Dry biscuit used as baby food / SUN 10-24-21 / One known as the Alive the Eternal / Greek goddess associated with witchcraft / Who actually lives in Lapland, some say / Chain whose name derives from its founders, the Raffel brothers

Constructor: Katie Hale

Relative difficulty: Easy

THEME: "Sports Nuts" — sports terms clued wackily, i.e. as if they were not sports terms ... I think that's it? 

Theme answers:

• OFFENSIVE REBOUND (22A: Your ex's new date whom you just can't stand?)
• FLOOR EXERCISE (34A: Kegels, e.g.?)
• STARTING BLOCK (51A: First square of a crossword?)
• SERVICE LINE (68A: "I'll be your waiter tonight," e.g.?)
• UNPLAYABLE LIE (82A: Conspiracy theory so wild that it can't be aired?) 
• SEVEN-TEN SPLIT (96A: Plan to leave at a very specific evening time?)
• DESIGNATED HITTER (114A: Blackjack dealer?)

Word of the Day: TOBIAS Menzies (10D: Actor Menzies who won an Emmy for "The Crown") —

Tobias Simpson Menzies (born 7 March 1974)^{[citation needed]} [LOL] is an English stage, television and film actor. He is best known for playing Frank and Jonathan "Black Jack" Randall in STARZ's Outlander, for which he received a Golden Globe Award nomination, in addition to his roles as Brutus in HBO's Rome and Edmure Tully in HBO's Game of Thrones. Menzies also portrayed Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh in the third and fourth seasons of Netflix's series The Crown, a role which earned him a Golden Globe Award nomination and won him the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Drama Series. (wikipedia)

• • •

The theme is a huge dud, but the fill is frequently top-notch, so I had more fun than I usually have on Sundays, to be quite honest. As for the theme ... if there's a complexity here, I'm missing it. This is a theme type I've mentioned before, a very easy-to-do theme type where you just have a bunch of *terms* from ... well, any field. And then you wackify them with your wacky "?" clues. The end. Not much to it. The clues are supposed to be funny, so if you find them funny, great, but even great clues don't elevate a theme like this enough for me. This version of the theme type is much weaker than most—usually, the "field" in question is much more narrowly defined. You know, like, *one* sport. All baseball terms or all football terms or whatever. I'm almost certain we've seen *exactly* that type of theme before. Golf terms, maybe? I dunno. But the non-narrowness here makes an already semi-tired theme type feel even more loose and lazy. I think the wacky clues are maybe better than most wacky clues. I'm thinking especially of the clues on the reimaginings of SEVEN TEN SPLIT (96A: Plan to leave at a very specific evening time?) and OFFENSIVE REBOUND (22A: Your ex's new date whom you just can't stand?). But overall, the theme just feels drab and olden. The fill, on the other hand, really has a lot of zing to it. PUT A LID ON IT and RAISE HELL make a great tandem in the NE, and DIG SITE and UNION REP look great side by side like that. "ARE WE OK?" and HORN IN also give the puzzle a little quirky personality? I cringed very little and I nodded appreciatively relatively often, and since filling in the fill is the bulk of the solving experience, after all, I can't say I'm entirely displeased with this thing, my feelings about the theme notwithstanding. 

Apparently I've been mispronouncing VIOL (in my head, which is the only way I've ever said "VIOL") all these years (79D: Instrument that's a homophone of 69-Down). I thought it was pronounced like the first part of VIOLA, you know ... "VEE-ole" ... something like that. Now I learn it (allegedly) rhymes with VIAL!? (69D: Vaccine holder). News to me. News I ... can't use, actually, since, as we've stipulated, the word "VIOL" literally never comes up in conversation. Still, fun (-ish) fact! I had forgotten about this third spelling of PALLET (95D: Bed of straw); I always have to stop to think about the PALATE / PALETTE distinction, so now I have a third option to confuse my brain; thanks, puzzle! Once again I forgot what vowel is supposed to go in CAR_MBA, but this time the cross was indisputable (it's an "A"). Do packages still come C.O.D.? (13D: One way for packages to arrive, in brief). That feels like an option from '80s infomercials that no one in my family ever used and I never saw used by anyone I knew ever. Literally, ever. It stands for "cash on delivery," kids. I think I'd've preferred a fish clue here. More timeless. I wrote in TCBY'S for 123A: Chain whose name derives from its founders, the Raffel brothers (ARBY'S). I don't know that reading the clue fully would've helped, and even so, it didn't matter much, as the crosses helped me fix my mistake lickety-split. I was stunned by HEKATE, as I know her as HECATE ... exklusively (41D: Greek goddess associated with witchcraft). I guess the "Greek" part of the clue was supposed to signal "K" to me. It did not. But again, thank god for crosses. Not much more to say here. I had a reasonable amount of fun. I hope you did too. See you later.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld 

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

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Drawing of the body without its skin from the French / SAT 10-23-21 / Online marketing giant with primate in its logo / L.A. jazz venue where Thelonious Monk recorded a live album / Manor house attendant / River with second-largest discharge volume in New World after the Amazon / First sch. to win 100 N.C.A.A. titles / Certain native of the Mideast / Chinmoy onetime India spiritual leader

Constructor: Sam Ezersky

Relative difficulty: Medium-Challenging

THEME: none 

Word of the Day: ÉCORCHÉ (43D: Drawing of the body without its skin, from the French) —

