Confection named for Yankee legend Phil Rizzuto / SAT 11-14-26 / Fast bowler, in cricket / S-shaped hanger / Eponymous Ontario brewer John / First Day observers / Actress/comedian Benaderet / 1988 comedy with Arnold Schwarzenegger as Ivan Danko / Leaves with a pungent taste in one's mouth? / Processed with bloodroot or butternut / Ethnic group in China's Xinjiang region / Noted DC locale since 1939 / Spicy, savory South Asian dish

Constructor: Byron Walden

Relative difficulty: Challenging

THEME: none 

Word of the Day: RED HEAT (10D: 1988 comedy with Arnold Schwarzenegger as Ivan Danko) —

Red Heat is a 1988 American buddy cop action comedy thriller film directed, co-written, and co-produced by Walter Hill and starring Arnold Schwarzenegger as Soviet policeman Ivan Danko, and Jim Belushi as Chicago police detective Art Ridzik. The film centers on the duo who, finding themselves on the same case, work as partners to catch a cunning and deadly Georgian drug kingpin, Viktor Rostavili (Ed O'Ross), who killed Danko's previous partner. Most of the scenes set in the Soviet Union were actually shot in Hungary. Schwarzenegger was paid $8 million for his role in the film. The film is dedicated to the memory of Bennie Dobbins, who died while filming in Austria. (wikipedia)

• • •

Fairly short write-up today because the NYTXW was unavailable this morning for some unknown reason and so my normal writing window evaporated (I'm usually done by now, 5:55am). I need to get on with my day, so ... sorry, puzzle, but you're getting short shrift. Probably for the best, since most of what I'd be doing is groaning about how hard it was. I don't know if my rhythm just got thrown off by the outage or what but sitting down to solve a hard puzzle at 5:30am vs. sitting down to solve it right when I wake up (~4:15am) felt very different. I am extremely routinized when it comes to this blog, and so I don't know if my struggles today were the result of the puzzle itself or of my being off-schedule (for instance, I've already done some light exercise, I've already got the coffee made ... maybe these things have addled me). Anyway, woof, I had some moments there early on where I was like "Am I ever going to be able to solve this thing?" Just couldn't get a foothold. CHAW??? (1A: Leaves with a pungent taste in one's mouth?). LOL, not in a million years with that clue. Is CHAW a word for "chewing tobacco?" Yes, it is. I knew I was dealing with actual leaves (i.e. foliage), but I still couldn't think of an answer. I think I had COCA in there for a bit. But after that, only CLAM (tentative) and ATRA (certain) in the NW. NE wasn't much friendlier. Ended up way down in the SE before I finally got my (MEAT)HOOKs into this one, starting with AGED (wrong! it's DYED (46D: Processed with bloodroot or butternut)) but then ARSE (correct!) and SEED (53A: Sow what?) (genuinely funny clue—I wanted something to do with a pig, at first). Then ARKS CLERK FEAR (a guess), and then finally a sigh of relief as the corner started to really come together. 

From there, I made steady if slow progress up the east coast, then through the middle—where I stalled out again when I couldn't get PACKS (29D: Starts to make a move) and wrote in TO LET instead of UNLET (32D: Available, as an apartment). But then down to the SW corner (thank you, LABATT's!) (42A: Eponymous Ontario brewer John), and then up and ta da, finishing where I started: CHAW! Disgusting way to end. But it was a good puzzle, in that I had to work, and the fill was decent. (In the morning puzzle confusion, I forgot to open the puzzle with the new version of the software, the one w/ the post-solve animation and timer, so I don't know how long it took me, but ... I wanna say 10? For me, an absolute whooping.)

