Rex Parker Does the NYT Crossword Puzzle (2024)

THEME: TRIPLE WORD SCORE (58A: Coveted Scrabble space ... or the sheet music for 16-, 21-, 34- or 51-Across?) — song titles where a single word is tripled:

Theme answers:

• "GIMME GIMME GIMME" (16A: Abba hit of 1979)
• "BYE BYE BYE" (21A: 'N Sync hit of 2000)
• "GIRLS GIRLS GIRLS" (34A: Mötley Crüe hit of 1987)
• "FUN FUN FUN" (51A: Beach Boys hit of 1964)

Word of the Day: NAMIB(4D: Coastal African desert) —

TheNamib(/ˈnɑːmɪb/NAH-mib;Portuguese:Namibe) is a coastaldesertinSouthern Africa. According to the broadest definition, the Namib stretches for more than 2,000 kilometres (1,200mi) along the Atlantic coasts ofAngola,Namibia, and northwestSouth Africa, extending southward from the Carunjamba River in Angola, through Namibia and to theOlifants Riverin Western Cape, South Africa.The Namib's northernmost portion, which extends 450 kilometres (280mi) from the Angola-Namibia border, is known asMoçâmedes Desert, while its southern portion approaches the neighboringKalahari Desert. From the Atlantic coast eastward, the Namib gradually ascends in elevation, reaching up to 200 kilometres (120mi) inland to the foot of theGreat Escarpment.Annual precipitation ranges from 2 millimetres (0.079in) in the aridest regions to 200 millimetres (7.9in) at the escarpment, making the Namib the only true desert in southern Africa.Having enduredaridorsemi-aridconditions for roughly 55–80 million years, the Namib may be the oldest desert in the worldand contains some of the world's driest regions, with only western South America'sAtacama Desertto challenge it for age and aridity benchmarks. (wikipedia)

• • •

This is one I definitely appreciated more when I got the revealer *and* looked at the theme-answer clues. Before that, solving Downs-only, it was just a lot of repeated-word phrases, and even when I got TRIPLE WORD SCORE, I didn't see the musical connection. But now, seeing that all the theme answers are songs, the "SCORE" pun becomes clear. I think of "SCORE" as music composed for a movie, but it's also just the "copy of a musical composition in printed or written notation" (merriam-webster dot com). I also think of "sheet music" as primarily orchestral—it's definitely not a phrase I'd put anywhere near Mötley Crüe, for instance—but there's "sheet music" for all kinds of music (even "GIRLS, GIRLS, GIRLS"), so even though the "sheet music" bit feels a *little* preposterous, on a technical level, it works. The theme is, by its nature, repetitive, and those theme answers were (therefore) really easy to get solving Downs-only, but still, conceptually, with *that* revealer, it's pretty good.

The fill on this one seemed far far less good. I tripped all over myself trying to make sense of the NAMIB / IN-APP / GAEL / ALY part as I started the puzzle (and really winced at ALY, considering I'd *just* written in ALI). And oof, the partials. A LEAK!? Trying to make sense of that when I couldn't see the Across clues was painful. It would've been painful, if somewhat easier, even if I could've seen the clue—it's really a horrible partial, and then we get *another* very bad-feeling partial?!? ("I'M OF"). Why the hell does a supremely easy Monday puzzle have two egregious partials? The craftsmanship really should be better—the fill much smoother—on early-week puzzles. But I had to stumble through stale and bygone fill of all kinds. "I CAME"? Ugh, I'm calling that a "partial" too, that makes three, that's too many. LUV, PRE, SCI, GAR ... OLA!? OXO? There's way way too much subpar stuff. ORES and OARS, ABUT and ATOP, SSW and SFPD ... these are innocuous on their own, but today they're part of a tidal wave of gunk. When my Downs-only adventures left me with T-SHAPE (!?!?!?), I sincerely thought I had something wrong.

There was almost no part of the solve where I thought things looked polished, bright, and clean. And after suffering through all the unloveliness, I ended up with an error, ugh. I had RIP BY instead ofZIP BYbecause RUMBA looked so good (in a way that ZUMBA, which I haven't heard anyone refer to in well over a decade, absolutely does not). I guess ZIP BY is more of a real phrase than RIP BY, but RUMBA >ZUMBA(in my head). Also, the "quickly fly past" in the clue made it seem like the clue was referring to time, and the years really do RIP BY as you get older, so honestly, I didn't really blink at that "R." Bah and humbug.

