Discontinued Mitsubishi sports sedan, informally / SAT 3-2-24 / Currency in the Legend of Zelda / Event of 1/31/2020 / Performance featuring masklike kumadori makeup / Rapper/singer with the 2005 hit "Temperature" / Comedian who played Louie the Lilac on "Batman" / Cute images with captions like "If it fits, I sits"

Constructor: Natan Last

Relative difficulty: Easy-Challenging (80% cake ... and then the southeast corner)

THEME: none 

Word of the Day: ALLIE B. Latimer (2D: ___ B. Latimer, civil rights activist in the National Women's Hall of Fame) —

Allie B. Latimer (born February 16, 1928, in Coraopolis, Pennsylvania) was the first woman and the first African American to serve as General Counsel of a major United States federal agency. In her work to bring the government into compliance with the Civil Rights Act, she founded and developed Federally Employed Women (FEW) and worked to end gender discrimination in public sector jobs throughout her 40+ year career. According to the National Women's Hall of Fame, “FEW’s many accomplishments and activities have impacted the federal workplace and contributed to improved working conditions for all.” [...] 

• • •

[Don't look at me, Alfie, you're
on your own]

WEDDING RINGS—that's it. That's the story of this puzzle in two words. The tragic story of this puzzle. And things were going so well for me! I was having a delightful spin around the grid, pointing in recognition at so many things I love. "Hey there, poetry! How ya doin'?! Baseball! My man, what is up? Ooh, look, STUNT DOGS, hello buddies! And .. wait ... holy cow, is that ... are those cats!? Sitting in boxes! Oh my god I gotta go say hi to them!" Just enjoying the hell out of myself, frankly. So pleased, so ... well, confident. Once I got a little bit into that fat middle section, I dropped WEDDING RINGS like it was nothing, casually. I didn't even bother following it down to the bottom of the grid to check crosses because, I mean, WEDDING RINGS, what else was it gonna be? (18D: Altar exchange). It was like I put a stake in the SE corner and thought "I'll be back to finish you off later." And so the middle went down and the SW went down and finally I headed over to the SE corner to close things out ... and promptly got flattened. Now, if I'd, say, paid attention to the informal names of bygone sedans (?) or played Zelda, ever (ha) (39D: Currency in The Legend of Zelda = RUPEE), or could've pulled the name of the artist on a two-decade-old rap song out of my hat (I had a different SEAN in my head the whole time, ugh), I might have realized the RINGS problem more quickly, and made a reasonably expeditious if not terribly graceful exit from this puzzle. But no. Instead I invented an informal name for the bygone sedan (the EXO!) (46D: Discontinued Mitsubishi sports sedan, informally), convinced myself that an English word means something it does not mean (EXIGENT!) (48A: Clear), and ... and ... and ... sputtered.

It seems hard to believe that I could get so far into the puzzle and not just ... close it out! It's not like I had nothing down there. I was able to guess DORSET (50A: ___ Horn (British sheep breed)) and drive TENANT through that section (35D: Lease signatory) and from there pick up TSK and TATA and KATY and STIHL!!! (32D: Big name in power tools)

But so intractable did the resulting rat's nest of letters prove that I knew I had something wrong. The problem was, I had no idea what, and so, masterfully, I pulled out ... STIHL! [Exceedingly deep sigh]. If only I could've seen TAX CUT!!! (31D: Stereotypical campaign promise). But that was not to be. At some point ... no idea how long it took me ... I started to pull things back to the studs (keep in mind—I thought RINGS *was* a stud). Out went the "X" in EXO/EXIGENT and then by some miracle EVIDENT sprang to mind for [Clear] and I thought, but it can't be, that would mean RINGS is ... wr- ... RING is wr- ... wrong!? EVIDENT to ***BANDS*** to all the dominoes falling in quick succession, the end.

My main issue with the "spare tire" thing was I didn't really think they were going to make a fat joke. So even though fat-around-the-gut was the first thing I thought of for "spare tire," I kept retreating back to literal, boot-of-the-car spare tire in my mind. But the real problem all along was RINGS. I could blame the rapper or the video game, but all that stuff fell into place when I made the simple (yet nearly impossible) move from RINGS to BANDS. The rest of the puzzle? My joyful romp? It's a misty memory now. Not a false memory, though. It was definitely a good time while it lasted.

[aka Civilization and Its Discontents]

It did take a little pushing to get into that fat center of the grid. I wasn't entirely sure about INSTANT WIN, given how the clue was phrased (didn't seem like a "yield" to me, exactly) (6D: Yield of some scratch-off tickets), and so I kinda held back there. I also had BLOOD VESSELS in there before the obvious "MAD" forced me to reconsider (37A: "We're all ___ here. I'm ___. You're ___": Cheshire Cat). I had some trouble getting all those long central Acrosses from their back ends, but once the STREAMS part of BLOODSTREAMS and the WEDDING part of WEDDING RINGS (argh) went in, I got SOUND BITE and the center toppled over easily. NUNHOOD! Can't decide if that's terrible or my favorite thing in the grid! If you can have PRIESTHOOD, why not NUNHOOD!?

