Creature with over 200 tiny eyes along its shell / FRI 4-11-25 / Music genre that's experimental yet radio-friendly / Certain ephemeral social media post, informally / Makings of some homemade pipes / "Sort by" option in a credit card history / How Romeo dies, in the eyes of the audience / Simple question written with two question marks / Fitting name for a girl born in October

Constructor: Jesse Guzman

Relative difficulty: Easy

THEME: none 

Word of the Day: step (in music) (31A: It's one step down from an F = E FLAT) —

In the language of music theory, a step is the distance between notes of different pitches. A half step, or semitone, is the smallest interval between notes in Western music. Notes that are directly next to each other—such as E and F, or A sharp and B—are a half step apart. Two half steps equal one whole step. The notes G and A are one whole step apart, as are the notes B flat and C. (masterclass.com)

• • •

Solid but a bit flat. Is the puzzle IRONICALLY flat if it opens with COCA-COLAS? (1A: Some pops). There just weren't enough pleasing marquee answers today. Again, it's all fine, but I don't think I ever smiled or said "nice!" while I was solving. Well, I take that back; I definitely smiled at least once, not because of something that was in the puzzle, but because of something that was not in the puzzle, something I wrote in the grid that was absurdly, ridiculously wrong. It may be the dumbest wrong answer of all time. I dare you to beat it for dumbness. I had the SEAS- at the beginning of 9D: Creature with over 200 tiny eyes along its shell and wrote in SEA SERPENT (a dumb answer, to be sure, but not the dumb answer I'm talking about); thankfully, it didn't take me long to realize that SEA SERPENTs, in addition to being maybe fictional (?!), is almost certainly shell-less. So I left that answer and came back to it. When I came back to it, I had the -ALLO- part, and after a split second of wanting SEA SWALLOW, whatever that is, I thought "oh, no, it's the seafood thing, the thing you never order at restaurants ... what's it called? ... oh yeah, shallot! It's SEA SHALLOT! (it was not, in fact, SEA SHALLOT, as a shallot is a kind of onion, as you likely know). In my defense, a shallot is roughly the size of a scallop (I'm just kidding, I have no defense, I plead insanity). 

[fearsome ... so many eyes ...]

I also wrote in ALT RAP instead of ALT POP (43D: Music genre that's experimental yet radio-friendly), which is not that great a wrong answer, but in its defense, all wrong answers are going to pale before SEA SHALLOT. Between SEA SHALLOT and ALT RAP, that's 90% of the difficulty I experienced today, and I think we can all agree, that difficulty was entirely (and extremely anomalously) self-imposed. I didn't know SNAP had STORYs, I thought just CHATs, so I needed some crosses there (59A: Certain ephemeral social media post, informally), and I whiffed at my first pass at the GROUP / BUN area (the only GRO- word that came to mind for [Party] was GROOVE, and having had no hair on my head to speak of since 2010 when I shaved it all off, I am not up on the latest BUN technology. I've got MAN BUN and then ... nothing. "Messy," you say? Cool). 

Who is making pipes out of COBS? (1D: Makings of some homemade pipes). This feels folksy/mythical. "Some homemade pipes"? Besides Frosty the Snowman, who is smoking these? COBS could have been more ... relatably clued. Corn cores! Male swans! "A crudely struck old Spanish coin of irregular shape"! "A stocky short-legged riding horse"! OK, don't use those last two, they're pretty obscure, I only looked them up just now, but ... something non-pipe-ish! The plural brands kind of soured me on this one early. COCA-COLAS was tolerable, but when you chase it almost immediately with GI JOES, now we've entered a realm of plural unpleasantness—pluralizing brand names that are not normally pluralized. And while you might say GI JOES, you'd never say COCA-COLAS, you'd say COKES (if you pluralized it at all). A whole lot of other plurals follow, OCEANS and SLAM POETS and PAEANS and TUTUS and RESALES and SEXAHOLICS ... speaking of, who uses that term? It feels like what sex addiction might've been called in the '70s/'80s. back when we were -aholic'ing everything. Remember "chocoholic?" I think that answer is supposed to be fun and fresh, but it felt odd and dated to me. Some of the mid-range stuff was fun today: "I'LL WAIT..." and DARKEST and DEAD LAST, those all hold up. But overall there's just not enough SPARK in this one, for me, for a Friday.

Bullets:

• 2D: Fitting name for a girl born in October (OPAL) — October's birthstone
• 15A: Richard Nixon or Mao Zedong, in a 1987 premiere (OPERA ROLE) — look at me, remembering that Nixon in China was an opera. I did not remember that it was by John Adams, but I remembered it, somehow.

