Large aquatic insect / THU 5-30-24 / Investment bank that folded in 2008 / Space on a CD track where a hidden song can be placed / Onetime head of the Chicago Outfit / California red, informally / Leaves with no moves, as a chess piece (2024)

THEME:"THE WALLS HAVE EARS" (7D: "Shh! People may be listening" ... or a hint to eight squares in this puzzle)— a rebus puzzle where "EAR" can be found in four boxes along the left edge (or "wall") of the grid and four boxes along the right.

Theme answers:

• WEAR AND TEAR (1D: Routine damage)
• HEART-TO-HEART (36D: Distinguished students)
• "HEAR YE, HEAR YE" (13D: Cry from a town crier)
• BEAR STEARNS (45D: Investment bank that folded in 2008)

Word of the Day: PREGAP(4D: Space on a CD track where a hidden song can be placed) —

Thepregapon aRed Bookaudio CDis the portion of the audio track that precedes "index01" for a given track in the table of contents (TOC). The pregap ("index 00") is typically two seconds long and usually, but not always, contains silence. Popular uses for having the pregap contain audio are live CDs, track interludes, andhidden songsin the pregap of the first track (detailed below). //The track 01 pregap was used to hide computer data, allowing computers to detect a data track whereas conventional CD players would continue to see the CD as an audio CD. //This method was made obsolete in mid 1996 when an update toWindows 95in driverSCSI1HLP.VXDmade the pregap track inaccessible. It is unclear whether this change in Microsoft Windows' behavior was intentional: for instance, it may have been intended to steer developers away from the pregap method and encourage what became theBlue Book specification"CD Extra" format. //On certain CDs, such asLight YearsbyKylie Minogue,HoboSapiensbyJohn Cale, orFactory ShowroombyThey Might Be Giants, the pregap before track 1 contains ahidden track. The track is truly hidden in the sense that most conventional standalone players and software CD players will not see it. //Such hidden tracks can be played by playing the first song and "rewinding" (more accurately, seeking in reverse) until the actual start of the whole CD audio track. //Not all CD drives can properly extract such hidden tracks. Some drives will report errors when reading these tracks, and some will seem to extract them properly, but the extracted file will contain only silence. //Other CDs contain additional audio information in the pre-gap area of other tracks, resulting in the audio only being heard on a conventional CD player if the CD is allowed to "play through," but not if you jump to the next track. //Some CDs also contain phantom tracks consisting ofonlyindex 0 data, meaning the track can only be played on a conventional CD player by allowing the CD to play through a previous track to the next track. (wikipedia)

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Rooms have four walls, not two, so unless we are supposed to be in some kind of hallway (or, since the puzzle seems so canal-obsessed, canal), then the theme is kind of wobbly at its foundations. I got the revealer first and expected to find "EAR"s on all of the walls. But no. Just the east and west walls. Not only did the puzzle neglect to EAR two walls, it also made the EARs ridiculously easy to find, arraying them very neatly, two in each of the four "wall" answers. It is very, very easy to get a longer answer when you know, before you even look at the clue, that it will contain not one but two "EAR"s. At about the halfway point, I decided to see if I could just fill in the remaining two "wall" answers with absolutely no assistance from crosses, and, sure enough:

That's a lot of real estate to just give away. In fact, the revealer itself gives most everything away, leaving us with nothing to do but find "EAR"s, like some kind of autumnal version of an EGG hunt (I'm imagining that the ears are ears of corn, but you could imagine that they are actual human ears if you wanted to go more of aBlue Velvet route). Hear an EAR, there an EAR. Shrug. The puzzle has a good concept, or at least a promising one, but (as happens so often) the execution doesn't really do the concept justice, failing to give us the proper four-walls experience, and failing to consider that once you get the revealer, it's just EAR EAR EAR etc. a barrage of EARs, all in predictable places. So, not nearly as much fun, nor as tough, as it should've been.

I took a weird route through this puzzle. When I couldn't get 1A: Chicken (WIMP) to work—I could think only of (COW)ARD but did not have enough (i.e. any) evidence to suggest there was a "COW" rebus afoot—I moved to the neighboring (due north) section and plunked down my first answer: EAU (6D: French hom*ophone of "haut"). And then ... the revealer was just right there. I didn't have to go down to the bottom of the grid to retrieve it; it just leapt into my boat. I had a few crosses in place before I saw the clue, but I don't think I would even have needed them. After that, I went EAR-hunting, and, well, ducks in a barrel at that point (what good are metaphors if you can't mix them?)

As for STONEFLY, well, it got me to look up STONEFLY, and man are they ugly. I thought they were going to be cool-looking, like dragonflies—you know, maybe OPALESCE a little—but no. They look like sticks. Actually, there are apparently ~3,500 species of them (and counting), so they probably look all kinds of ways. Despite being "common," they haven't been seen in the NYTX for almost forty years (last appearance was in the pre-Shortz era, 1988). STONEFLIES has yet to appear, so some ambitious entomology-minded constructor has a real opportunity there...