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THEME: "Is There an Echo in Here?" — clues are repeated sounds, words, or numbers, and answers are punny descriptions of those repetitions:

Theme answers:

• DOUBLE-CLICK (21A:"Tsk, tsk"?)
• SECOND MATE (23A:Buddy-buddy?)
• RAP DUO (44A:[Knock, knock]?)
• ONE AFTER ANOTHER (45A:11?)
• THIS BEARS REPEATING (64A:Pooh-pooh?)
• THE MUMMY RETURNS (88A:Tut-tut?)
• ALLOWS (93A:"Ow! Ow!"?)
• BACK-UP COPY (110A:"OK, OK"?)
• PAIR OF PANTS (114A:"Hubba, hubba!"?)

Word of the Day: PARIS, TEXAS(18A: City with a cowboy hat-wearing replica of the Eiffel Tower) —

Parisis a city andcounty seatofLamar County, Texas, United States. Located inNortheast Texasat the western edge of thePiney Woods, the population of the city was 24,171 in 2020. [...]Following a tradition of American cities named "Paris" (named afterFrance's capital), the city commissioned a 65-foot-tall (20m)replicaof theEiffel Towerin 1993 and installed it on site of the Love Civic Center, southeast of the town square. In 1998, presumably as a response to the 1993 construction of a 60-foot-tall (18m)towerinParis, Tennessee, the city placed a giant red cowboy hat atop its tower. The current Eiffel Tower replica is at least the second one; an earlier replica constructed of wood was destroyed by atornado. [...]In the late-19th and early-20th centuries, severallynchingswere staged at the Paris Fairgrounds as public spectacles, with crowds of white spectators cheering as the African-American victims were tortured and murdered.A Black teenager namedHenry Smithwas lynched in 1893. His murder was the first lynching in US history that was captured in photographs sold as postcards and other trinkets commemorating the killing.JournalistIda B. Wellssaid of the incident "Never in the history of civilization has any Christian people stooped to such shocking brutality and indescribable barbarism as that which characterized the people of Paris, Texas." (wikipedia)

• • •

These puns are hit-and-miss, though I will admit that I grudgingly stopped and admired THIS BEARS REPEATING. You gotta mentally insert an apostrophe for the pun to work, but that's fine. Better than fine. Really imaginative. The pun is (for once) good. The bear (Pooh) is indeed repeating. There's a lot of cleverness on display here, and occasionally some welcome lunacy. ALL "OW"S! ONE AFTER THE OTHER! When I say wackiness needs to go big or go home, that's what I mean. But the themers kind of peter out there at the bottom.BACK-UP COPYandPAIR OF PANTSare the only ones I actively don't like. First of all, I get that "OK" means "copy" (in RADIOSPEAK?), but only one of the "OK"s can be theBACK-UP COPY. The other one is just a "COPY," so the answer does not make sense for the clue. I think this critique extends to SECOND MATE, where only one of the "buddies" is actually "second." The first "buddy" is ... first, so again, the answer simply doesn't work for the clue. Compare those two answers to DOUBLE-CLICK, which refers to both "clicks" i.e. both "tut"s, not just the second one, or THIS BEARS REPEATING or THE MUMMY RETURNS, where the repetition itself is the subject. No, BACK-UP COPY and SECOND MATE just don't work, since those answers directly refer only to the *second*, repeated part of the clue, and not the original, first part as well. And as for PAIR OF PANTS, er, I would not describe a "hubba" as ... well, as an anything, but certainly not a "pant." I get that "hubba-hubba!" is what you say when you are panting (libidinously), but the hubba-pant equation feels awful. But in the main, this punny puzzle does better than most punny puzzles, and there's enough zany variety to cover a Sunday-sized grid without leaving me feeling exhausted by a beaten-into-the-ground concept. It's a mild thumbs-up from me, which is a pretty big accomplishment considering that it's a Sunday (so so often a no-funday).

