Ball of vinegared rice topped with raw fish / SUN 8-23-20 / Basketball player in old slang / Party symbol since 1870 / Lyre player of myth / Non-US MLB team on sports tickers

Constructor: Barbara Lin

Relative difficulty: Easy (7:57)

THEME: "Musical Interlude" — wacky answers are created by adding the notes of the scale (DO, RE, MI, FA, SOL, LA, TI) to familiar phrases:

Theme answers:

• AMAZING DOG RACE (23A: Iditarod, for one?) ("Amazing Grace")
• FORESTER PARENT (31A: One driving kids around in a Subaru?) (foster parent)
• ORGAN DOMINATION (47A: Letting out all the stops to drown out the other instruments?) (organ donation)
• SCARFACE RESOURCES (62A: Cocaine and guns, in a Pacino movie?) (scarce resources)
• PARASOL MILITARY (81A: Troops who are worried about sun protection?) (paramilitary)
• GLARE AT GRANDMA (93A: Give mom's mom the stink eye?) (great grandma)
• THE PITIED PIPER (109A: "Twelve Days of Christmas" musician who invites sympathy?) (the Pied Piper)

Word of the Day: UAR (77D: Former Mideast grp.) —

The United Arab Republic (UAR; Arabic: الجمهورية العربية المتحدة‎ al-Jumhūrīyah al-'Arabīyah al-Muttaḥidah) was a sovereign state in the Middle East from 1958 to 1971. It was initially a political union between Egypt (including the occupied Gaza Strip) and Syria from 1958 until Syria seceded from the union after the 1961 Syrian coup d'état -- leaving a rump state. Egypt continued to be known officially as the United Arab Republic until 1971.

The republic was led by Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser. The UAR was a member of the United Arab States, a loose confederation with the Mutawakkilite Kingdom of Yemen, which was dissolved in 1961. (wikipedia)

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A very normal 20th-century effort. The wacky add-some-letters stuff and the musical scale stuff, absolutely basic theme material for years and years. Doesn't mean it's inherently bad, just that you better put it to good (novel, fun) use, or else it's going to feel like an exercise in nostalgia. The Way Puzzles Were. And this one just didn't feel snappy or contemporary enough, or wacky enough, for that matter. It was a perfectly serviceable but ultimately tepid effort. And it's a good thing that it went by so fast (i.e. was so easy) because it is not a grid you want to look at too closely. There's a lot, and I mean a lot, of substandard fill here. Or, rather, it's pretty standard, and pretty tired, and pretty wince-inducing. Very short list I've scrawled out quickly here on my printed-out puzzle: MATIC EROO ENTO NUTRI (so ... just prefixes and suffixes) ATPAR ATNINE ACERB ARMEE RICAN MRE UAR (those last two *right next to each other*) ENORM and something called EDATE??? What the hell? Meanwhile over in the Plus column, all I have is SPOTIFY NIGIRI GNOCCHI and KALE SALAD (which sounds like a fun night in during quarantine). WIRETAP and MAHALIA are OK too. But overall, the theme just doesn't produce the fireworks it needs to in order to be successful, and the fill is too often gratingly non-wordy and overfamiliar. I'd give GLARE AT GRANDMA a thumbs-up, and maaaaybe SCARFACE RESOURCES too. Everything else just kinda lies there. 

I had a clunky start to this one, in that I thought there was going to be some reference to the TV show "The Amazing Race" (the existence of this show makes the ultimate answer, AMAZING DOG RACE, very very anticlimactic ... like, you're just adding the word "dog" to a pre-existing TV show title). Then I realized that the base phrase was "Amazing Grace," w/ a "G," which has me wondering now if "The Amazing Race" was *always* a pun on "Amazing Grace" ... somehow? I guess it's pretty typical to start (comparatively) slow, since the start is always when you have the least amount of info to go on, by definition. Picking up speed is probably a pretty normal phenomenon. Still, looking bad, I sputtered up there compared to how blazingly fast I was afterward. Once I cleared the alleged Beatles song ("YES IT IS"!?!?!) (in my head it goes, "Speaking words of wisdom / YES IT IS!") (33A: B-side to the Beatles' "Ticket to Ride"), it was off to the races. This was one of those solves where I could feel, about halfway through, that I was going to be close to record pace. Sometimes you can just feel it. But then I typo'd EDGING (90D: Trim) as EEGING and that completely screwed up the tail end of the GRANDMA themer (-GRANEMA), which meant that the whole SE corner all of a sudden got much much harder. It felt big and empty compared to the areas I'd just been slicing through. So I had to plunk the "LA" in there in the circled squares (so knowing the theme actually helped!) and muscle my way through to the end. Not sure how I never actually saw the ROSIE clue, since that would've been a gimme (dang it!) (96D: Perez of "Do the Right Thing"), but anyway, I still got to the end in under 8, which is very fast for me. I think my record on a Sunday NYTXW is in the 7:40s. The high of nearly breaking my record kept me from having too many bad feelings about this puzzle, but as the high wore off and I reviewed the grid ... things soured quickly. But as I say, it's a very solid late-'90s kind of effort. B+ if it were actually the late-'90s. But for today, a C at best.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

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