Rex Parker Does the NYT Crossword Puzzle

Brand of school supplies known for its dazzling rainbow designs / TUE 5-18-21 / Khan who founded Khan Academy / Old battle clubs / Sleep preventer in fairy tale / 2016 film starring amy adams as linguist who communicates with aliens / Heavy metal fan

Posted: 18 May 2021 03:04 AM PDT

Constructor: Margaret Seikel

Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium

THEME: SAUSAGE LINK (55A: Breakfast side order ... or a hint to the last words of 18-, 23-, 34- and 49-Across) — last words of the themers are all types of sausage:

Theme answers:

SPOILED BRAT (18A: Rotten kid)
HEADBANGER (23A: Heavy metal fan)
LISA FRANK (34A: Brand of school supplies known for its dazzling rainbow designs)
THERAPY DOG (49A: Certain emotional support animal)

Word of the Day: LISA FRANK (34A) —

Lisa Frank is an American businesswoman, the founder of Lisa Frank Incorporated, headquartered in Tucson, Arizona. She is known for producing whimsical commercial design for school supplies and other products that are primarily marketed to children. (wikipedia)

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At first, I was wondering why I was tearing through this so easily. Yes, Tuesdays are generally pretty easy, but the top of this puzzle just went up in smoke, as fast as I could type. Put in MRI at 1A: Hospital scan, for short and immediately got all three long crosses and whoosh, goodbye. I was thinking "either this is going to be record Tuesday territory, or ... something's coming to even things out." Sure enough, something was coming, and it's honestly the only thing I remember about this puzzle. That something was LISA FRANK. I cannot overstate the degree to which I have never heard of this. I've been in schools with supplies, I've been in stores with school supplies, I certainly bought my daughter school supplies, but if I've seen the name LISA FRANK, it was utterly unremarkable. I buy stuff at Staples all the time without knowing the brand name. I have binders and lined paper that certainly comes from some company, but the question is, does it have any brand presence anywhere in the public consciousness? And for me, LISA FRANK, wow, no?

[this video is, uh, frank]

This is one of those days where I wish there was crowdsourcing data so I could see how familiar each answer was to the solver population, or see where solvers were solving most slowly. I would bet my kingdom, whatever that is, that LISA FRANK is the least familiar thing in the grid. Worse, it's abutting probably the next least familiar thing: SAL Khan. I've definitely heard of Khan Academy, but SAL!? LOL, OK, sure, SAL. I don't mind not knowing short stuff like that, but here, sitting atop the most obscure thing in the grid, it just creates awful proper-noun problems. New / non-household names are fine, but You Must Handle Them Properly. The nail in the coffin here is the execrable fill linking LISA FRANK and SAL: SSS (!?!?!) (32D: Radiator noise). There's no lower fill entry than SSS. OK, maybe EEE, but after that, it's SSS. And I thought maybe a radiator HUMmed. Throw in the ugliest French pronoun (ILS), which is immediately adjacent to all this, and. you have the kind of awful, ugly blotch that you absolutely don't want on your breezy early-week puzzle. What was the rest of the puzzle about? Sausage? If you say so. Anyway, if you set the LISA SAL SSS fiasco aside, you've got a perfectly serviceable, absolutely average Tuesday on your hands.

[Frank Ocean]

I wish LINK was doing something here. That is, I wish wordplay were somehow involved. As it is, it seems like SAUSAGE could've done the revealer work just fine on its own, so really LINK is just here to provide rotational symmetry with SPOILED BRAT. Maybe I'm supposed to believe that SAUSAGE is the thing that LINKs all these answers, but ... that seems a stretch. The very definition of a theme is a LINK among answers, plus the revealer clue already directs you to which answers share the sausage feature, so LINK remains basically unemployed at the figurative level. I can't believe someone hasn't made, or isn't about to make, a puzzle with this same revealer where words for sausages are embedded inside two-word theme answers and literally "link" those two words together. Actually, that would be tough to pull off, but at least the word LINK would be pulling its weight instead of just sitting there flapping the breeze. I loved THERAPY DOG because I love therapy dogs. I'm so jealous of my wife because of the THERAPY DOG that visits her classroom several times a year. I know my university has, in the (prepandemic) past, brought in THERAPY DOGs for the students during finals week, but no one's ever brought one straight into my classroom for me to hug endlessly, ignoring all other creatures in the room until such time as someone physically pried me away from the dog. That, I can safely say, has never happened. Some day...