Bob

I FEVER: [makes people camp outside the Apple store?]

TIL that GOOGLE DRIVE has the same number of letters as APPLE ICLOUD.

I solved the whole thing without getting the theme, even though I knew from the title that it had to do with Pig Latin. Even after reading the explanations, I'm not sure I really get it. If you had told me it was a themeless puzzle, I'd have believed it. Maybe it's because I was too old when I first encountered Pig Latin. 😅 Not my cup of tea. Or OJ or au lait...

I wanted [Enterprise enterprise] to be something like BOLDLY GO (where no man has gone before). 🖖

I went to Yale, and no one ever mentioned UPenn. The only rival people cared about was Harvard. :-)

Today I learned that PASEO is recognized as an English word. I knew it from Spanish and saw that it fit, but I resisted it until proven overwhelmingly by the crosses because the clue did not suggest the answer would be a foreign word. So I looked it up in Merriam-Webster, and there it is! Another of the many Spanish loanwords English. Loved the puzzle, by the way, especially DANCING WITH THE TSARS.

I'm reminded of an old joke: Amount of beauty required to launch 1 ship? 1 millihelen.

You don't need to be a Lego aficionado to know MINIFIGs: you just need to have kids. At least that was my experience! 🙂

At the very end I was stuck with TEXTBOT / TRAYS, but the latter didn't make sense for [Looks below the surface?] (I originally had DRAGS for that one, but overrode it when I found ACHY). I thought TEXT BOT made sense, as in software used by scammers to send text messages asking people to "enter" their information. I just couldn't see the answer until I approached the end of the alphabet: TEXT BOA? Nope TEXT BOB? Nope TEXT BOD? Nope TEXT BOG? Nope TEXT BOO? Nope TEXT BOP? Nope TEXT BOW? Nope TEXT BOX? Facepalm

I had AID for 1D instead of the rebus (by reading "provided assistance" as "assistance that was provided"), but saw that you could make the correct answer for 19A, IDEEFIXE, by going down, then right, then up, and then right. In other words, doing a sort of hairpin turn. So I thought that was the gimmick! So when I reached the revealer at 69 A, I thought at first that it was BEWARE TURNS. /facepalm IEFIXE DE

Was I the only one who thought that baseball was the "obvious" topic for "perfectly pitched" and that therefore the question mark in [Perfectly pitched?] meant it was about something else, such as music? My first try was TUNED.

"Perfect" as verb vs noun are not homophones, they are homographs / heteronyms. Homophone means "same sound", that is, same pronunciation. Wikipedia has a nice Venn diagram with all these terms.

I thought for a moment that [Reds' fandom?] might be COMMUNISTS. It has the right number of letters!

The first "chemical twin" that came to mind was ISOTOPE, but it didn't fit. Calling ISOMERS "twins" is a stretch, because they can differ from each other more that Arnold Schwarzenegger differs from Danny DeVito. The classical example is urea vs ammonium cyanate, both with the formula CH₄N₂O. One is an inorganic salt, the other an organic compound which is part of nitrogen metabolism. Or consider ethanol vs dimethyl ether (C₂H₆O): one is a liquid you can drink (although some say you shouldn't); the other is a gas used as a propellant. Isomers have as much to do with each other as the word ISOMER has to do with MOIRES: they are anagrams.

I had the feeling that I had never heard of JAMAISVU before, even though I know I must have...

The only city I could think of was Portland, but it would only fit as PORTLANDOR or maybe PORTLANDIA. It wasn't until I did a buch of the crosses that I realized it was Bend and had a good CHORTLE.

I felt so sure that [Cardinal point?] would be PAPALCONCLAVE until the crosses convinced me otherwise...

LOL, it shows my ignorance of birding that I didn't realize that the full answers to the theme clues were actual bird names. I thought they were only puns that ended with a (relatively generic) bird name. That is, I knew hawks, but not Cooper's hawks, crows, but not American crows, parrots, but not Amazon parrots...

I saw the pattern of the center as a "tilted square", so I had TILTED instead of DOTTED for the longest time. FACEPALM!

I immediately saw ARTISTIC LICENSE, which has the right number of letters, but later dropped the whole thing after I saw that some of the crosses on the left didn't work with it. By the time I had found CREATIVE, I had some crosses on the right that were wrong, so I never thought of LICENSE again until the very end! (Which finally allowed me to get those crosses right.) So close, yet so far away!

For a moment there I thought that the amswer to [Where the sidewalk ends] was BURB...

The TRAFFIC JAM clue was unnecessarily cryptic when seen in the NYT app or website, because it shows three slices of road on a single line: |X:X:X:X| |X:X:X:X| |X:X:X:X| For the print version, it was laid out like this, which makes more sense: |X:X:X:X| |X:X:X:X| |X:X:X:X|

As a former Harvard postdoc, I had no trouble solving the puzzle but did not get the theme until I read this column. :-) GELID was not a problem for me because I was familiar with "gélido", which I think is not as uncommon in Spanish as gelid is in English, and also has the benefit of sounding similar to "hielo", which is Spanish for ice, since they share the same Latin root.

I had TAG for [Besmirch], thinking of graffiti, but then wondered what on Earth is a "gag bag"? Not that I had ever heard of rag bags, either... I take it that this was no coincidence but the editors were sitting on it waiting for a heat wave? :-) The crossing of MAMACASS with TERRACHIPS was a Natick for me. Had to Google those.

Shouldn't the clue for NOLA [The Big Easy] allude to the fact that it is an acronym? Even though NOLA was the first answer that occurred to me, I thought it couldn't be right, so I looked fruitlessly for other ideas, such as *FILM (there's one with that title from 1986, but maybe too obscurefor a Tuesday).

When I finally filled in 33A, I was initially surprised that GET SHOT would be the answer. I mean, one would "see red" (blood), but it seemed unbecoming a NYT crossword to have such a "triggering" answer! /facepalm

I spent an embarrassing amount of time trying to figure out what's a ZTAGENAME.

ERLENMEYERFLASK was a gimme for me, but I couldn't fit it in until I had the theme figured out. I had never heard of CHEYENNEMOUNTAIN, which was the last of the theme words I could fill in. But curiously enough, the one that made me decide that there definitely must be a rebus was POPEYES. Admittedly not as highbrow as EYEOFNEWT! What really killed my NE was that I had confused buckeye for HAWKEYE. Got stuck until I read the column which had CHEW, leading to a real facepalm moment...

The RIPA/AERO intersection felt like a Natick to me.

I liked the theme and was able to figure it out quickly from the revealer, but got stuck with some of the other clues, some of which I thought were inaccurate. I agree with the criticism already made of PERP, DVR and ZORK; another one that I thought iffy is TONYAWARD, which I'd say is a theater award, not a music award (even though it has categories for musical theater). I thought the Juno Awards fit, given the crosses I had then, but I'm not sure if anyone has heard of them in the US! 🙂 I liked the ALIBABA clue, for which I had initially put *ISHMAEL (famous for mentioning his name in the opening line of Moby Dick, of course).

Today I learned that NAY and NEE are homophones in English! The French pronunciation for the latter is definitely different (no diphtong, just a simple "e" sound).