My Funny Valentine Sung by the Guy on the Cosby Show to Maxine Shaw

Onetime Mughal capital / SAT 12-11-21 / Food often served with plastic grass / 1991 platinum debut album by a female singer / Small-batch publication / Grp. with much discussed amateurism rules

Constructor: Hal Moore

Relative difficulty: Easy

THEME: none

Word of the Day: ERIKA Alexander(49D: Actress Alexander of "Get Out") —

Erika Rose Alexander  (born November 19, 1969) is an American actress, writer, producer, entrepreneur and activist best known for her roles asPam Tucker on theNBCsitcom The Cosby Show  (1990–1992), and Maxine Shaw on theFOX sitcom Living Single  (1993–1998).  She has won numerous awards for her work on Living Single , including twoNAACP Image Awards forOutstanding Actress in a Comedy Series.  Her film credits include The Long Walk Home  (1990), 30 Years to Life  (2001), Déjà Vu (2006) and Get Out  (2017). (wikipedia)

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Well this one was a journey. On the first part of the journey, I ran into three "Q"s on a diagonal and thought, "Oh ... no ... what fresh hell is this?" I braced myself for some kind of high-value Scrabble tile indulge-a-thon, where "Z"s and "J"s get splattered around the grid in either symmetrical or random ways, all to the massive and inevitable detriment of fill quality. Getting cute with the "Q"s set off loud alarm bells, but, at least initially, the fill was holding up, so I took a deep breath and pressed forward ... and it didn't take long to realize that all my fears had been needless. I was put at ease pretty quickly with a beautiful grid-spanner descending the west side of the grid:

And after I worked a lot of the crosses and put a lot of the shorter stuff together, all I saw was cleanness. Instead of descending into awkward darkness, this one floated up, at least a little if not well above average NYT grid quality. Everything was just working, and not just working, but bouncy. Tasty. Good like a CHEAP QUESADILLA from a RAD TAQUERIA . Or a RAD QUESADILLA from a CHEAP TAQUERIA . One of those. The moral of the story is, set your expectations to "Dread" and then you too can occasionally get the rush of being pleasantly surprised!

The grid is really open, so there's nowhere to get well and truly stuck, and lots of opportunities to get toeholds from 3- 4- and 5-letter answers (I always try to attack the short stuff on late-week puzzles before I ever even look at the long stuff). As I said above, the "Q"s in this one gave me some concern about where the puzzle was headed aesthetically, but they proved to be a launching pad, making those long Downs very easy to get and thus sending me sailing into the middle and bottom of the grid, right from the jump. Not only is the grid not packed with odd, whimsical "J" and "Z" arrangements, but the "Q"s end up being really the only place you see those Scrabbly letters flaunting themselves ostentatiously. There's one "Z" there in the EUROZONE ZINE ("Siri, what is the world's most boring ZINE ?"), and a couple of stray "K"s, but otherwise we stay in the realm of colorful fill with relatively common letters. PENCIL SHARPENER, RUMOR MILL, MELATONIN , all winners. HI-TOP FADES was a fantastic way to close things out—really lucky that that was my final long Down, because it put an emphatic "hell yeah!" exclamation point on a puzzle that I thought was gonna plod and sag. I nearly spun out at the end when I wrote in LENIENCE rather than LENIENCY , but luckily I checked the cross instead of just looking at ETD and being satisfied (60D: Paycheck abbr. = YTD ). Very pleased with this one. Taste of Friday's puzzle, absolutely gone from my mouth. All I taste now is QUESADILLA . It's nice.

Other things:

• 23A: Promulgate (ISSUE) — I guess they both mean "send forth" or "put out," but I think of "promulgate" as something you do with an idea generally and ISSUE as something you do more as a discrete act ... I'm not explaining this well, but they feel somehow not quite lined up. But close enough, I suppose.
• 16A: "Rumors are carried by ___, spread by fools and accepted by idiots" (old saying) ("HATERS") — no, sorry, I challenge. You are not going to convince me that " HATERS " is "old." "Old saying" is such a hedge. Someone said it, or they didn't. Give me an actual quotation or get lost. How "old"? What is "old" here? 2014? "In my day, we had a saying ... ' HATERS gonna hate'"—me in forty years to a bunch of befuddled children at some kind of family gathering, if those still exist, probably

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  53D: Card games are played in it (MLB) — sometimes it pays to do a lot of puzzles, particularly hard ones—I just saw a variant of this clue last night, as I was solving my way through a puzzle backlog of titanic proportions. It was a "Fireball" crossword, I think. The answer was MLBGAME and this "Card" misdirection was part of the shenanigans ("Card" being short for (St. Louis) Cardinal, and MLB standing for "Major League Baseball," of course).
• 24D: Tender union? (EUROZONE) — I get that they share a currency in that "zone," and so they have a "union" of (legal) "tender," but what is "tender union" even punning on? What's the wordplay? Is it supposed to evoke marriage or something? When I google it in quotation marks, the first hit is the NYT's own puzzle site. That doesn't suggest that the phrase has much ... currency.
• 51D: Name for a Dalmatian (OREO) — first I'm hearing of this, but if you say so
• 25A: Food often served with plastic grass (SUSHI)— yesterday, CHIRASHI; today, SUSHI . It's a raw fish extravaganza! Tasty! Doesn't exactly *go* with my mole chicken QUESADILLA, but whatever, I'll make do.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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parkerwhatiall.blogspot.com

Source: https://rexwordpuzzle.blogspot.com/2021/12/onetime-mughal-capital-sat-12-11-21.html

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