SPEED ROUND:

• 9A: ___ pad (CRASH) — lots of "????" fill-in-the-blanks (or "word that goes with") today. None of them transparent to me. TAG (8D: Word with dog or ear). TREAT (23D: "My ___"). Neither of the quotations were familiar (though I got "FEAR" a lot more easily than I got "CRAG"). I wrote in "Go GREEN" (of course) before "Go SOLAR" (boo!) (20D: "Go ___" (environmentalist's catchphrase). Over and over, I tripped and stalled.
• 9D: Bunch of dubious characters? (CHICKEN SCRATCH) — fun (to me) fact—I debuted this answer back in 2012 (this is its first appearance since):

• 14A: Country that celebrates Stork Day on March 25 to honor the return of its national bird (LITHUANIA) — cool triv but lol my knowing this. It's just [Country] and wait for crosses.
• 26A: Light refreshments? (PALE ALES) — they're light in color, presumably.
• 31A: First Day observers (QUAKERS) — really needed that "Q" because I had -T-KERS (from the TO LET error) and nearly wrote in STOKERS, just assuming they were some sect I'd never heard of. First Day is just ... Sunday?
• 36A: Break dancing? (CUT IN) — very nice clue.

• 38A: Alex Honnold's "How I climbed a 3,000-foot vertical cliff — without ropes" and others (TED TALKS) — briefly thought 29D: Starts to make a move (PACKS) was PACES (!?) and so was surprised to find that there were things called TED TALES now ... (there aren't, it turns out). 
• 39A: Kind of concrete that does not require pre-mixing (DRY-SET) — oof. Not PRE-SET, then? I ended up with DRI-SET, figuring it was some kind of industry spelling, since I was certain that UIGHURS was spelled with the "I" (u(i)gh!) (37D: Ethnic group in China's Xinjiang region). 
• 6D: Whopper topper (ONION) — saw this for the hamburger clue it was, but wasn't sure it wasn't about lying ... when I think of the "top" of a Whopper, I think of sesame seeds, but I may be confusing it with a Big Mac. Looks like both burgers feature sesame seed buns, though only one has a jingle that mentions them. Whatever, the answer was ONION, which "tops" the beef, OK, but not the whole Whopper, so boo.

• 7A: Bad tipper? (FINK) — don't love this. Is the idea that he's bad for talking to the cops (presumably)? Is this clue pro-crime, pro-code of silence, pro-Omerta? Or is the FINK just a bad guy (in the generic sense of the term) and he's squealing? His tips probably aren't bad. They're good tips? Otherwise he wouldn't really be a FINK, would he?
• 12D: Confection named for Yankee legend Phil Rizzuto (SCOOTER PIE) — lol no, no idea. Don't know what that is, don't know what it's got to do with baseball, nothing nothing nothing. I had heard the term before, probably, since I was able to guess the SCOOTER part, eventually, but woof, no, I had nothing here. The internet is telling me it's just a knock-off of a moon pie.

["Holy cow! They're named after me.”]

• 13D: Finishes a shift? (HEMS) — shift = dress. I wrote in SEWS at first, then took the "finishes" part seriously and changed it to HEMS.
• 15D: Country house? (U.N. HEADQUARTERS) — great fill, clever clue.
• 22D: Fast bowler, in cricket (PACER) — lol please be serious. Cricket? Jeez louise.
• 48D: Actress/comedian Benaderet (BEA) — lol again no. The sheer number of things outside my ken today, ouch and woof and ugh. But again, I did appreciate the fight. Byron is one of my favs. Just wasn't on (or near) his wavelength today.

[BEA Benaderet was, among other things, the voice of Betty on The Flintstones]

That's it, see you next time.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on BlueSky and Letterboxd]
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SAT 11-14-26 ???

Constructor: Byron Walden

Relative difficulty: who knows?

Hello, it is just after 4 in the morning and I have come to my computer to solve the puzzle and ... it is not available. Not through my software, not on the website, not in the app. Here's what I see when I try to get at the puzzle:

Checking social media quickly, it looks like I'm not the only one having this problem. I have no idea what's happening or how long it's going to take to resolve, but today's blog post is obviously going to be delayed indefinitely as a result of whatever tech failing this is. I thought all of Outlook going down and then all of U.S. air traffic going down and then Elon's rocket booster blowing up was all the tech failure I was going to witness in a 48-hour span. Seemed like a lot. Guess I was wrong. See you ... soon, I hope.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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Hagia Sophia feature / FRI 11-13-26 / Perform an entrechat, e.g. / Sci-fi companion who speaks "binary," familiarly / Ye olde quaff / Big name in discount supermarkets / Lutheran hymn / Relative of a mandrill

Constructor: Mike Graczyk

Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium to Medium

[50D: Sci-fi companion who speaks "binary," familiarly = ARTOO]

THEME: none 

Word of the Day: EMIL Nolde (53D: Actor Jannings or artist Nolde) —

Emil Nolde (born Hans Emil Hansen; 7 August 1867 – 13 April 1956) was a German painter and printmaker. He was one of the first Expressionists, a member of Die Brücke, and was one of the first oil painting and watercolor painters of the early 20th century to explore color. He is known for his brushwork and expressive choice of colors. Golden yellows and deep reds appear frequently in his work, giving a luminous quality to otherwise somber tones. His watercolors include vivid, brooding storm-scapes and brilliant florals.

