Freshly pressed grapes before fermentation / SAT 10-26-24 / Vessel that hasn't crossed the Canadian border since 1993 / The so-called "Rocket City" of the South / Oslo Accords signatory, for short / Name on the playbill for the 1936 Salzburg Festival / When doubled, a pop nickname / Fish whose egg casings are called "mermaid's purses" / Medical breakthrough of 1954 that yielded a Nobel Prize

Constructor: Peter A. Collins

Relative difficulty: Easy

THEME: none 

Word of the Day: MUST (10A: Freshly pressed grapes before fermentation) —

Must (from the Latin vinum mustum; lit. 'young wine') is freshly crushed fruit juice (usually grape juice) that contains the skins, seeds, and stems of the fruit. The solid portion of the must is called pomace and typically makes up 7–23% of the total weight of the must. Making must is the first step in winemaking. Because of its high glucose content, typically between 10 and 15%, must is also used as a sweetener in a variety of cuisines. Unlike commercially sold grape juice, which is filtered and pasteurized, must is thick with particulate matter, opaque, and comes in various shades of brown and purple. (wikipedia)

• • •

[18A: Meaning of a finger wag]
(graphic: PBS News)

The more I look this puzzle over, the easier it looks. All the difficulty for me today came because I got suckered into starting the puzzle from below. Shoulda just stuck to the routine: NW to start (if possible), and then generally top to bottom, L to R. This ensures that the answers that I get tend to make up the *front* ends of other answers, especially longer answers. Much easier, for instance, to get VOCAL CORD from VOC- than to get RAVISHING from -ING. But today, as I say, I got drawn into the SE by my own hubris. First answer into the grid was an out-and-out gimme ... and a cross-reference:

[5D: With 43-Down, fictional coach of AFC Richmond]

Now, there's no reason I should've felt the need to check the crosses on LASSO because LASSO was indisputably correct. But some solver instinct made me check the crosses and then *stay* down in the SW—possibly because there were simply more letters in place down there, and I generally build off of the place where I have the most information to go on. Sigh. Should've stuck to the plan! Should've trusted the process! But no, I start working this thing bassackwards, which accounts for almost all the difficulty that I experienced today. I'm never making the LOUISVILLE-for-HUNTSVILLE error (28D: The so-called "Rocket City" of the South) if I come at this thing from the top. I'm never imagining that the -TY at the end of 22D: Something to wallow in (SELF-PITY) is a "STY." That central triple stack was fairly easy for me, but I bet it would've been even easier if I'd come at those long answers from their first letters instead of their last. When I play Quordle, I have a routine. Same first two guesses every time, and after that, if one of the answers isn't readily apparent, my first burner word is CHIMP (or CHOMP or CHUMP, depending on what vowels I might need to move). But sommmmmetimes I try to get cute and guess a different word based on some hunch I have about what one of the words *might* be, and I cannot tell you how many times that decision has bitten me in the ass. "GAWKY!? What was I thinking!?," I mutter as I enter the final correct answer on my ninth (and final) guess. Anyway, I do things a certain way for a reason—because it's effective. Luckily, today, my getting cute didn't cost me much because the puzzle is so easy overall. Lesson learned (and, undoubtedly, soon forgotten).

The triple stack is mostly solid, but it's also the only thing the puzzle has going for it. There are other longer answers, obviously, but they’re largely ho-hum, and then there's all this short stuff—what seemed like an awful lot of short stuff for a Saturday. Alllll the corners, all the nooks and crannies on the edges of the grid, are choked with 3s 4s and 5s. This is probably what made the puzzle feel so easy (lots of little opportunities for traction), but also what made it feel a little lackluster. As for that stack—my main issue with it is that the phrase is "DON'T WAIT UP!" That's what you'd say. The "FOR US" feels totally tacked on (even if it makes a perfectly reasonable complete phrase). The "FOR US" takes a lot of the pop out of the colloquial energy of the phrase. De-zings the expression. Also, I like ORGAN TRANSPLANT as an answer, but I don't like its clue very much (34A: Medical breakthrough of 1954 that yielded a Nobel Prize), mainly because it's so specific that I couldn't help but wonder "Which organ?" (It’s a kidney). Really wanted an actual organ there, making ORGAN a weird sort of letdown. If I hadn't had the "O" from "DO I!" (29D: Emphatic agreement)—which I'd gotten earlier from IDENTITY THIEVES—I might have guessed HEART, even though I was pretty sure the first HEART TRANSPLANT was many years later (actually, only a little over a decade later: 1967). IDENTITY THIEVES is the real winner of the triple stack today—a nice answer with a clever clue (35A: Masters of bad impersonation?). But (with slight side-eye at FOR US), the stack is totally acceptable, and—more impressively—its crosses are all admirably clean (you tend to get a lot of compromised fill in the answers holding stacks together).

