My time: 16:05, eight minutes faster than average, despite the fact that I put a lot of wrong answers in at first.
Theme: "Sugar, Sugar" is the title. The themed answers are the names of candies all running together, clued to express a phrase.
For example, "supernova in our galaxy?" is MILKY WAY STARBURST. And "bookworms call dad?" is NERDS RING POP. My favorite is "some astronomy PhDs?" which is MARS SMARTIES.
It's a pretty simple theme, and once the idea clicks, filling in the answers is easy.
The BMW Z4 was a clue just recently, in January 17. The other BMW in the clue is the X6, a "sports activity coupe."
For "Doctors Without Borders, e.g." I put *NGO but it's the much more prosaic ORG. For "false accusation, informally," I put *BAD RAP, but it's BUM RAP. My wrong answer led to more confusion on the crossing clue "result of a breast pocket mishap, maybe." I had *INK SPOT at first, then it changed to *INK DARK which makes little sense and puzzled the heck out of me, until finally the bum in BUM RAP showed me it was INK MARK.
I doff my cap at the arcane word ARCANUM for "deep secret."
The Mark Twain play "IS HE Dead?" is based on his own 1893 short story "Is He Living or Is He Dead." It concerns a painter who fakes his own death to increase the value of his work and thereafter dresses as a woman to avoid detection. Apparently even Twain scholars conclude that the play is Not Good.
Never heard of TONI Watson, an Australian singer (nom de stage: Tones and I) with a 2019 hit called "Dance Monkey."
I only got "do core exercises all day, every day?" from the theme and context. CRUNCH NOW AND LATER makes perfect sense, but I think of Crunch bars as Nestlé Crunch. I didn't imagine the right candy until I searched it for this blog entry.
Spike Lee seems pretty obviously a guy who went to NYU (he got an MFA in 1982 from the NYU Tisch School of the Arts), but so did Donald Glover (also TSOA, 2006). So did Aziz Ansari and Audrey Plaza.
For "members of the crow family" I put *DAWS. But it's JAYS! I didn't know they were related. They are all Corvidae. Crows are genus corvus; jays are genus cyanocitta.
The UTES are University of Utah basketball team, which I feel like has probably come up before. Thsi time they are clued as the Runnin' UTES.
I have a very extensive vocabulary, but didn't think of BUR for "prickly covering of a seed."
"The BRAIN --- is wider than the Sky" is a poem by Emily Dickinson. Because the brain can hold the sky and you besides, do you see? Also, the brain is just the weight of God. Because they're both infinite? Maybe.
The SPY is "the only Stratego piece with a letter on it." The letter is S. The other pieces had the number one to nine on them. The Scout is 9, and the Marshal is 9. At least in the classic game. This has been revised.
OSAKA has come up a lot in the puzzle, mostly as the city but sometimes as the tennis pro Naomi Osaka. On January 2, 2018, I noted in passing that OSAKA is known as "Japan's kitchen." Today's clue is "Japan's street food mecca." It has been said that the people of Osaka spend more on food than on anything else, and the term kuidaore ("eat until you drop") is used to describe the food culture there.
Apparently the Detroit Lions play in FORD Field. The team is owned by Martha Firestone Ford's children. She served six seasons (2014-19) as the Detroit Lions Owner and Chairman.
"Volt-amperes" are WATTS. The watt is the SI unit of power, equivalent to one joule per second, corresponding to the power in an electric circuit in which the potential difference is one volt and the current one ampere.
Clever clues: "Company whose business is picking up?" is UBER. "Cutting edge?" is HAIRLINE. "It helps in passing" is YEA.
This was a fun Sunday. I thought it was easier than most. The theme is quite straightforward and once you've solved one the others come quickly. Also, I thought the clues were not nearly as tricky as on some other later-week puzzles. For example, "they go wherever the wind blows" is not a particularly recondite clue for VANES. In all, this was an amusing breather in what is normally a head-scratching day.
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