Nolde's intense preoccupation with the subject of flowers reflected his interest in the art of Vincent van Gogh.

Even though his art was included in the Entartete Kunst exhibition of 1937, Nolde was a member of the Nazi Party, with racist and antisemitic views, and a staunch supporter of Nazi Germany. [...] 

Nolde was a supporter of the National Socialist German Workers' Party from the early 1920s, having become a member of its Danish section. He expressed anti-semitic, negative opinions about Jewish artists, and considered Expressionism to be a distinctively Germanic style. This view was shared by some other members of the Nazi party, notably Joseph Goebbels and Fritz Hippler. // However, Adolf Hitler rejected all forms of modernism as "degenerate art"; the Nazi regime officially condemned Nolde's work. Until that time, he had been held in great esteem in Germany. A total of 1,052 of his works were removed from museums, more than those of any other artist. (wikipedia)

• • •

Happy Native American Heritage Mo., I guess! (16A: NOV.). Also, Happy Friday the 13th! And finally, happy birthday to my mother, Sarah, who wrote me last week to tell me, "Even when I went by Sally, no one ever called me Sal!" (see this past Sunday's puzzle for more on this alleged "Nickname for Sarah" controversy). If my mother's birthday is on Friday the 13th, then that means mine is on Thanksgiving Day this year. Don't get my own special day just for myself, but ... I love Thanksgiving so much that I don't really care. Best meal of the year, daughter will be home, etc. I think I'm gonna ask to celebrate my birthday a few days early, just to keep some recovery space between the birthday cake and the Thanksgiving pie. But back to the puzzle ...

About a minute slower than last week, but still very doable. The grid really felt like a Saturday. Something about its strongly quadranted and blocky shape ... but the quadrants really aren't that cut off from the rest of the grid. Lots of points of entry make for nice flow. I never got a real whoosh-whoosh zoom-zoom thrill, largely because there aren't any answers that really shooooot across the grid from section to section, but I really really liked the big stacks up top and down below. I think "CAN'T BEAT THAT" is the (far) more common expression (4 million+ hits), but "CAN'T TOP THAT" does exist (~68K hits), and doesn't grate my ears too much. And the other long answers up there—stellar. "ALONE AT LAST" is a winner, and the first of a slew of longer colloquial answers that all seem vaguely related, like they're snippets of the same conversation. "ALONE AT LAST ... so how have you been?" "I MET SOMEONE" "Wow. CAN'T TOP THAT. Is he married?" "LET'S HOPE NOT." And then someone with a shopping cart shouts "MOVE IT ALONG!" because this conversation takes place in a grocery store and the people involved are blocking the CEREAL AISLE. Speaking of CEREAL AISLE, that clue is an all-timer (15A: Total area). I've seen Total used in this misdirective way before, but today it really got me.

["You better loosen your girdle, Margaret!"]

The fill overall seemed pretty strong today, with very few things making me wince or frown. There's your usual smattering of EPEES and ATO and NAH and ARTOO and OTOE and ENE etc., but there's nothing particularly egregious, and the mid-range and longer stuff stays bright throughout, which is all I ask of a themeless puzzle. The puzzle felt harder than it was. I think that's because the puzzle never felt like it broke wide open. There was always an answer or two I had to work around. So I just made steady progress. Worst problem was also the first problem, i.e. 1D: Acquiesce. As you can see on the grid animation above, I dropped in GIVE IN, crossed it (successfully!) with EPA, and then ... those two just sat there while I worked on other things. Even when I circled back to fix GIVE IN, the first thing I changed it to (ACCEPT) was also wrong (it's ACCEDE). Ouch. Nothing else tripped me up for long after that. Took some time to see CRY WOLF (39A: Raise a false red flag) because of the awkward clue: I know false flags and I know red flags but I've never heard of "false red flags" (though I can infer what they are). Struggled to parse "TRÈS CHIC!" since there's nothing in the clue to indicate Frenchness (36D: "What style!"). Had no idea a CHORALE was a [Lutheran hymn]. I just thought it was a musical piece for a chorus. Rather, it's "a hymn or psalm sung to a traditional or composed melody in church also : a harmonization of a chorale melody" (merriam-webster.com). It's also used as a synonym for "Chorus" or "Choir." 