• 20A: Like Iceland's weather most of the year (WINDY) — tried to cram WINTRY in here.
• 31A: It's one step down from an F (E FLAT) — I ignorantly took "step" to mean "a single key away on the keyboard" and so couldn't figure out how I would be on a black key. One piano key down from F is E. But one "step" (as defined, above) is two keys, taking me (you, us) to E FLAT.
• 57A: Simple question written with two question marks ("¿COMO ESTAS?") — so "simple" that even I, a non-Spanish speaker, got it pretty easily. The "two question marks" is a dead giveaway for Spanish, and "¿COMO ESTAS?" is the first question that pops to mind when I think of Spanish questions (which is not often, but ... here we are!)
• 4D: One into modeling at school (ART MAJOR) — not sure I get this. Obviously the people who pose for art class, those models, are not (necessarily) ART MAJORs. Is this a reference to ... sculpting? Or are ART MAJORs "into" modeling because they ... paint (or sculpt) ... from models? Seems like a misdirection attempt gone slightly awry here.

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm off to sea to hunt the Great Onion Leviathan, the SEA SHALLOT, on my onioning ship, The Leekquod). 

See you next time.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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Norse god of war / THU 4-10-25 / Hundredths of a Swedish krona / Diminutive, diminutively / Titular solver of many a medical mystery in 2000s TV / International grocery chain founded in Germany / Rapper with back-to-back triple-platinum albums in 2000 and 2001

Constructor: Adam Wagner

Relative difficulty: Medium-Challenging

THEME: diminutive suffixes — clues are normal-seeming words, but they have to be interpreted as "word" + [diminutive suffix] ... so the answers are all small versions of things (things that seem completely unrelated to the original word):

Theme answers:

• GENTLE NUDGE (18A: Shoveling?) ("shove-ling" or little shove)
• VENDING MACHINE (24A: Martini?) ("mart-ini" or little mart)
• PINKY RING (35A: Bandito?) ("Band-ito" or little band)
• FINGER SANDWICH (49A: Sublet?) ("Sub-let" or little sub)
• GRAIN OF SAND (57A: Rockette?) ("Rock-ette" or little rock)

  Word of the Day: ALDI (27D: International grocery chain founded in Germany) —

Aldi (stylised as ALDI) (German pronunciation: [ˈaldiː] ^ⓘ) is the common company brand name of two German multinational family-owned discount supermarket chains operating over 12,000 stores in 18 countries. The chain was founded by brothers Karl and Theo Albrecht in 1946, when they took over their mother's store in Essen. The business was split into two separate groups in 1960 that later became Aldi Nord (initially Northern West Germany), headquartered in Essen, and Aldi Süd (initially Southern West Germany), headquartered in neighbouring Mülheim. [...] Aldi's German operations consist of Aldi Nord's 35 individual regional companies with about 2,200 stores in western, northern, and eastern Germany, and Aldi Süd's 32 regional companies with 2,000 stores in western and southern Germany. Internationally, Aldi Nord operates in Belgium, Netherlands, France, Luxembourg, Poland, Portugal and Spain, while Aldi Süd operates in Australia, Austria, China, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Slovenia, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States. In Austria and Slovenia, Aldi operates stores under the Hofer brand. Aldi Nord also owns the Trader Joe's grocery chain in the United States, which operates separately from the group. (wikipedia)

• • •

This is very clever, in retrospect, but it wasn't so much fun while solving, as I never had any idea what the theme was supposed to be, which meant that five long answers went into the grid as if they were unclued. Obviously they had clues, I just didn't understand how I was supposed to interpret them. Having every single themer be essentially unclued made the puzzle way more challenging than normal. I just had to infer ... something ... some plausible phrase ... to fill in those five answers. This was sometimes not that hard (not that much that can follow VEND- in a plausible phrase), and sometimes really hard (completely died somewhere in the middle of what ended up being PINKY RING and had to reboot in the SW). At one point I stopped my solving progression and just went hunting for a revealer ... of which there was none, which gave me a mild panic feeling ("you're not going to be able to explain the theme! what good are you?!"). So I was very conscious of the fact that even if I finished (which I assumed I would), I wouldn't be able to decode the themers. It took ...  I don't know, probably a minute or so, to see the diminutive suffix gag, but it felt like an eternity. I could see that "Mart" and VENDING had something to do with each other, and that a NUDGE was a kind of "Shove," and that eventually tipped the whole theme. Out of their normal diminutive context, those suffixes just don't read as diminutive, which ... obviously is the point of the theme. The only suffix that really reads as diminutive to me is "-ette" and maybe "-ito." No way on "-ling" and "-let," and as for "-ini," that's always going to mean pasta to me. Tricky tricky. I wish the trick had been visible to me while I was solving—that's always more fun than discovering it after. But even though I didn't love the solving experience, I have to give credit to this once, conceptually. Very tricky, but very slick.