The fill was pretty decent overall, but there were more than a few answers that grated. A lot of the longer answers felt overly nichey, or like things that were barely things. RADIOSPEAK seemed off (25A: What "Ten-four" and "Over" are used in). Doesn't seem like a very real word. When I google it, I get "radio lingo" and "radio terminology" sites. E-BILL is up there with the worst E-things I've seen in a grid (38A: Paper-saving invoice). It's just a bill, or an invoice. The norm is electronic now, so to specify E-BILL feels E-BAD. "EGADS! Have you seen this E-BILL! It's E-GREGIOUS!" Boo. The STARKILLER thing is just annoying (102A: George Lucas's original surname for Luke Skywalker). If Lucas didn't use it, then it's not a thing. How in the world should I know that dumb bit of trivia? Completely stupid to think that it's an acceptable answer. My god fandom can addle some people's brains. Or else overstuffed wordlists are doing the addling, I don't know, but STARKILLER—hard boo. I got it easily enough, by inference, but still, it's bad enough to have to remember so much damn "Star Wars" universe trivia from the *actual* movies. Asking me to know things that didn't even make it in = bridge too far. For reference:

I don't go to enough carnivals, it seems, because SPACE SHOT was a ???? to me (15D: Carnival attraction that propels its riders sky-high). MOON SHOT is really a much nicer answer, why aren't they called that? Also not familiar to me, as a term: NIGHT BIRD (58A: Owl or whippoorwill). I know that many birds are nocturnal, and I've heard of NIGHT OWL, and NIGHTHAWKS, of course, but just ... NIGHT BIRD? Meh. I'm sure some people say this, but do people who know anything about birds say this? Feels too vague, too general. I guess a BRAIN DUMP is a thing I've heard of, but it's so ugly as a term that I can't pretend I'm happy to see it (117A: Outpouring of ideas). Some "originality" = unwelcome. And RAGE ROOMS, lol, whatever (71A: Places to let out anger by smashing objects). I've seen this before, but *only* in crosswords (once, also in the plural, last year). It's hard to believe these rooms exist. How bad are you at feeling your feelings that you need a room to smash? Bizarre. It's too weird a thing to use in a grid, especially once it's already been used. Ten-year moratorium on RAGE ROOMS starting now, OK? OK. Copy? Copy.

There are also some patches of regular-old short fill that are really, really dire. Well, one in particular. It goes from SRTA in the far east and then sorta trickles down to form a sludge puddle right around the AERO / ARO crossing (crossing two hom*ophones that are only one letter apart—not great). So SRTA OUTTA "UH, NO" "OHH" OTRO ARO AERO EGADS ... that is one unpleasant short-answer slurry. But much of the rest of the grid is solid to strong: PARIS, TEXAS, TIME-LAPSE, FOUL TIP, EYE MASKS ... there's a wide variety of interesting fill, and not too much garbage. I loved STEADICAM, esp. the way it was clued (75D: Filming innovation used in "The Shining"), but I'm a *little* concerned that people will spell it STEADYCAM (as I did at first pass) and leave the "Y" in, believing that that is how ELY Manning spells his name. If you are not into sports, this seems like a very plausible error. But then maybe you've all been doing crosswords for so long that even if you couldn't tell ELI Manning fromELIWallach, you know for sure that it'sELIwith an "I." Let's hope so.

What else?:

• 28A: Honnold who was the first to free-solo climb El Capitan (ALEX) — shrug. The only Honnold I know was the namesake of the college library at my alma mater (Pomona). At least I think that's how it was spelled, Honnold. Hmm, looks like it's the Honnold/Mudd Library but we just called it "Honnold" in the olden days. Speaking of my college, there's an article on their English department that is ... well, it's a ride. It's called "When a Department Self-Destructs," if that gives you any idea. (It's been over 30 years since I was an English major there, so I don't know any of the parties involved.)
• 31A: Sight at Sydney's yearly Festival of the Winds (KITE)— four letters so I *kinda* wanted OBOE. Then I had the "K" and I *kinda* wanted KOALA (sadly, not four letters).
• 79A: Queer identity, for short (ARO)— short for "aromantic." Soon, this answer will have become as common as Brian ENO and I will stop feeling the need to explain it to people.
• 31D: Nine credited roles in "Barbie" (KENS)— normally plural names are suboptimal, as fill goes, but Barbie has madeKENSan exception. So many KENS ...

• 56D: State with a five-sided flag (OHIO)— I see "five-sided flag," I think NEPAL, so this is interesting. If I knew this about OHIO's flag, I forgot it, but luckily there are only so many four-letter states.