["AAH..."]

What else? I thought Lincoln might have been talking about PEOPLE or a PERSON, as I couldn't immediately conjure up the closing lines of the Gettysburg Address ("... PERISH from this earth") (43D: Fourth-to-last word of the Gettysburg Address). I had absolutely no conception of the Memphis-to-Nashville dir. (ENE), so that little bit of directional crosswordese was a nuisance, for sure. I did manage to remember ANAPHORA, though—a rhetorical device that involves repetition at the beginning of successive phrases. ANAPHORA is not to be confused with AMPHORA, which is some kind of earthenware jug, if I remember correctly. Yes. Though it's more "jar" than "jug." Narrow neck. Handles. Used in ancient world for storage and transport of various grains and liquids.

[AMPHORA]

Bullets:

• 53D: Actor Jannings or artist Nolde (EMIL) — Jannings has been the NYTXW's go-to EMIL for as long as I've been solving. Nolde you see less often, perhaps because, despite being an astonishing painter, he was a very big Nazi (see Word of the Day, above). Didn't save his art from being condemned as "degenerate" by Goebbels et al., but yeah, he was a member of the Nazi party and an enthusiastic racist and antisemite. Not sure why Jannings couldn't have just held this clue down by himself. [sorry, we regret to inform you that Jannings was also a Nazi] There are a handful of other EMILs out there as well. 

• 6D: Spiny succulents (ALOES) — fell into a CACTI pit. Pretty painful, as pits go.
• 2D: Perform an entrechat, e.g. (LEAP UP) — Perform a "between cat"!? I'm imagining my cats leaping up. Seems a poor analogy for the dance move. According to m-w.com, "entrechat" is a "modification of Italian (capriola) intrecciata, literally, intertwined caper"
• 11D: French bean (TÊTE) — your "bean" is your "head" is your TÊTE (in French).
• 50D: Sci-fi companion who speaks "binary," familiarly (ARTOO) — as in R2-D2. I love that the day after I mentioned how long it had been since we'd seen a Star Wars clue, we see a Star Wars clue. I honestly thought "I'm gonna jinx it." And ta da! You're welcome!

That's all for today. See you next time.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on BlueSky and Letterboxd]
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Intrusive marketing issue / THU 11-12-26 / Meaning of the Arabic greeting "As-salamu alaykum" / Diesel in a muscle car? / John of 2018's "Searching" / "Unbelievable," in a text / Absent, for short / Site of some urban greenery / Skintight activewear / Novelist Butler

Constructor: Jared Cappel

Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium

[pretty sure this is the longest Star Wars-free streak of the year]

THEME: ROOFTOP GARDEN (55A: Site of some urban greenery ... or where the starts of four Down answers have "grown") — first parts of four Down answers appear off-grid, on top of the grid, in what becomes (upon completion of the puzzle) a ROOFTOP GARDEN. The vegetables involved are also imagined as a VEGETABLE MEDLEY (60A: Dish with ingredients from this puzzle's 55-Across):

Theme answers:

• BEETHOVEN'S THIRD (3D: Symphony known as "Eroica")
• CORNER POCKET (5D: One of four on a pool table)
• KALEIDOSCOPE (8D: Toy meant to be looked into)
• "PEACE BE WITH YOU" (10D: Meaning of the Arabic greeting "As-salamu alaykum")

Word of the Day: Searching (10A: John of 2018's "Searching" = CHO) —

Searching is a 2018 American screenlife mystery thriller film directed by Aneesh Chaganty in his feature debut, written by Chaganty and Sev Ohanian and produced by Timur Bekmambetov. Set almost entirely on computer screens and smartphones, the film follows a father (John Cho) trying to find his missing 16-year-old daughter (Michelle La) with the help of a police detective (Debra Messing). This was the first mainstream Hollywood thriller headlined by an Asian-American actor.

