USA Today Crossword - June 17th 2020

When this appeared in my feed last week I was truly tempted to pick up my keyboard and go to work, but I figured that it was pretty likely that someone a little more qualified would leap to the challenge. Rex Parker (as well as being an old internet acquaintance via the spirital blogmother) is the king of angry crossword twitter and I figured his royal seal of approval would be all it would take to get a regular USA Today crossword blog up and running. As if I didn't spend enough time thinking a out crossword every day as it is.

Sadly, a week of enjoyable USA Today crosswords later and I haven't seen any evidence of a new blog appearing just yet, so in the meantime thought it might be fun to try imitating Rex's style for a little while here on the Leaflocker and share my enjoyment of the puzzle that has recently become a staple of my days in quarantine.

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Yes, I'm hot in this" garment / Island whose capital is Oranjestad / Character often said to have been based on Bass Reeves / Tamal wrappers / Company with a duck mascot / "What was I thinking?"

Constructor: Zhouqin Burnikel

Difficulty: I've only been doing this puzzle for a few weeks, so it's hard to say how difficult this one was compared to usual. I'd say it's in the mid-Tuesday NYT range, which is about right for the sort of thing I've come to expect from the USA Today most of the time, and the 8:44 I took is also pretty typical for me for a puzzle completed with my clumsy thumbs.

Theme: WOLF PACK - First word of each of the three theme entries start a phrase completed with the word 'wolf'. 

• LONE RANGER (16A: Character often said to have been based on Bass Reeves)
• TEEN CHOICE AWARD (36A: One of 28 won by One Direction)
• GRAY MATTER (60A: Brains)

Sure, three theme answers doesn't feel like a lot for a puzzle without a revealer, but I've gone over the puzzle twice, and unless false wolf and cheap wolf are phrases this is what we've got. They're all definitely wolves and as a nice bonus they triggered flashbacks to a certain Michael J Fox movie that seemed to be constantly being played on Australian TV during my childhood in the '90s, so...thanks I guess?

I didn't notice the theme at all during the solve, but I did notice that the keystone One Direction clue was accompanied by a LIAM at 46 down, so I was expecting to find the names of the rest of those early-teens heartthrobs as an easter egg, but was sadly disappointed that in a grid with a LOU and a LOIS there doesn't seem to be a LOUIS hiding anywhere. If this wasn't going to be five-year-late OneD tribute puzzle, then why not use someone more current, like Taylor Swift, who has almost as many wins, or BTS, who won some awards in 2019?

That minor quibble aside, the grid was full of the good stuff that we've come to expect from the Agard-edited USA Today puzzle: Easy fill that doesn't require two many second guesses (I had START instead of RESET for a while) but avoiding a lot of the usual crosswordese dross even if there was an OWIE or two along the way, with a decent chance of the solver learning something along the way. I'd never met Yes, I'm Hot in This or Oranjestad, but they both seem like things to know about.

Clunkers: I'm not a big fan of AH I SEE, but the crossings were all pretty straight forward, so that's all good. As a non-Usonian I tend to trip up a little on brandnames, too, but since EARLE seemed inevitable AFLAC came together nicely, and a few years of buying the grape juice for communion meant that WELCHS was a gimme. Some things just don't change even on the other side of the Atlantic, it seems.

Word of the Day: SCOOTED (25A: Slid while seated) Simple, elegant, and could never be anything other than SCOOTED. Just the word itself brings back happy memories of cafeterias and camps back in the days when we spent time in the same place as other people.

There should probably be a picture or video clip or something, but I'm not going to subject you all to the highlight of 80's cinema that was Teen Wolf and my reference library of music leaves a little to be desired. So uh....