Rapper with the 2010 hit "No Hands" / WED 5-24-23 / Khmer temple / Whoops in a text / Yuzuru ___, first skater to successfully land a quadruple loop in competition / Funky bit of noodling / Academic acronym / Feeding apparatus at a petting zoo

Constructor: Kavin Pawittranon and Nijah Morris

Relative difficulty: Easy (except, in my case, for the SE corner)

THEME: PAC-MAN (68A: Where to find the starts of 17-, 28-, 45- and 58-Across) — first words of the theme answers are associated with the iconic video game:

Theme answers:

• PELLET DISPENSER (17A: Feeding apparatus at a petting zoo)
• GHOST OF A CHANCE (28A: Slightest opportunity)
• FRUIT OF THE LOOM (45A: Big name in underwear)
• WAKA FLOCKA FLAME (58A: Rapper with the 2010 hit "No Hands")

Word of the Day: WAKA FLOCKA FLAME (58A) —

Juaquin James Malphurs (born May 31, 1986), known professionally as Waka Flocka Flame, is an American rapper. Signing to 1017 Brick Squad and Warner Bros. Records in 2009, he became a mainstream artist with the release of his singles "O Let's Do It", "Hard in da Paint", and "No Hands" (featuring Roscoe Dash and Wale), with the latter peaking at number 13 on the US Billboard Hot 100. His debut studio album Flockaveli was released in 2010. His second studio album Triple F Life: Friends, Fans & Family was released in 2012 and was preceded by the lead single "Round of Applause" (featuring Drake). [...] In April 2015 Waka Flocka did a collaboration campaign with Rolling Stone magazine in which he pretended to run for president. [...] In April 2015, Malphurs announced that he was running for president, despite the fact he was below the constitutionally required age of 35, as he was only 30 by the time of the 2016 United States presidential election. His platform included legalizing marijuana, raising the minimum hourly wage to $15, and creating better trade opportunities for school students. His other proposals included banning dogs from restaurants and making it illegal for people with shoe sizes above 13 to walk on the street. He also seemed to be dismissive of Congress, and had an anti-war stance. Former professional wrestler Ric Flair was his running mate. (wikipedia)

• • •

Whether this puzzle works or not rests entirely on WAKA FLOCKA FLAME, which is ... a choice. I mean, it's going to delight some, for sure—it's an original, grid-spanning answer that comes from fairly contemporary (as opposed to olden) popular culture, and it's got the puzzle's best element in it: the WAKA sound. I mean, the theme is a complete dud without the WAKA. The WAKA is the most inventive part, by a long shot. I don't even associate PELLETs or FRUIT with PAC-MAN that strongly (or maybe I just never thought of the dots as "pellets")—whatever specific qualities that game has, the only ones that have stuck with me beyond the little yellow guy himself and the maze structure he has to navigate are the ghosts and the WAKA WAKA WAKA sound (which I've never seen spelled out, or even thought about spelling out, which is another reason having WAKA as the final theme element is so delightful—it's surprising *and* on-the-nose). The down side of putting all your eggs in the WAKA FLOCKA FLAME basket, though, is that some sizable segment of the solving population won't have any idea who that is, and, what's (kinda) worse, won't have any real way to even *infer* the name, as no part of WAKA FLOCKA FLAME is exactly ... namelike. 

So I've written a Lot about how important it is to handle your names—how all kinds of names should appear in puzzles, regardless of whether they are universally famous, but that the puzzlemaker should always have an eye on that part of the solving population that *doesn't* share their particular cultural demographic, and make sure that those folks are brought along for the ride. This is typically done by watching *all* the crosses on the name in question and making sure they're fair, and that you're not essentially creating two puzzles: an easy / fun puzzle for those who know the same pop culture you know, and a challenging slog for those who don't. Here, I think the crosses are all fair, but so *much* of the puzzle rides on this answer—it's not just long, it's the punchline—that I think that it's going to be divisive along predictable cultural lines, with younger solvers appreciating it far more than older solvers. Essentially your love of the puzzle is going to depend on how you feel about the name WAKA FLOCKA FLAME, and a lot of that is going to be dependent on whether you knew him in the first place. It's a lot of weight to put on one name. We'll see how it plays. I like it—as I say, the theme is nothing without it—but I *knew* the WAKA FLOCKA part and *still* got brought to a screeching, jarring halt in the SE. I don't have much patience for the "I don't want any rapper names in my puzzle!" crowd, but I'll have at least a little sympathy for those who struggle with this particular name today.


WAKA FLOCKA FLAME isn't the only name the puzzle throws at you today. There's also HANYU (9D: Yuzuru ___, first skater to successfully land a quadruple loop in competition), totally unknown to me, but in that case, the answer is short and all the crosses are easy and so it's only a small bump in the road. This makes it easier to appreciate the new (to me) name. I was a bit worried about the general quality of the fill at the start of this one, as that NW corner really did not bode well:

[Kinda disappointed when first themer turned out not to be PELLE THE CONQUEROR]

 