The only time I got stuck, like ... stuck stuck ... was here, trying to get into the SW corner to finish up the puzzle:

I would've called a "spade" a GARDEN TOOL. Something about the phrase LAWN TOOL just wasn't clicking at all. Just getting that answer to LAWNT- took some doing, as "Spade" has so many meanings (a card suit, a famous detective, etc.). LAWNT- looked so weird to me that I genuinely wondered if I had an error. But no. How 'bout the other Down that could've led me into the SW? (27D: Vessel that hasn't crossed the Canadian border since 1993). In a word: NOPE. Couldn't make sense of it. That clue was bonkers for several reasons: first, the ambiguity of the word "vessel"; second, the oddness of the word "crossed" (trophies don't have mobility or agency); and third, the unclear implications of "1993," which had me wondering whether the clue wasn't dealing with some obscure transportation provision in NAFTA (turns out that NAFTA was signed in 1992 and took effect in 1994, so my historical memory there was somehow both perfect and wrong). Now, when I say I was "stuck" here at LAWNT- and STAN-, it's not a real stuck. It's a stubborn stuck. It's an "I should be able to get this without looking at any other clues" stuck. Because eventually I got from --OS to LOOS (36A: Pub fixtures), and there was LAWN TOOL, and there was STANLEY ... and there was STANLEY CUP. D'oh! "Vessel"! I get it now. Also, if I'd just bothered to dip into the SW corner and see what was there, I woulda gotten both MERYL and GRETA instantly, so ... in reality, I was only "stuck" because I chose to be. Because I refused to move on (for a bit). I was never properly stuck.

Puzzle notes:

• 1A: Hotel room staple (TV SET) — tough one to parse right out of the gate. Its symmetrical counterpart—also hard to parse. Sincerely thought 55A: Quite the party (BIG DO) might be a BASHO. A BASH-O. As in, "That was some swingin' BASHO!," opined the hepcat.
• 1D: Name on the playbill for the 1936 Salzburg Festival (TRAPP) — I'm guessing this is some Sound of Music s**t but "1936 Salzburg Festival" is utterly meaningless to me (yes, here we go: "In 1936, the festival featured a performance by the Trapp Family Singers, whose story was later depicted in the musical The Sound of Music (featuring a scene of the Trapp Family singing at the Felsenreitschule, but inaccurately set in 1938)" (wikipedia). I saw "1936" and "playbill" and five letters and thought GRETA (as in Garbo), making GRETA one of the unlikeliest malapops of my solving career) (a "malapop" is an answer that turns out to be wrong ... only to appear as a correct answer elsewhere in the grid) (see, today, GRETA Van Susteren of TV news).
• 30D: When doubled, a pop nickname (TAY) — your favorite ubiquitous pop star, TAY-TAY, aka Taylor Swift. One of the weirdest things about TAY, as a crossword answer, is its mysterious 11-year disappearance. The TAY is a Scottish river, and it appeared in Farrar, Weng, and Maleska puzzles with reasonable regularity, but once Shortz took over, it just ... vanished. Then suddenly, eleven years later, in 2004, it came back online, and has since appeared eighteen (18) times as the Scottish river; the first appearance of this more current pop star clue was just this year (back in June), so the TAY-TAY frame of reference is solely a Fagliano Era phenomenon. 
• 22A: Fish whose egg casings are called "mermaid's purses" (SKATE) — OK, you got me. I'm curious enough to want to see what these things look like.... whoa. Cool.