A co-production between the United States and Russia, the film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival on January 21, 2018. It was released in a limited release on August 24, 2018, before opening wide on August 31, 2018 by Sony Pictures Releasing. The film was a financial and critical success, grossing over $75 million worldwide against a $880,000 budget. At the Independent Spirit Awards, Cho was nominated for Best Male Lead. The film's success launched a titular film series including a standalone installment titled Run, and a follow-up titled Missing. (wikipedia)

• • •

I'm loath to give a puzzle too much credit for post-solve animation and other whistles and bells not directly related to the solve itself, but I have to admit this one was kind of cute. The visual worked, making a nice, colorful representation of words (vegetables) I'd otherwise just have to imagine (I've been asked to imagine out-of-grid elements a number of times over the years, so it's not a problem, but the little picture of the garden at the (roof)top of the grid ... it's nice). This puzzle only really needed one revealer, but we got two, and without any apparent strain on the grid, so that was nice as well. Is there KALE in a typical VEGETABLE MEDLEY. I feel like once you add KALE, you get KALE SALAD. Or in this case, a KALE-BEET SALAD with CORN and a single PEA. But I don't think plausibility of ingredients matters much—the puzzle features a medley (or mixture) of vegetables, good enough. The theme was easy to ... dig up 😎. 

I ran through the NW corner until I hit the "POCKET" part of CORNER POCKET, and because the ROOFTOP GARDEN was a part of the grid from the start, it was easy to infer that the missing "CORN" from CORNER POCKET would be sticking up in the garden. Since I know what "Eroica" is, the BEET went in easily. I was flustered at first by the Arabic in the clue for "PEACE BE WITH YOU," but then realized it was the one phrase that I actually did know pretty well. Weirdly, I balked at KALEIDOSCOPE the first time I saw its clue because I thought "there's no vegetable that starts with KAL-." Sigh. Sometimes the brain just malfunctions inexplicably. Like, why does my electric toothbrush work perfectly some nights and other nights I push the button and ... nothing? I bang it, it works, I bang it, it doesn't work. I'm too lazy/cheap to get a new one. Which is how I feel about my brain as well. I'm used to it. I think I'll keep it. But it often disappoints.

Mistakes abounded, though none of them held me up for long. OMG for SMH right out of the gate, smh, that sucked (1A: "Unbelievable," in a text). Later on, the entirety of the NE corner gave me a bit of a thrashing. First, CHU for CHO (It's Jon CHU, director; John CHO, actor). Later, ACTS for OPTS (12D: Stops vacillating). M.I.A. (1A: Absent, for short), AD CREEP (15A: Intrusive marketing issue), and NOT A BIT (18A: 0%) were all elusive to me. The clue on ACTORS was not immediately clear either (9D: People who are told what to say?). So about 1/8 of the grid was the source of something like 1/2 my trouble. Had some symmetrical trouble in the SW with RELO (55D: Move quickly?) and OGLE (56D: Bad look) (LEER is more of a "look" than an "OGLE" ... an OGLE? It's a noun? I guess it's a noun). For the RELO clue, "quickly" apparently functions as an abbreviation indicator. Not at all obvious to me. I also struggled with the AFTER part of GET AFTER (39D: Nagged). So there were toughish parts, but I was never completely stuck.

Bullets:

• 24A: Scores that usually occur on fourth downs, in brief (FGS) — I guess this clue is true enough, but I couldn't process it. Me: "If you score on fourth down, you're probably close to the goal line ... so TDS?" But right. A field goal is also a "score." And those are usually attempted on fourth down. 
• 31A: Turns (ROTS) — a brutally ambiguous clue for ROTS. So many kinds of turning... turning your car? Taking turns at a game? Today, just rotting. Appropriate for a vegetable puzzle. We've gotten a lot better at using all the produce before it "turns," but ... occasionally, you'll find some forgotten something in the back of the crisper drawer.
• 35A: Contented sighs (AAHS) — like yesterday, our puzzle has a strong visual element, and like yesterday, our puzzle has AAHS. Yesterday, just a single AAH, but the spelling ambiguity remains the same. You wanna know how you can tell if the answer is going to be AAH or AHH? You can't! Same clues are used for both. Weirdly, though, in the plural, it is always AAHS, never AHHS, which, when you look at AHHS, makes sense. Truly horrifying letter arrangement.