No one answer is particularly terrible, but when you get AREOLA LOL OLE WAT SOL OREO in a big wad like that, right up front, I think it's reasonable to be worried. But the crosswordiness never gets that thick again. The grid isn't exactly sizzling, but the quality levels out, and EIGHT BALL and ASTROTURF and especially SAFE WORD (!!!) (38D: Something agreed upon by consenting sexual partners) are nice long anchors. One of the reasons the end of the puzzle (for me, the SE) was so jarring is that the rest of the puzzle was (generally) sooooo easy. I had to navigate around HANYU, but other than that, the only clue that slowed me down even a little was 23A: One who is one, e.g. (BABY). I was thinking of something ... I dunno, spiritual? Like ... one ... with the universe? It's such an oddly enigmatic clue for something that is also absolutely literal and straightforward ("one who is one ... year old!"). But the only part of this puzzle I even remember solving is the SE—getting stuck will tend to bring things into focus that way. I could not remember FLAME part of his name to save my life. Me: "WAKA FLOCKA ... there's more? WAKA FLOCKA ... JONES? That seems unlikely ..." I wrote in TSA and LTD before FAA (61D: Sky safety org.) and LLC (62D: Inc. cousin), which immediately gummed up the whole SE section. Thought the "mangle" in 55D: Mangle, e.g. (MAIM) was the old-fashioned TOOL people used to use to wring clothes dry after washing, didn't know people still texted MY B (!?) (short for "my bad") (55A: "Whoops," in a text), *and* I misread 65A: Spiteful feeling (MALICE) as [Spiritual feeling] (!?), so yeeeeesh the wheels really came off down there. I mean, I put the wheels back on without *too* much struggle, but compared to how quickly and smoothly I moved through the rest of the grid, this part was a disaster. But I worked it out. Hope you worked it out too, and that the WAKA (waka waka) bit made you smile at least a little. If not, that's cool too. See you tomorrow.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

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German sunrise direction / TUE 5-23-23 / Dada artist Jean / Poets + 10 = Serves drinks / Karate-like exercise program

Constructor: Lee Taylor

Relative difficulty: Medium (normal Tuesday—themers took some thought, all else easy)

THEME: Clue + [number] = other clue — add a number to (the middle of) one answer to get the actual answer:

Theme answers:

• BARTENDS (16A: Poets + 10 = Serves drinks)
• NEWS EVENT (35A: Small amphibian + 7 = Story worth covering)
• STONE AGE (58A: Phase + 1 = Ancient period)
• BONINESS (18D: Supervisor + 9 = Quality that makes a fish hard to eat)
• "IT WORKED!" (28D: Annoyed + 2 = "Success!")

Word of the Day: LICHENS (29A: Growths on rocks and bark) —

A lichen (/ˈlaɪkən/ LY-kən, UK also /ˈlɪtʃən/ LITCH-ən) is a composite organism that arises from algae or cyanobacteria living among filaments of multiple fungi species in a mutualistic relationship. Lichens are important actors in nutrient cycling and act as producers which many higher trophic feeders feed on, such as reindeer, gastropods, nematodes, mites, and springtails. Lichens have properties different from those of their component organisms. They come in many colors, sizes, and forms and are sometimes plant-like, but are not plants. They may have tiny, leafless branches (fruticose); flat leaf-like structures (foliose); grow crust-like, adhering tightly to a surface (substrate) like a thick coat of paint (crustose); have a powder-like appearance (leprose); or other growth forms. (wikipedia)

• • •

I love cryptic crosswords, which may be why solving this particular puzzle was so deeply unsatisfying. It's like an awkward, remedial cryptic, phrased in mathematical terms. A normal cryptic clue for BARTENDS would be something like [Serves drinks for poets around 10], where you've got the literal part ("Serves drinks") and the figurative part ("poets around ten") combined into a plausible (if loopy-sounding) overall clue. [Big story: Gingrich swallows seven!] = NEWS EVENT. Something like that. The solver has to look at the clue and figure out which part is the literal and which part is the figurative and put the answer together from there. Here, though, you can clearly see that one side of the equation is the literal. There it is. You don't have to do any work at all if you don't want to. Just ignore half the equation. Or, you can "add" a number to a different answer, if you want, I guess, but who cares? I found the themer clues tricky only to the extent that I was distracted by the first half of the equations. There's nothing clever at all about the wording of the clues. All the delightful wordplay of a good cryptic clue has been swapped out for ... mathplay!? Solving this was actually like having a cryptic clue *explained* to me. And not even explained well, because the numbers are more engulfed than simply added. And what do the numbers even mean? I mean, what's the rationale? Do they ... add up to something? Why these numbers? I guess it's because these are the numbers you can do this trick with, i.e. good luck adding "SIX" to anything and getting a plausible final answer. But the whole thing feels pointless. All it did was make me wish I was doing a proper cryptic (my favorites are the American Values Club cryptic (eds. Stella Zawistowski, Francis Heaney and Claire Muscat) and Out of Left Field (by Joshua Kosman and Henri Picciotto). 

I like the grid quite a bit, though. Chuck the math parts and make it a Tuesday themeless, and you're in business. The largish corners are (mostly) full of solid, colorful answers. I don't love LICHENS in the plural, and there's a reasonable amount of short overfamiliar gunk I could do without, but overall the grid has a lot of variety and bounce. ZIP, even. Got slowed down only a few times today. Parsing "IT WORKED" took my brain a few swings ("I ... TWERKED?"), and I couldn't remember how to spell NYONG'O (specifically, I couldn't remember the first letter). I also misspelled LICOLNS, thusly. I got UNTAKEN easily enough, but something about that "word" feels absurd. Frost wrote "The Road Not Taken," not "The Road UNTAKEN." You'd say "is this seat taken?" of course, but you wouldn't say "no, it is UNTAKEN," or "there are lots of UNTAKEN seats up front"—you'd say "open" or "empty" or something like that. The seat angle is somehow not working for me here. I hope that the last movie in the "Taken" series (so ... the 17th installment, made when Liam Neeson is 90) is called "UNTAKEN." That would be cool. And then you'd have a good clue for UNTAKEN.

I don't think any clues need explaining today, so I'm off to make coffee and bother my cats. See you tomorrow.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

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