Bullet points:

• 7A: Dock ___, pitcher who claimed to have thrown a no-hitter on LSD in 1970 (ELLIS) — there's an entertaining documentary about this on Netflix. Or there was. Looks like it's not there anymore. You can watch it free (with ads) on Tubi. It's called "No No: A Dockumentary." Recommended.
• 23A: Talk trashed? (SLUR) — really thought this clue was insulting people with speech impediments ("you talk like trash, loser!") but then realized that "trashed" here meant "drunk"; when you're drunk you might SLUR your words. Fair enough.
• 38A: Event of 1/31/2020 (BREXIT) — I remember the vote. That happened in the summer some time (2016, I think). The actual Day Of ... total unknown to me. Jan. 31, 2020, you say? I believe you.
• 14D: Comedian who played Louie the Lilac on "Batman" (BERLE) — wow, reaching back for this one. I had no idea Milton BERLE was ever on the Adam West "Batman" TV show! That is the "Batman" we're talking about, right? They didn't bring BERLE back in hologram form for the 2022 "Batman" movie, did they!? 

• 12A: Place for some nonstarters (BULLPEN) — in baseball, relief pitchers (i.e. non-starters) come out of the BULLPEN (a kind of holding room typically found beyond the outfield, behind the wall)
• 13A: Currency that replaced the British West African pound (LEONE) — Crosswordese to the rescue! I have no idea where, exactly, this is a currency, but I know that it *is* a currency because ... crosswords! (It will perhaps shock you, as it did me, to learn that the LEONE is the currency of ... Sierra LEONE)

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

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Shade akin to peridot / FRI 3-1-24 / First syllable of a rhyming film genre / Arpad ___ creator of an eponymous chess rating system / Of all the noises known to man, it is the most expensive, per an old quip / Challenge for some funny video compilations

Constructor: Julian Xiao

Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium

THEME: none 

Word of the Day: Arpad ELO (22A: Arpad ELO, creator of an eponymous chess rating system) —

Arpad Emmerich Elo (né Élő Árpád Imre; August 25, 1903 – November 5, 1992) was an American-Hungarian physics professor who created the Elo rating system for two-player games such as chess. 

Born in Egyházaskesző, Kingdom of Hungary, he moved to the United States with his parents in 1913. He was a professor of physics at Marquette University in Milwaukee and a chess master. By the 1930s he was the strongest chess player in Milwaukee, at the time one of the nation's leading chess cities. He won the Wisconsin State Championship eight times, and was the 11th person inducted into the World Chess Hall of Fame. (wikipedia)

• • •

This one wasn't really showing me much. Kind of a placeholder. It skews a little quaint and old-fashioned ([Canoodle] / NECK, "THEM'S THE FACTS," that interminable "old quip" about OPERA, a host of overfamiliar short answers, etc.), and the cluing was frequently either flat or irksome. The worst part of the cluing was that the awful twin-clue convention was used not once not twice but thrice. The first time, it's used to predictably off and awkward effect, and right up front! Right out of the gate! Why? There's nothing "fun" about a double "conductor" clue that leads to CIRCUITS (?) and CUING (?). Yes, you have tapped into that astounding linguistic fact that "conductors" can mean multiple things! But [The works of many conductors] is such an awkward way of cluing CIRCUITS. What's the idea? Are you trying to misdirect people toward orchestra conductors (rather than electrical conductors)? Composers are the ones with "works," not conductors, although I guess recordings might be considered a conductor's "works." The fact that I'm having to think about this only reinforces my sense that the clue here is trying too hard. And then the puzzle goes and doubles down on the whole "conductor" business with CUING? (1D: Task for a conductor). I mean, yes, conductors do "cue" players in various ways, but CUING feels forced. Defensible, but not great because it's trying to do something no one actually cares about, i.e. echoing the 1-Across clue. You've also got two (2) "word found backward inside another similar word" clues (for ALOHA (HOLA) and TUNA (NUT))—fine when I saw it the first time, boring when I saw it again. But wait, there's more! You've also got two (2) "let's try to make bad fill interesting" clues (for SCI (Fi) and ROM (com)) (both clued as [First syllable of a rhyming film genre]). 