In case you didn't know, a SKATE is a kind of ray. Here's a picture of one terrorizing some poor man (from the Macclesfield Psalter (14c. England)):

[LOL the Latin text: propterea non timebimus dum turbabitur terra ("therefore we will not fear, though the earth be troubled")]

Have a monster SKATE-free day. Early voting starts today in NY, so that's what I'll be up to today (in addition to the usual Saturday lazing). See you next time.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorldld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

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"It was news to me," in online shorthand / FRI 10-25-24 / Another name for C## / Dog's post-surgery wear, familiarly / Timesaver for a breakfast chef / Nickname for an early 2000s governor of California / Flawless display of technique / Mount Rushmore's makeup / Closest confidant, informally / Misleading cognate, like the German "Gift" which actually means "poison" / Male protocol popularized by "How I Met Your Mother"

Constructor: Alex Murphy

Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium

THEME: none 

Word of the Day: piragua (46A: Main ingredient of the Puerto Rican dessert piragua) —

A piragua Spanish pronunciation: [piˈɾa.ɣwa] is a Puerto Rican shaved ice dessert, shaped like a cone, consisting of shaved ice and covered with fruit-flavored syrup. Piraguas are sold by vendors, known as piragüeros, from small, traditionally brightly-colored pushcarts offering a variety of flavors. Besides Puerto Rico, piraguas can be found in mainland areas of the United States with large Puerto Rican communities, such as New York and Central Florida.

• • •

Probably the biggest reaction this puzzle got out of me was when I literally laughed out loud at the clue on TIL (37A: "It was news to me," in online shorthand), not because the clue is particularly funny, but because I thought "wow, that is going to be news to a sizable segment of the solving population." It's a slightly cruel way to clue what is normally an ordinary (if quaint) and forgettable contraction. Well, "cruel" if you are not extremely online. Luckily, I'm at least moderately online, and so I've known TIL ("Today I Learned...") for years. And maybe I've completely misjudged the breadth of its familiarity, but it *feels* like an abbr. that will resonate with younger (and here I mean, under 60*) people far more than older people. I don't mind online initialisms in my puzzle, but it's always frustrating to encounter an initialism you've never heard of, and then, even after you've worked it out from crosses, have no idea what the initials stand for. I remember the first time I saw TIL in a tweet or whatever, and having no clue what I was looking at. IDK ("I don't know") and IRL ("In real life") are reasonably intuitive (if you've got some amount of context from the clue). But TIL, yeesh. IDK and IRL have the virtue of being truly original answers (i.e. you can't clue them any other way), whereas TIL isn't new at all—the clue just dresses it up in new clothes. To some, those "clothes" will be totally inscrutable, and if you were one of those "some," well, just know I was thinking about you while I was solving. And if you didn't know TIL, just think: you can go on social media and post this perfect post: "TIL what TIL means." Or just send it in an email to your BESTIE, if that's easier.

Speaking of BESTIE, that was my first answer today. Got it off the "T" in INT, which was wrong, but just right enough (i.e. 1/3 right) to get me going (ATT = attempt, as in "attempted pass"; a QB's completion rate is "completed passes / ATTs"). BESTIE to LOIS to DREAM, and then I saw RIBALD, which changed INT to ATT, and off I went. The middle of this puzzle is nice, but it came together awfully easily. The front ends of those long Downs are not hard to pick up, and with the first few letters in place, both TEN OUT OF TEN and OVERSELLING were cinches. I had ... not trouble, but hesitation on FALSE FRIEND (17D: Misleading cognate, like the German "Gift" which actually means "poison"), as I know the term as FALSE COGNATE ... but then I learned just now (TIL!) that these are distinct terms:

False cognates are pairs of words that seem to be cognates because of similar sounds and meaning, but have different etymologies; they can be within the same language or from different languages, even within the same family. For example, the English word dog and the Mbabaram word dog have exactly the same meaning and very similar pronunciations, but by complete coincidence. [...] The term "false cognate" is sometimes misused to refer to false friends, but the two phenomena are distinct. False friends occur when two words in different languages or dialects look similar, but have different meanings. While some false friends are also false cognates, many are genuine cognates (see False friends § Causes). For example, English pretend and French prétendre are false friends, but not false cognates, as they have the same origin. (wikipedia)

So there you go. I thought it was FRIEND, but I wasn't sure, but then crosses confirmed it, ta da. The triple stack across the middle of the grid today is really lovely. It's weird that SHAME is attached to the cone (34A: Dog's post-surgery wear, familiarly). I guess the idea is that it must be humiliating for the dog to have to suffer the distinctly uncanine indignity of wearing such a thing. It's even worse on a cat, tbh. Our cats have so far avoided cone-dom, though the dogs both had injuries of one kind or another that necessitated preventing them from gnawing, licking, etc. So sad, so adorable. You can make up all kinds of "cone" nicknames for your poor animal. Like "CONE-an, the Barbarian" or "Mrs Conington" etc. May as well have fun with it (note: your animal will not see the humor).

