Biblical patriarch who begat Methuselah / WED 3-5-25 / Missouri tributary / Spinning, feathered lures

Theme answers:

• BLOOD BATH-- Blowout victory, metaphorically
• DEADPOOL-- Marvel superhero portrayed by Ryan Reynolds
• ZOMBIE OFFICE-- Commercial property left mostly vacant by hybrid work arrangements
• GHOST KITCHEN-- Restaurant offering delivery and pickup only

Word of the Day: GABE ("Welcome Back, Kotter" role of 1970s TV) —

Welcome Back, Kotter is an American sitcom starring Gabe Kaplan as a high-school teacher in charge of a racially and ethnically diverse remedial education class nicknamed the Sweathogs. Recorded in front of a live studio audience, the series aired on ABC from September 9, 1975, through May 17, 1979.

Hello friends, and happy Malaika MWednesday! I recognize Rebecca's name as someone who is excellent at coming up with themes, so I was excited to dive in. This was awesome! I'll take one paragraph to discuss the theme, and another paragraph to discuss the construction.

The way the New York Times structured this puzzle, when you were entering a theme answer, it highlighted the revealer. Usually my instinct is to immediately jump down and read that clue, but this time I held out a little and hopped around avoiding that section, and I'm glad. I think it was more fun that way. In particular, I got DEADPOOL and BLOOD BATH first, and tried to think of their connection. I wondered if their shared letters (OOL / LOO) would have anything to do with the theme. It wasn't until I filled in GHOST KITCHEN that I saw the spooky vibes, but I still didn't clock the relationship between the features of a house until I did hit the revealer.

I don't often discuss the complexity of construction in order to praise it. A lot of my reviews actually criticize when a constructor is jamming theme answers into a tight grid because I rarely think it's worth it, but Rebecca did an excellent job here. If you haven't constructed puzzles before, a grid with mirror symmetry like this one is really hard to wrangle because it's easy to end up with columns of long entries along the center axis, which can be hard to fill cleanly. That's what happened here, with INBOUNDS / DEADPOOL / KOMBUCHA and (to a lesser extent) DOG RUNS / RAINS / WE GET IT, but all the entries are clean. It's also hard to have theme answers intersecting (like DEADPOOL with BLOODBATH) or to have them stacked (like HAUNTED and MANSION). And she could have broken up those long non-thematic down answers with an extra block at square 49, but she kept them intact. 

All in all, a really cute theme with really good execution. A puzzle that reminds me why I love puzzles.

Bullets:

• [Sweet braided bread] for BABKA — I wanted "challah" here at first; I think of babka as twisted, not braided
• [Message meaning "I can't be reached right now"] for OOO — This means "out of office." At my job, this is a very common initialism that I probably see at least weekly, more around the holidays
• [Woman's name that becomes another woman's name when an "M" is added to the front] for ELISSA — It's always interesting to me when a name that's not particularly uncommon comes up in a grid and there's no famous person associated with it. Even more interesting when I personally have friends with this name! Can't put them in a clue though...
• [Speed Wagon and Flying Cloud of old autodom] for REOS — This and GTO are the crossword cars that I will simply never ever remember or get

I'll see y'all later this week
;)

Malaika

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