Novel parodied by Umberto Eco's "Granita" / THU 4-25-24 / City in the Pacific Northwest with a Russian-sounding name / Spider-Man adversary played by Jamie Foxx / Plant with lance-shaped leaves / Longtime judge on "Britain's Got Talent" and "America's Got Talent"/ Something checkered in New York's past? / Detroit ___, nickname for Malcolm X / Powerful card in the game President

Constructor: Hanh Huynh

Relative difficulty: Easy (after you get the trick)

THEME: HOLY COW (61A: "Wow!" ... or a phonetic hint to this puzzle's theme) — the letter string "COW" appears three times inside longer answers; each time, the letters in "COW" are separated by circled squares which represent "HOLE"s—those squares are literal holes (i.e. empty space) in the "COW" answers (so that you get a bunch of "hole-y COWs"!), but actual letters ("H,O,L,E") in the Down crosses:

The "hole"-y COWs:

• SC O WL (14A: Dirty look)
• SIMON C O WELL (21A: Longtime judge on "Britain's Got Talent" and "America's Got Talent")
• MOSC O W, IDAHO (46A: City in the Pacific Northwest with a Russian-sounding name)

The "hole"-y crosses (!):

• CHOLER (3D: Ire)
• WHOLE NUMBERS (4D: 1, 2, 3, etc.)
• PEEP HOLES (7D: Low-tech security measures on some doors)
• CORNHOLE (9D: Popular backyard game)
• HOLES OUT (47D: Sinks the putt)
• WHOLESALE (44D: Not retail)

Word of the Day: MOSCOW, IDAHO (46A) —

Moscow (/ˈmɒskoʊ/ MOSS-koh) is a city and the county seat of Latah County, Idaho. Located in the North Central region of the state along the border with Washington, it had a population of 25,435 at the 2020 census. Moscow is the home of the University of Idaho, the state's land-grant institution and primary research university.

It is the principal city in the Moscow, Idaho Micropolitan Statistical Area, which includes all of Latah County. The city contains over 60% of the county's population, and while the university is Moscow's dominant employer, the city also serves as an agricultural and commercial hub for the Palouse region.

Along with the rest of the Idaho Panhandle, Moscow is in the Pacific Time Zone. The elevation of its city center is 2,579 feet (786 m) above sea level. Two major highways serve the city, passing through the city center: US-95 (north-south) and ID-8 (east-west). The Pullman–Moscow Regional Airport, four miles (6 km) west, provides limited commercial air service. The local newspaper is the Moscow-Pullman Daily News. (wikipedia)

• • •

Woo hoo! If it makes me happy, it can't be that bad, and this one made me smile like I haven't smiled (at a puzzle) in a while, from the first "aha" ("Those squares are HOLEs! ... OK, why?") through the interesting themers and relatively clean grid to the revealer and the final "aha" ("HOLE"-y COWs!? ... omg, so dumb, I Love It!"). The revealer Really did its thing for me today. It really really paid off not trying to think too hard about the theme as I was solving (beyond the "HOLE"-goes-in-circle part). "All will be revealed," I assumed, and boy was I right. And then, like some kind of bonus blessing from the crossword gods, I followed the revealer with a trio (!?) of "?" clues All Of Which Landed: 

• 42D: Like like like this clue clue clue ... (ECHOEY)
• 37D: Something checkered in New York's past? (TAXI) 
• 44A: Wicked stuff? (WAX) (think candles)

OK that first one doesn't actually have a "?" in it, but you see what I mean—it tries to get cute ... and absolutely pulls it off. It's hard enough for the puzzle to get one of those wacky "?"-type clues to land most days, so three!? Right on the heels of a perfect reveal!? My lucky day. If this isn't one of my April "Puzzles of the Month," well, that means we're going to have some amazing puzzles in the next week, because right now this is my favorite themed puzzle of the month by a pretty decent margin (with Kwong's "A STAR IS 'B' OR 'N'" puzzle from last Thursday a worthy runner-up).

