Thursday, August 13 2026, Killian Olson

A delightful puzzle today, with a clever theme that was opaque to me until the revealer made it all make sense in the end.  Going through the Across clues, we encounter four in italics, straightforward enough except their (evident) answers either don't match the crossers, or don't fit the available squares:

• 17A "Mafia members, e.g." should be MOBSTERS but it's LOBSTERS
• 26A "Alimony recipients, say" should be EXSPOUSES (too long!) but it's ESPOUSES
• 41A "Drinks at a pub" should be ALES (too short!) but it's AXLES
• 53A "11th of a noted 12" should be AQUARIUS but it's AQUARIUM

I had all this written in by the time I encountered the revealer "Evaluating, as an opponent", whose answer SIZINGUP makes the above make sense - the 'M' in MOBSTERS is 'sized up' to 'L' to make LOBSTERS, and so on.  Very neat, and the idea to include XS and XL as 'sizes' is downright brilliant!

The very first letter of the grid is a 'Z' (say it with me : ZED) and of course, that gets the ol' antennae quivering - and sure enough, the crossword is a pangram!!  Always impressive and I didn't find it forced at all.

No big snags to report here, aside from some initial theme-related confusion.  I had a false start with ZIPPO at 1D for '0' (it's ZILCH) but other than that, everything flowed nicely.

Elsewhere in the news:  We've all seen the RICOLA commercials, right?  Is that really yodeling? .. I got a kick out of the clue for PBJ ("Sandwich that may be a bit crunchy.." <-- emphasis on MAY, for those of us in the smooth-PB camp). This, by the way, joins BRRS ("Verbalized shivers") as the Vowelless Answers o' the Day.  And there's EKE again, this time clued as "Pull (out), as a narrow victory")!  We need some sort of bureau of standards to weigh in on this word, finally.

Signing off till tomorrow..

-phil