NOUNplural noun écorchés/ˌākôrˈSHā/ /ˌeɪkɔrˈʃeɪ/ 

• A painting or sculpture of a human figure with the skin removed to display the musculature. (lexico)

• • •

Things were going along pretty nicely there for a while. I mostly enjoyed the top part of this grid. The GROUCHY part of this grid did not make me GROUCHY at all. I would've been very GROUCHY, probably, if I'd encountered 9D: Online marketing giant with a primate in its logo and not been a semi-regular podcast listener, specifically a former "Serial" listener—MAILCHIMP was their big sponsor that first season, and I don't think I've encountered MAILCHIMP anywhere else, ever. If I have, it was totally unremarkable. There's a smug "we're all podcast listeners, right?" quality to the very presence of MAILCHIMP ... but I knew it, so I get to be in on the smugness, which is all any of us really wants, right? [...] Anyway, the point is, I was good up top. I associate Disney with G- rather than PG-rated fare, and dat answer you got DERE at 34D: "Wot's dat over ___?" is truly horrendous, but POP QUIZ, ZYGOTE, the inventive OIL GLUT, all good, fine fine, let's keep going! But then comes the bottom. My descent, much like Dante's—highly unpleasant, though ultimately educational, I guess (?). 

Trying to round the corner from the center into the SE corner was rough. Well, at first, it was impossible, despite the fact that I was able to throw GROK down off just the "G" and then immediately get the often-hard-to-parse ST. KITTS (thank you, GROK, for the high-value "K"!). But even with the first three letters of 42- and 43-Down, I just drew a blank. Two blanks. Blank blank. Actually, I guessed that the trucking charge might be CARTAGE (42D: Charge for some truckers), which I then, as now, am pronouncing as if it were a French word. But I really really felt like I was making that up, and that CARTAGE ... what do trucks do if not cart stuff, and why are you charging ... wait ... does "charge" here mean "responsibility"? Trucks are "charged" with "carting" material from place to place? Oof, woof and yikes. What do you mean, "some truckers"? What else do truckers do but transport things in a vehicle (the definition of CARTAGE)!? It's bad enough your word is a weird obscurity, you then want to go wordplaying around with the meaning of "charge"? And alongside [rechecks grid for the umpteenth time] ÉCORCHÉ?? Look, if I can't call ÉCORCHÉ obscure, then nothing is obscure. I don't understand how CARTAGE ÉCORCHÉ is anything but embarrassing. A double obscurity in your longer answers? What a waste of space. I could've taken either of these words on their own, but alongside one another ... that's just constructorial negligence.

There was worse to come, though. This time, the problem was less a fill obscurity problem and much (much) more a cluing problem. A cluing problem that just happens to occur at one of the toughest parts of the grid. I've never heard of the IT CLUB, and I won't be alone on that, but with crosses, ultimately, it's gettable (50A: L.A. jazz venue where Thelonious Monk recorded a live album, with "the"). But about those crosses ... I was lucky to "know" PIECAKEN, but I wonder if that's really a word in most people's vocabulary. Also, ew, gross, is it a pie inside a cake inside a *chicken*!?! Where is the "-en" coming from!? According the the NYT, it's "three types of pie stuffed into a cake," which sounds OK, but the name suggests nothing about "three" and still has the "chicken" part of it left over from TURDUCKEN (whence the name was borrowed by analogy—wow, just noticed TURDUCKEN has "turd" in it ... and people still eat it?). I'm not opposed to your food neologism, it's whimsical and fun, but like MAILCHIMP, it seems potentially exclusionary. Then there's BREVE, which is a fine term, one I think I've seen before, and I certainly wanted BREVE when I was staring at -EVE, but I was not at all certain. I know BREVE primarily as a coffee drink (latte variation with steamed half-and-half instead of steamed milk). As musical terms go, it's definitely on the lesser-known side, so now we've got two ITCLUB crosses that might lock people out (the two with the highest-value letters, too—PIECAKEN gives the you the "C" and BREVE the "B," which are the key elements in parsing ITCLUB). But still, this seems workable. Potentially. And yet. 

It turns out the worst (in the sense of actually unforgivable) part of this ITCLUB section is not an answer, but a clue—specifically the clue on FUEL UP (47D: Go from E to F). It's actually a great clue ... but not for this answer. I love the misdirection and general weirdness of the clue—the fact that it looks like maybe it's about musical notes. And I would've really enjoyed it if the answer had been FILL UP, because that is what the clue literally says and so that is what I wrote in. If you go to "F," you fill up. By definition. From "E" empty to "F" full. That's it. FILL UP. Nice clue, I thought ... only to discover that the answer is actually FUEL UP, which does not necessarily convey *filling* up your tank. It's a generic term for getting some gas. Go from E to F—that's a FILL UP. Fill, fill, a thousand times, fill. The "F" means "Full," not "Fuel." Respect your own damn clue. Woof x 1000. I cannot tell you how locked-in FILL UP was. And to think I was mentally *applauding* that clue. I don't know what the term is for that: when you have an answer and you think "that's a great clue for that answer!" only to find out through repeated hacking that your answer is actually wrong and the clue stinks. This is new territory for me, terminologically. Difficulty in puzzles is good, achieving it through obscure trivia is less good, botching your clues is outright bad. I need to get coffee now. Mwah. Cheers.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

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