʃ ˈpaːl]; 26 March 1913 – 20 September 1996) was a renowned Hungarian mathematician. He was one of the most prolific mathematicians and producers of mathematical conjectures of the 20th century. He was known both for his social practice of mathematics (he engaged more than 500 collaborators) and for his eccentric lifestyle (Time magazine called him The Oddball's Oddball). He devoted his waking hours to mathematics, even into his later years—indeed, his death came only hours after he solved a geometry problem at a conference in Warsaw. [...] Other idiosyncratic elements of Erdős's vocabulary include:

• Children were referred to as "epsilons" (because in mathematics, particularly calculus, an arbitrarily small positive quantity is commonly denoted by the Greek letter (ε)).
• Women were "bosses" who "captured" men as "slaves" by marrying them. Divorced men were "liberated". (wikipedia)

• • •

I'm never going to like themes on Friday or Saturday. Well, maybe not never, but you're gonna have to do way, way better than this random trivia test w/ terrible "picture." The theme stuff itself wasn't that hard to pick up, but because it was so cut off from the rest of the grid, the stuff under the "dome" was brutal for me—like a stand-alone puzzle that was way harder than any of the rest of it (probably because the other sections have easy-to-get theme material running through them, whereas there's zero theme material in the "dome" area). But back to the theme: don't care. You deprived me of the joy I get from the zippiest puzzle day of the week with this half-assed architectural nonsense. "Consecrated in 1561," Who Cares? It's not even a proper anniversary puzzle. We have ONION DOMEs all over town, as there are a lot of Eastern Orthodox churches around Binghamton. The black squares in this puzzle don't really capture the contours of the ONION DOME very well. I feel like some alien, or one of the Teletubbies, is looking at me when I look at this puzzle. Self-indulgent nonsense. Pass.

The fill was OK, though I didn't know a bunch of the names. CABOT is a name I only kinda sorta recognize as an explorer (1D: Notable voyager of 1497). Looks like he made it to Newfoundland. Good for him. Also, that ERDOS guy, that's a name I know exclusively because of crosswords, and even then I barely know it. Math guys think other math guys are more famous than they are. I had never heard of EULER before crosswords either, but at least he seems truly worth knowing. ERDOS is math-name crosswordese. ELENA, also crosswordese, and I totally forgot she was a Disney princess. Gross to see DHS here (Department of Homeland Security)—you rarely see it in xwords, which is great, since it's terrible and should be dissolved; and double-gross to see NOT PC, which, again, if you still have crap like NOT PC or UNPC in your wordlists, what are you doing? If you're "insensitive," you're "insensitive," not NOT PC. NOT PC is the language you use when you don't actually believe you were "insensitive" at all. Only total *********s use that kind of language. Shove it. NOT PC is disavowing language. It's "I'm sorry you were offended" language. It's trollspeak. It sucks. 

I had DEM before GOV (57A: Cuomo, for one) and AGE before GPA (41D: N.C.A.A. eligibility consideration), both of which made the under-the-"dome" part additionally hard. No way I could see KITCHEN from just the -CHEN with 49A: Island locale as the clue. Clue needs a "perhaps." Lots of (most) KITCHENs do not have islands, ugh. Why can't you just make a fun, bouncy Friday themeless. Other people seem capable. It's mysterious. This showy crap is for the birds when the "show" is not impressive (as it usually is not). If you're gonna get cute, make sure you stick the landing. 

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld 

P.S. Hey, Tommy Benfey. Yes, you, Princeton. Erin asked me to wish you happy birthday yesterday but I totally bricked it because I have quarantine brain. Anyway, happy birthday, thanks for reading, and, I dunno, maybe do something special for Erin. She seems nice.

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