[Nepal]

[OHIO]

• 99D: Haggard fellow? (MERLE) — first thought: "... the Horrible? Mr. The Horrible?" But that's Hägar (the comic strip Viking), not Haggard (the country legend). Happy to see Haggard instead of HUNTER HAYES today (Saturday solvers know what I mean...). Haggard is the best of the "H" country stars. Here's some more "H"s in his honor.

See you next time.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

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THEME: none

Word of the Day: RON English(52A: Pop artist ___ English) —

Ron English(born June 6, 1959)is an Americancontemporary artistwho exploresbrand imagery,street art,andadvertising. [...]English has produced images on the street, in museums, in movies, books and television. He coined the term POPaganda to describe a mash-up of high and low cultural touchstones, from superhero mythology to totems of art history, populated with his original characters, including MC Supersized, the obese fast-food mascot featured in the movieSuper Size Me, and Abraham Obama, the fusion of America's 16th and 44th Presidents. Other characters in English's paintings, billboards, and sculpture include three-eyed rabbits, cowgirls and grinning skulls – visual, with humorous undertones. (wikipedia)

• • •

[21D: Batman adversary with a stitched burlap mask]

So yesterday, NANCHERLA provided an example of a pop culture name that (for me) stood out strongly for being the least familiar thing in the grid. If you don't know it (as I (mostly) didn't), it requires much more attention and effort than anything else in the grid, and thus makes the solving experience go kind of lopsided. But yesterday, all the crosses were fair. I felt like the puzzle was *helping* me to get it, was constructed in a way that made me enjoy (and not resent) learning the name. Cool cool. Now fast-forward to this puzzle, where (again, for me), virtually the same thing happens—the puzzle throws a long pop culture answer at me that I have never heard of in my life—but instead of the crosses being fair ... well, they are mostly fair, but they also include one short pop culture answer that I have never heard of in my life, and that, dear reader, that has made all the difference. And in a bad way, not a Robert Frost way. I worked this puzzle all the way down to ... this:

Just like yesterday, the proper noun debacle stood in stark contrast to the rest of my solving experience, as I blew through most of the rest of the grid, no problem. I blew through it a little faster yesterday, true, but that's why Friday is Friday and Saturday is Saturday. Relative to their expected levels of difficulty, F and Sat were equally easy for me. The SW corner today played like a Monday; I doubt I was down there for more than 30 seconds. The NW gave me YUCA, which looks all kinds of wrong—I want there to be two "C"s in there, but YUCCA is a perennial shrub, whereYUCAis another name for "Cassava," a root tuber. Ah, well, looks like the confusion is baked into the name itself from way back: "Early reports of the species [yucca] were confused with thecassava(Manihot esculenta).Consequently,Linnaeusmistakenly derived the generic name from theTaínoword for the latter,yuca." But even though that spelling was unfamiliar to me, I still wanted YU(C)CA, so I was prepared for the letters when they came, and the rest of that corner was a cinch (thank you, Crosswordese Ambassador James AGEE for granting me access) (9D: "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men" writer, 1941) [side note: AGEE was hired by TIME, INC. as a reporter, right out of college]. The NW corner (where I started) was also pretty easy, once I got past my initial error: DAR / REPOTS instead of ABU / UNPOTS (I was thinking of DAR es Salaam, the "largest city and financial hub of Tanzania," which is not a capital, last I checked, was not in the "Mideast," alas). The capital of Tanzania, by the way, is DODOMA, which has never appeared in the NYTXW, despite its seemingly favorable letter configuration (short, lots of vowels, alternating vowels and consonants, terminal "A"). Now you're prepared for when DODOMA eventually drops, which it will, some day, trust me.

That just leaves the SE, easily the toughest of the puzzle's corners. Again, proper nouns come into play, as I had no idea who RON English was. He was apparently on "The Simpsons," but well after I'd stopped watching it. I had the last letter of his name as an "S" because I assumed 37D: Many Grindr users (GAY MEN)was going to be an "S"-ending plural. I also had MBA before MFA (47D: Deg. from Yale's Geffen School), SOFT SPOT before SOFT SIDE (the former being waaaaaay more of a thing than the latter) (49A: Vulnerable part of one's personality), and I didn't really know that BIG AIR was an event. Snowboarding, sure, BIG AIR, uh uh. Still, though, that corner played like an average Saturday corner, in terms of difficulty—took some work, but it was all ultimately gettable. The only thing that was truly harrowing about this puzzle was the HEDER / HAYES "H"-bomb. I defused it, but only barely. Speaking of barely ... BARLEY. Specifically ... BARLEY WATER!? (8D: Drink of boiled grains with purported detoxifying effects). Yeesh, between HUNTER HAYES and BARLEY WATER, it's like this puzzle is trying to be actively unappetizing. Luckily there's a cute FOSTER KITTEN(6D: Candidate for a "forever home") and some TURKEY JERKY and a copy of "Batman" with THE SCARECROW on the cover, so the puzzle was not without its pleasures. In fact, the longer answers (of the non-BARLEY non-country music persuasion) are really solid across the board. Also SHTICKY and "DID I ASK?!"—both winners.