The reason I am focused upon this dumb c(l)uing minutiae today is there's not much to focus on in the marquee stuff, which just isn't marquee enough. The long Downs are all adequate, but not bringing much heat. I guess maybe golfers might chuckle knowingly at THREE-PUTT (12D: What might turn you red on a green). Who knows what golfers will do? I don't care about the game at all, and still that was the most interesting of the Downs for me. As for the long Acrosses, the 8s in the corners are very ho-hum, and then you've got the triple-stack across the middle. "THEM'S THE FACTS" has its charm, I guess, if you like faux-folksiness (fauxksiness!), and "ARE WE THERE YET?" is certainly an old (certainly clichéd) backseat refrain, but what the hell is TRY NOT TO LAUGH??? A "challenge"? Maybe, *maybe* if you'd clued this as an introduction to the revelation of an embarrassing fact, it would be OK. But as clued, it's awful. NOT LAUGHING is (maybe) the "challenge," but "TRY NOT TO LAUGH" is an impossible-to-imagine dare. It's a spoken phrase that needs a darer. Is someone saying this to me as they hand me their phone to show me a blooper reel, or cat videos? Bizarre. Not a phrase that stands alone well at all, and certainly not with this clue.*

Aside from the initial CIRCUITS / CUING awkwardness, there was only one part of the grid that offered any pushback, and (tragically) it involves some of the grid's weakest fill—GOSEE x/w ADSPOT. ADSPOT is on-its-face bad, a commercial redundancy that only biznessspeak speakers could love (50A: Social media post labeled "Sponsored," e.g.). I thought the clue was gonna point to some neologism along the lines of SPONCON ("sponsored content"), but all I got was ADSPOT, blech. As for GOSEE ... "modeling lingo"? I had no idea there was such a thing (44D: Open call, in modeling lingo). I believe the clue—that it's a real thing. And the clue is at least trying to make GOSEE interesting. But in general I'm not a fan of deliberately adding difficulty to the parts of the grid that are least attractive. You want people to linger on the Good stuff, not the bad (in this case, more mediocre than truly bad, to be fair). I think most of what I'm annoyed about today falls under the category of bad editing, not bad constructing (I have to finish editing a puzzle for the forthcoming These Puzzles Fund Abortion 4 benefit collection today, so I maybe jinxing myself here ... or just pre-yelling at myself)

[Saw this same song—with this same clue—in another puzzle this past week, which is the only reason I knew it (59A: 2019 #1 hit by Shawn Mendes and Camila Cabello). I remembered it because in the other puzzle I had it as "SEDORITA" and wondered what that might mean ... turns out I had SHAVED where I should've had SHAVEN; the one upside of screwing up is the answers involved tend to stick your brain]

Other things:

• 38A: Shade akin to peridot (LIME) — I could've told you that peridot was a color, but apparently I could not have told you what that color was, or was akin to. I wrote ROSE here at first :(
• 3D: Nina of fashion (RICCI) — my first answer in the grid. Do you ever feel like your vast storehouse of crosswordese is a form of cheating? That's how it felt to get my first toehold in the puzzle with Nina RICCI, about whom I know nothing.
• 8D: One who has ways of making you talk ... (SPEECH THERAPIST) —again, what is going on with the cluing? What is that mysterious ellipsis doing there at the end (...) and why (dear god) would you evoke torture in your clue? Even cartoonish, TV-and-movie-bad-guy torture? 
• 35D: Simple bucket (LAY-UP) — they got me here. Was really looking for a bucket-shaped bucket here, not slang for a made shot in basketball.
• 18D: Luxury brand ... or a non-luxury option (COACH) — my favorite wrong answer of the day. I had C--CH and decided to go with the non-luxury sleeping option: COUCH. "Hmm, I'm not familiar with the COUCH luxury brand. Do they make handbags? Scarves? Funny that their name is so close to ... hey!" There should be an anti-luxury brand called COUCH. A perfume that smells like NACHO chips, something along those lines.

End of February. There were four 4️⃣ solo woman constructors this month! Four more than last month! Hurray?! 2024 totals now

Women 4
Men … 41

🎉😕

15 collabs so far this year;those skew M as well, but not nearly as bad, obvs

M/W: 8
M/M: 5
W/W: 2

— Rex Parker 🐈🐾☕️🐾🐈 (@rexparker) February 29, 2024

It's the end of February, so it's time for my Puzzles of the Month feature: three of the best NYTXW I solved this month: two themed, one themeless

February 2024 Puzzles of the Month:

Themed: 

• Sam Donaldson, "OPPOSITES ATTRACT" (Thursday, Feb. 8, 2024)
• Teddy Katz and Rich Katz, "DOUBLE OR NOTHING" (Thursday, Feb. 15, 2024)

Themeless: 

• Carolyn Davies Lynch and Jeff Chen (ROCKET SCIENCE / BRAIN SURGERY) (Saturday, Feb. 3, 2024)

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld 

*Someone in the comments said TRY NOT TO LAUGH is a whole category of video on YouTube, which, if true, makes it more legit as fill, but endears it to me not at all

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

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