I'm not sure I'd ever call a VENDING MACHINE a "mart," under any circumstances, so that one felt tenuous, for sure, but otherwise the themers all work pretty well, though man, getting from "band" to PINKY RING, oof—unlike "mart," "band" has a ton of different meanings. Even if I had understood the diminutive suffix gimmick during the solve, I'm not sure it would've helped there. Is the band a gang? Does it play music? No, it's a ring, like a wedding band, only not a wedding band, unless you wear your wedding band on your pinky, which, who am I to judge, do your thing. As for the fill, I have no real complaints, though bringing back both ORE (as clued) (14A: Hundredths of a Swedish krona) and TYR (33D: Norse god of war) on the same day made it feel a bit like Crosswordese Homecoming. TYR should only be allowed to appear on Tuesdays (his namesake day), and even then only twice a year, max). And then there was also JA RULE, holy cow (4A: Rapper with back-to-back triple-platinum albums in 2000 and 2001). I lived through the JA RULE era and even I had trouble parsing that one. He was turn-of-the-century huge and then I don't know what happened. Haven't heard his name outside crosswords in at least a decade.

Did not like NSFW the clue at all. "R" is an official rating of the MMPA, whereas NSFW is just a string of letters you might attach to an email warning the receiver that the content is Not Suitable/Safe For Work. The non-suitability might be due to all kinds of things, not necessarily the kinds of things that would get a movie an "R" rating. Sometimes it might be "PG," and sometimes it might be "X." The two things are not-equivalent in too many ways for this clue to work. It sends the solver (me) looking for an actual rating, not some letter string that is only ever applied at the individual writer/sender's discretion. Boo. 

["It took me four days to hitchhike from 12-Down"]

Bullets:

• 43A: Button often pressed moments before noticing a typo (SEND) — again, the context was just lost on me. I don't think of "SEND" as a "button" that I "press." Keyboards have buttons. Well, keys. "It's often clicked" or "... hit," that language might have gotten me to the email / texting context. But "buttons" to me are ESC and TAB and CTRL.
• 1D: ___ Hennessy Louis Vuitton, French luxury goods holding company (MOËT) — what a Frankenstein's monster of a company. I saw the "Vuitton" and thought fashion, but later, after I got a cross or two, I noticed the Hennessy, and thought "beverage" ... and then thought MOËT (the champagne makers).
• 8D: Diminutive, diminutively (LIL) — this is the puzzle winking at you
• 45D: Titular solver of many a medical mystery in 2000s TV (DR. HOUSE) — why someone mentioned DR. HOUSE to me this past weekend at the ACPT, I don't know, but I do know he was still kicking around my brain somewhere when I read this clue, for which I was grateful. I don't think I ever watched more than one or two episodes of House (a woman had rabies in one, iirc ... it featured the actress who played Jack Bauer's wife in "24" ... it is weird that I can remember these hyperspecific things about a single episode of TV that I saw once, twenty years ago). Very popular, not my thing.

• 26D: Tabloid talk show host Povich (MAURY) — I think he films in Stamford?? There's def. a TV studio there with his giant mug plastered on it. Looks like it was filmed there until the show ended a few years ago. His face is still there, though, I promise.
• 32D: Moves in a left-left-right-right pattern (SKIPS) — absolutely brutal clue. I was looking for maybe a dance? And then I was physically kinda trying to act out what the hell such a movement could be. Needed almost every cross to get SKIPS—an activity in which the lefts and rights do not get the SAME aMOUNT of EMphaSIS, which makes the clue, yeah, confusing as hell.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

P.S. after two days of ACPT write-ups (Tuesday, Wednesday), I can't believe I forgot to mention one of the most important things that happened to me, which is: I met Malaika Handa and Rafael Musa (both of whom write for me on a regular basis) for the first time, At (practically) The Same Time! The tournament is a good way to remind yourself (myself) that people are real! 3 dimensional! And (more often than not) delightful. Again, go to a tournament some time. You won't regret it. No one regrets it. Who knows? You might even win ... a trophy! Like this (last time, I promise!!!)

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