Beverage featured in “A Christmas Story” / FRI 11-7-25 / Illustrator of the Tammany Tiger / Bygone office assistant / In an awesome way, slangily / Victuals, informally / Domesticated insect entirely dependent on humans for reproduction / Novelist Fannie who wrote “Imitation of Life” (1933) / The Brady household including Alice, e.g. / Muscleman of 1980s TV
Constructor: Kelly Morenus
Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium
THEME: none
Word of the Day: Fannie HURST (1D: Novelist Fannie who wrote “Imitation of Life” (1933)) —
Fannie Hurst (October 18, 1889 – February 23, 1968) was an American novelist and short-story writer whose works were highly popular during the post-World War I era. Her work combined sentimental, romantic themes with social issues of the day, such as women’s rights and race relations. She was one of the most widely read female authors of the 20th century, and for a time in the 1920s she was one of the highest-paid American writers. Hurst actively supported a number of social causes, including feminism, African American equality, and New Deal programs.
Although her novels, including Lummox (1923), Back Street (1931), and Imitation of Life (1933), lost popularity over time and were mostly out of print as of the 2000s, they were bestsellers when first published and were translated into many languages. She also published over 300 short stories during her lifetime.
Hurst is known for the film adaptations of her works, including Imitation of Life (1934), Four Daughters (1938), Imitation of Life (1959), Humoresque (1946), and Young at Heart (1954, a musical remake of Four Daughters). (wikipedia)
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This didn’t start out so great. It had the kind of fill up top that makes me sag and stop and take a screenshot to document the vibe
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| [ENNEAD, i.e. a set of 9] |
The clue on PEDAL TO THE MEDAL felt bad, in the sense that it’s not a complete command in that form, the way the clue suggests (8D: “Step on it!”). You need “Put the” at the front for it to be a plausible command. I guess I can imagine shouting the phrase without the “Put the” at the beginning, but it feels pretty contrived. The clue on LIKE A BOSS also felt slightly off to me (34D: In an awesome way, slangily). Something about “awesome” is too vague and not competence-specific enough. If you do something LIKE A BOSS, you do it with confidence, skill, and authority, which I suppose falls under the umbrella “awesomely” if you squint hard enough, but the clue just isn’t on-the-nose enough. Anyway, “in an awesome way” is already slang. [With skill and panache, slangily] makes more sense.
I had some trouble with MAILER (I was thinking of much bigger, more industrial “shipping containers”) (31A: Shipping container), and I think I had LUNA MOTH before SILK MOTH (just because I had four blank letters before MOTH and LUNA, you know, fit) (39A: Domesticated insect entirely dependent on humans for reproduction). Otherwise, no real errors, except a brief dalliance with GERM (30D: Very start, as of an idea = SEED). The SE corner went down like a Monday, as more of my crosswordesey friends (NERO, ORSINO, NSC, HAVA, ASNER) showed up and made things very easy.
Bullets:
- 57A: Modern identification method (RETINA SCAN) — and here I’ve been wasting valuable nanoseconds saying “RETINAL SCAN.” Possibly because that’s the actual term. But in common usage, the “L” gets dropped, it’s fine. Slowed me down only as long as it took me to delete the “L.”
- 15A: Synthetic upholstery material (ULTRASUEDE) — in Japan it is sold under the brand name ECSAINE, which is the kind of answer I see in my crossword nightmares. The very first paragraph of the wikipedia entry for ULTRASUEDE states that “It is used to make footbags (also known as hacky sacks) and juggling balls.” Which is bizarrely specific. Did a hacky-sacker write this entry?
- 51A: Victuals, informally (GRUB) — I wanted EATS. See also CHOW.
- 52D: World capital on both banks of the Daugava River (RIGA) — had the “R” and “A” and completely instinctively wrote in ROMA. The crossword probability part of my brain simply overrode the “look at the actual words that are in the clue” part. Actually, it turns out, ROMA is only slightly more common than RIGA, in terms of all-time NYTXW appearances (309 to 298). This is the fifth RIGA of 2025, making this the most RIGAful year since 2003. Oh, maybe I should add that RIGA, in case you didn’t know, is the capital of Latvia.
See you next time.
Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld
[Follow Rex Parker on BlueSky and Facebook and Letterboxd]
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