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THEME: none

Word of the Day: Aparna NANCHERLA(33D: Comedian Aparna who wrote "Unreliable Narrator") —

Aparna Nancherla(born 1982 or 1983)is an American stand-up comedian and actress. She has had recurring roles on television series includingBoJack HorsemanandCorporateand has written forLate Night with Seth MeyersandTotally Biased with W. Kamau Bell. Nancherla released her debutcomedy albumJust Putting It Out TherethroughTig Notaro'sBentzen Ball Recordson July 8, 2016. [...]In seasonsfour,fiveandsixofBoJack Horseman, from 2017 to 2020, Nancherla had a recurring voice role as BoJack's alleged daughter, but actual half-sister, Hollyhock Manheim-Mannheim-Guerrero-Robinson-Zilberschlag-Hsung-Fonzerelli-McQuack. (wikipedia)

• • •

This was two puzzles: extremely easy, andNANCHERLA. Pop culture proper nouns are, as you know, frequently an adventure, and can be radically inclusionary ("Hey, I know that person! So happy to see her!") ... or exclusionary ("Who the ...!?"). I fell somewhere in the "Hey!" / "Who the!?" gap. I could picture her. I knew I'd seen her in ... that thing ... with those people ... on that show ... but her name, I just ... couldn't retrieve it. I would've been able to retrieve APARNA much more easily, I think (her first name has appeared once before, in a 2018 puzzle), butNANCHERLA, that ended up being a letter-by-letter ordeal. Well, "ordeal" makes it sound harder and more grueling than it was, but still, her name was an extreme outlier in this otherwise very easy and relatively (if not completely) name-free puzzle. What I liked aboutNANCHERLAwas looking her up and discovering that she voiced a recurring, important character onBojack Horseman(a show I adored); she was the voice of Bojack's half-sister, Hollyhock. In fact, she does a Lot of voice work for animated shows.Unreliable Narrator(the book mentioned in the clue) was not something I'd heard of, so it did nothing to help me retrieve her name. She's an established comedian / writer, so she's eminently crossworthy, but she's also not a household name, so if solvers are gonna struggle *anywhere* today, they're gonna struggle there. And when you struggle in only one place, it gives you a kind of WARPED solving experience, an imbalanced feeling. It's like I forgot most of the rest of the (lovely) puzzle because all of my actual solving energy had to go into makingNANCHERLAappear. But—and this is crucial—the crosses were all fair. Can't imagine a single letter that a solver might wipe out on. So, no Naticks! Which, at the end of the day, is the most important rule of crosswords. So you have to work to get a name you've never heard of. It happens. And if you have heard of it, then you get that thrill of recognition. Either way, we all survive.

["... hunting the HORNY black TOAD ..."]

But there were other answers in this puzzle, so let's look at them. We've got SWIFTIES content, which seems like it will never let up, abate, or relent (10D: Fan base added to the O.E.D. in 2023), but beyond that we've got a cavalcade of cute colloquialisms—a truly loaded puzzle at the marquee-answer level. "I HAVE TO RUN!" over "NOTE TO SELF ..." into the big drop at "ARE YOU KIDDING ME!?" You've got the cutesy half-sailorish "AHOY THERE" (2D: Bit of salty language?) ("salt" is slang for "sailor") and the curt "YEAH, FINE" (20A: Begrudging assent) and the exasperated "WHO KNOWS!?" All the moods, basically. It's colorful and smooth and entertaining, extremely hard to fault. I don't have any real struggles to document or report, though. Didn't make any mistakes, didn't fall into any traps, and didn't work particularly hard to get anything beyond the aforementioned NANCHERLA. There was one little moment of puzzlement when I wrote in OWN for 60D: Beat decisively, in video game lingo (PWN), and then, faced with BIG O- at 59A: Forest, in a metaphor, just stared for a few seconds and thought "BIG ... BIG ... BIG OLD TREE?" What the hell kind of folksy idiom is that, I wondered. "C'mon, kids, we're gonna take our sleeping bags and tent and go out camping in the BIG OLD TREE," Pa would say. I thought the answer was the metaphor. But the forest is the metaphor. "You can't see the forest (BIG PICTURE) for the trees." And so PWN, not OWN. That's the kind of fun, low-key struggle I enjoy having on a Friday. Wish there'd been more of that, or more of any kind of resistance today, but I can't be too mad at a grid this pretty.