The hardest part was getting started, which, as I've said many times, is typical, especially with a tricky gimmick to SUSS out. 1A: Snap was probably the hardest answer in the whole (!) puzzle for me. I had JIF. Then wanted SEC. Then put Las Vegas on Mountain Time (MST) and tried MIN. Strike three. But I wasn't out! At some point the P from PST (Las Vegas's actual time zone) got me PIC ("gah, a camera snap!"), but the circled squares were still a mystery. From THRONES I was able to get enough of the puzzle to see NUMBERS, which allowed me to infer the "HOLE" (for WHOLE NUMBERS), which (finally) allowed me to see CHOLER! That's some olde-timey ire right there! You rarely see CHOLER outside older literature and vocabulary tests (thanks, Mr. Berglund!). So, a little work to HOE out those "HOLE"s (in "SCOWL"), and then a tentative "HOLE"-ing out of the "HOLE"s in SIMON COWELL, and when those "HOLE"s worked, I knew the remaining circled squares would also be "HOLE"s and the grid opened right up. What had been a medium-tough puzzle all of a sudden became quite easy, and I got some of that Whoosh feeling I usually look forward to on Fridays, sailing through SADDLES and SIMON COWELL, and ELECTRO and LOLITA, to end up in MOSCOW, IDAHO, where I have been before—my mom grew up in St. Maries, ID (also in the Idaho Panhandle) and at least one of her two sisters (my aunts) (obviously) went to college in Moscow (at the U. of Idaho). My aunt Nancy lived for a time in Lewiston, ID, which is only 30 miles or so south of Moscow. This is all to say that seeing MOSCOW, IDAHO in the puzzle made me happy in a way it is unlikely to have made most of you happy. You don't see the Idaho panhandle in puzzles much—Coeur d'ALENE sometimes, maybe—so it was delightful to see it brought into the thematic spotlight here. Despite not having spent a lot of time there, it's a part of the world I feel close to and am very fond of. 

Were there trouble spots? After getting the first HOLEs, not a lot. I hit the laptop brand (28D: Laptop brand) with only the "L" in place and had this flash of "&$^%, how should I know?" but then not more than a second or two later my brain was like "easy, buddy, you know this, it's LENOVO." Me: "Wait, how do I know that? I've never seen a LENOVO laptop in my life." Brain: "Who knows what you know? It's a mess in here, frankly. Just keep going!" I did not know (or forgot) that Malcolm X was ever nicknamed Detroit RED, but the rest of that NE corner was so easy that it hardly mattered (13D: Detroit ___, nickname for Malcolm X). I didn't really know the Spider-Man adversary in question, but I could infer ELECTRO pretty well after the first few letters (I like it—it's got good ... energy) (24D: Spider-Man adversary played by Jamie Foxx). I've got Carmen MCRAE on WAX in my house, so no trouble there (45A: Jazz singer Carmen). Only DETOO and LESSEE made me scowl (!) today. Otherwise, this was close to an ideal Thursday experience. Could've been a little tougher, but it's hard to complain about the difficulty level with a puzzle that sticks the landing like this. I have wondered aloud "Where have the delightful puzzles gone!?" Well—found one. See you next time.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld 

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

Read more...

Furniture retailer with an arboreal name / WED 4-24-24 / Tragic NASA mission of 1967 / Lewis who sang the theme for "Avatar" / Classic computer game in MoMA's video game collection

Constructor: Jeffrey Martinovic

Relative difficulty: Medium

THEME: LATERAL SYMMETRY (62A: Feature of this puzzle's grid and the answers to the six starred clues) — both the grid and the indicated answers (that is, THE INDIVIDUAL LETTERS THAT MAKE UP THE THEME ANSWERS) have lateral (mirror) symmetry along a vertical axis 

Theme answers:

• MAUI, HAWAII (3D: *Home to Haleakala National Park)
• "WAIT, WHAT?" (4D: *"Hold on, repeat that?")
• "MWAHAHA!" (45D: *[Evil laugh])
• MAXIMUM (46D: *Calculus calculation)
• "MAMMA MIA!" (10D: *Musical whose name is an Italian exclamation)
• HOITY-TOITY (11D: *Highfalutin)

Word of the Day: WEST ELM (4A: Furniture retailer with an arboreal name) —

 

West Elm (stylized as west elm) is a retail store that features contemporary furniture designs and other housewares. It is a wholly owned subsidiary of Williams-Sonoma, Inc. There are currently stores in the United States, Canada, Mexico, Australia, United Kingdom, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. Customers are able to shop in-store, online, or through a catalog by telephone. The larger products such as sofas and beds are only displayed in stores for customers to see and feel in-person, likening West Elm to a pure catalog/online retail company. (wikipedia)