[Couldn't find a cone pic, so here's a cast pic (Gabby, 2008-2020)]

The SW corner was the hardest part of the grid for me, and also the least pleasant. Nothing like BROCODE to put me off my lunch (luckily, it's 5am and therefore not lunch time). Feels like the puzzle is overly fond of How I Met Your Mother, possibly as some kind of payback for having Will Shortz on the show once. Anyway, the very idea of a BROCODE is a hard pass for me (however hilarious it was on the show itself—I wouldn't know). The other off-putting thing down here was CREPE MIX (34D: Timesaver for a breakfast chef). I want to say "is that a thing?" but I suppose it is. I've just never seen or heard of it or seen anyone use it etc. so the only thing I'm thinking when I see CREPE is PAN. A CREPE PAN is very much a thing. A familiar thing that I have seen. I've never made crêpes, and when my mom made them she didn't use a mix (I don't think), so ... shrug. No idea about the Mozart opera (47D: "La Clemenza di ___" (Mozart opera) (TITO)), and no idea what was supposed to follow SEX at 56A: What might be included in an act of congress (SEX TOY). Ah, the old "congress" pun; an oldie but ... well, an oldie, for sure. Luckily, Lily TOMLIN was a gimme (god bless her), and she gave me the leverage I needed to pry that corner open.

D NATURAL is a funny one if you know nothing about music because you could easily find yourself wondering what the hell the clue has to do with DNA (that was certainly where I thought the answer was going before I looked at the clue, and even for a second or two afterwards, frankly) (52A: Another name for C##). C sharp sharp = D.  Sharp the sharp and you're back at the natural. That SE corner was generally easy, though I definitely misspelled KRONER at my first pass (KRONOR!) (57A: Scandinavian capital) ("capital" as in money, another clue misdirection oldie). Hey wait, I didn't misspell it! KRONOR is the plural of "krona," the basic monetary unit of Sweden (and Iceland). What is KRONER, then? ... [looks it up] ... Aw jeez, what are you doing, Scandinavia? Why do Denmark and Norway spell it "krone / kroner"? That seems perverse. You all should get on the same page, because AS IT IS, it's unnecessarily confusing.

Bullets:

• 22A: Broadway's Salonga (LEA) — misspelled it LIA, the only trouble I had in that NE corner. Somehow, though, I couldn't drop down easily from that corner, as neither DRAMEDY (26D: It'll make you laugh, it'll make you cry) nor PLAZA (30D: Square) computed at first. Brutally vague clue on PLAZA. This is my preferred PLAZA clue at the moment:

• 7D: Suck up (ABSORB) — boo. You mean "Soak up." This is an awkward attempt at misdirection. Again I say, boo.
• 26A: Where the lions sleep tonight, presumably (DENS) — boo. Save this clue for singular DEN, so you can at least get the song phrasing right. It's "the lion sleeps tonight," not the "lions sleep tonight." Again I say, boo.

• 36A: Play place (ARENA) — I wanted not to like this, as I've never seen a play in an ARENA, but then I realized "play" is just a general term, not a theatrical performance. For instance, people "play" football in an ARENA. So it's fine.
• 7D: Nickname for an early 2000s governor of California (ARNIE) — as in Arnold, as in Schwarzenegger. Slightly hilarious at the time, but the dude looks positively presidential now.
• 41D: Like firstborn children vis-à-vis second-born children, statistically (TALLER) — I'm 6'3" and my sister is a mere 5'7", so this one checks out.

Thanks for reading. See you next time.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

*I'll be 55 in November—just trying to extend my "youth" a few more years, please indulge  

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

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