Bullet points:

• 18A: Holly genus (ILEX) — OK, so there's one stale olden Maleskaesque answer in the puzzle. Sometimes you gotta feed OOXTEPLERNON (the God of Bad Short Fill). Sacrifice an answer. Appease him. It's easier that way. You don't want him angry. You wouldn't like him when he's angry. The things he does to grids ... gruesome.

[October 30, 2009]

• 40A: "TiK ToK" creator (KESHA) — this clue made me smile. Her hit song "TiK ToK" (2010) preceded the existence of the app by many years.

• 58A: Antagonist in a 1604 play ... or a 1992 animated movie (IAGO) — I want to say I got this because of Shakespeare, but if I'm being honest, I think theOthellovillain and theAladdin parrot flew into my head roughly simultaneously
• 38D: West Coast political hub, familiarly (SAC)— do people call it that? I grew up in the San Joaquin Valley, just a few hours south of Sacramento, and I don't remember anyone saying that. But then, I don't remember anyone talking much about Sacramento at all. Anyway, SAC is a baseball term to me, now and forever, irrevocably.
• 52D: Color of a proverbial French beast (NOIRE)— from the expression "bêteNOIRE" (literally, "black beast"), which means "something strongly detested or avoided" (merriam webster dot com). It is also the ironic name of a 1987 Bryan Ferry album ("ironic" because I neither detest nor avoid it.)

See you next time.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

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THEME: Letter openers...— you have to read the first two letters of each theme clue aloud in order to get the first word of the answer; thus [MEDALS] is a word that starts with "ME-" and means "awards," so your answer is EMMY ("M" E") AWARDS:

One real tough spot for me: the NE. OK, not real tough, but toughish. Trouble started with GOT AT instead of GOT TO (22A: Irritated), and then two "?" clues, neither of which I could quite process. I know the term "naked eye," obviously, but my brain was like "Why would it look bad with your naked eye? or why would your eye look ... badly?" But the idea is just that there are things that simply can't be seen with the naked EYE, which means it's not the "best" at "looking" (at microbes, say). Then there was the ABBOT, who sits at the "Top of the order" ... of monks. It's a good "?" clue (9D: Top of the order?), with a surface meaning that screams "baseball" and then seemingly infinite potential other meanings (depending on how many meanings of either "top" or "order" you can imagine). In the end, it's pretty straightforward, actually, but once your (my) brain goes into "?"-clue, mode, it can be hard to emerge from the weeds. Then there wasBOYTOY, which, again, I just couldn't come up with (11D: Young male lover, informally). I wanted something in the ROMEO / LOTHARIO family.BOYTOYimplies a specific relationship to a partner, a somewhat demeaning and objectifying relationship, in a way that other words for mere "lover" do not, which is probably why BOYTOY didn't occur to me. I actually figured all this out without that much trouble, but compared to the rest of the grid, that NE corner seemed like work.

A couple things that grated. One was the cloying cutesy language. BOOTIE seems pretty neutral, but it started a baby-talk trend that just kept going, including referring to feet as "Tootsies" (5A: Tootsie treat? = PEDI) and finally (literally finally, the last thing I put in the grid) referring to one's rear end as both the cringey / dated [Buns] (in the clue), and the truly horrifically infantile PATOOT in the answer. Real nails/chalkboard stuff, and a hard way to go out. Otherwise, the only other problem I have with this grid is that it containsNEOwhen NEOLITH is such a prominent thematic component. That seems like very bad editing. Doesn't matter that you clue NEO some other, non-prefix way. Still seems like a jarring dupe, especially as NEO literally crosses the [NEOLITH] answer.

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