• • •

Again, I don't understand why this is an idea you'd want to build a theme around. Who cares or notices that (capital) letters of the alphabet have LATERAL SYMMETRY? And as for the grid ... crossword grids have LATERAL SYMMETRY all the time. All. The. Time. It's not a remarkable feature. Not in the least. So you've got a totally ordinary architectural element and then you've tied your hands behind your back and limited yourself to just ... [counting] ... eleven letters of the alphabet for your theme answers, all so you could go "look, those letters have LATERAL SYMMETRY?" When I say I don't understand, I mean I don't understand how anyone thought any of this would be fun or interesting from a solver's point of view. I mean, is anyone, literally anyone, excited to see MAUI, HAWAII? MAUI, HAWAII? Oh, that Maui! I was thinking maybe Maui, North Dakota, but of course, MAUI, HAWAII, I see it now (/sarcasm). I don't mind the other themers at all—they're nice answers, some of them—but do I care that their letters have LATERAL SYMMETRY? I do not. Also, did you know that there are no other Down answers besides the themers that have the same lateral symmetry? I would say this is nice attention to detail, and it is, but it's a detail that a. no one is going to notice, and b. potentially compromises the grid, i.e. your best choice for an answer at any given point when building your grid might, in fact, be a laterally symmetrical one, but for this theme, if the answer is a non-thematic Down, you'd now have to go off of that best choice if it were in fact laterally symmetrical ... and for reasons no one cares about. And if you think avoiding lateral symmetry is easy, notice that the Acrosses have HAM, and TAU, and WOAH ... all of them composed of laterally symmetrical letters. This is all to say that a lot of careful attention had to go into making a tree fall in the woods that no one is there to hear until you call out to them and say "hey guys, listen to that tree falling!? Hear it!?" Erm, kinda? Not really.

I say EWW to ERM. I say EWW to EWW too, in that I was told only yesterday that the spelling is actually just a two-letter "EW." Does the puzzle think I don't remember yesterday? Well, in general that's a pretty good bet, the days do kinda bleed into one another that makes them hard to distinguish, but that "EW" business, I remember. WOAH is also terrible but at least it was clued with special attention to its ugly wrongness (51A: "Slow down!," spelled unusually). Except ... WAIT, WHAT? No one would spell WOAH that way for *that* meaning of the word ("slow down"). Younger people do tend to spell it that way, but only to express astonishment, not to stop their horses. Bizarre cluing choice. ATAD is not "the smallest amount"—it's a totally unspecified amount—but I guess figuratively you can get away with this clue (I had ATOM here). ABYSM? (70A: Bottomless pit). LOL just say this word out loud to yourself a few times if you wanna feel silly. This is different from an ABYSS how? And how is it "appropriate" that OPRAH has a middle name that's the same* as her best friend's first name? (34D: Celebrity whose middle name is Gail, appropriately enough). It's a weird coincidence, I'll grant you, but there's nothing "appropriate" about it. If your middle name were WOOD and you grew up to be a carpenter, that might be "appropriate"; but unless we think of OPRAH as having grown up to be a windstorm, "Gail" doesn't really qualify as "appropriate."  

I don't know my Laotian currency from my Albanian currency, so KIP was an adventure (26D: Currency of Laos) ... wait, is Albania the LEK ... it is! Hey, maybe I do know my Laotian currency from my Albanian currency. Fascinating development. There were no particularly difficult parts of this grid, except maybe the far north, where my consumer habits didn't prepare me for what was being offered, i.e. I am only vaguely aware of WEST ELM and probably would've told you it was a clothing retailer (plus I thought the "arboreal name" was going to be WOOD-something); and as for IMODIUM (18A: Alternative to Pepto-Bismol) ... I know the name, but not how to spell it, and after Pepto, my familiarity with brand names in this category drops off sharply. Even ARCADIA, which is kind of in my wheelhouse, didn't come to me quickly (I thought maybe "Pan's domain" was something like ORGIES or PARTYING or something like that) (15A: Pan's domain in Greek myth). So I had to run a lot of crosses through that section before it filled out. Otherwise, smooth sailing. See you tomorrow.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld 

*Gayle (not actually “Gail”) King

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

Read more...