["AAH..."]

• 60D: Diesel in a muscle car? (VIN) — VIN Diesel is the star of the Fast & Furious franchise. Are the street-racing cars in that franchise "muscle cars"? Well, "muscle cars" are "performance-oriented street cars" with "powerful engines" (wikipedia), so maybe. Probably. Anyway, I'm pretty sure Fast & Furious is the key to understanding this clue.

That's all for today. See you next time.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on BlueSky and Letterboxd]
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Old-timey "Whoa!" / WED 11-11-26 / Toy that can "walk" down stairs / NBA coach Spoelstra / 1988 Conway Twitty country hit with the lyric "And if it's too late for love to change your mind ..." / Apt name for a caroler (other than Carol) / Quickly indicate one's approval, say

Constructor: Damon Gulczynski

Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium

THEME: BLURRY PHOTO (61A: Image that's difficulty to make out ... as suggested four times in this puzzle?) — well-known subjects of BLURRY PHOTOs are found hidden (in blurry squares) inside four answers:
Theme answers:

• PLAYING HOST (17A: Welcoming people to a party, say)
• "GOODBYE TIME" (10D: 1988 Conway Twitty country hit with the lyric "And if it's too late for love to change your mind ...")
• "YOU FOOL!" (38A: "That was a boneheaded thing to do!")
• TRAVEL VISAS (25D: Requirements for many vacationers abroad)

Word of the Day: The Turing test (57D: Turing who proposed the Turing test) —

The Turing test was designed by Alan Turing to assess a machine's ability to exhibit intelligent behaviour equivalent to that of a human by imitating interactive dialogue. In the modern version, a human evaluator judges a text transcript of a natural-language conversation between a human and a machine. The evaluator tries to identify the machine, and the machine passes if the evaluator cannot reliably tell them apart. The results would not depend on the machine's ability to answer questions correctly, only on how closely its answers resembled those of a human. Since the Turing test is a test of indistinguishability in performance capacity, the original (verbal) version generalises naturally to all of human performance capacity, including nonverbal (robotic).

The test was introduced as the imitation game by Turing in his 1950 paper "Computing Machinery and Intelligence" while working at the University of Manchester. It opens with the words: "I propose to consider the question, 'Can machines think?'." Because "thinking" is difficult to define, Turing chooses to "replace the question by another, which is closely related to it and is expressed in relatively unambiguous words". Turing describes the new form of the problem in terms of a three-person party game called the "imitation game", in which an interrogator asks questions of a man and a woman in another room in order to determine the correct sex of the two players. Turing's new question is: "Are there imaginable digital computers which would do well in the imitation game?" This question, Turing believed, was one that could actually be answered. In the remainder of the paper, he argued against the major objections to the proposition that "machines can think".

Since Turing introduced his test, it has been highly influential in the philosophy of artificial intelligence, resulting in substantial discussion and controversy, as well as criticism from philosophers like John Searle, who argue against the test's ability to detect consciousness. (Wikipedia)

• • •

On the one hand, this is just a "hidden word" theme that gets all of its punch from visual manipulation of the grid. Kind of a gaudy tactic, making those squares a ghostly gray. From a solving standpoint, they're identical to the circled squares you might see in any number of themed puzzles, including those with hidden-word themes. Without a coat of paint to make those squares look the way they look, this theme falls flat. It can't work. Even as it is, ghostly gray doesn't quite nail the concept of "blurriness." And yet ... the letters in those squares do seem less distinct, and there's nothing wrong with a little superficial whimsy, and the revealer did get an "aha" out of me (or the rough equivalent), and I sort of enjoyed thinking I had the idea (with GHOST and YETI—fictional creatures), losing the idea (with UFOS and ELVIS—neither of which is fictional), and then getting it for real with BLURRY PHOTO. Plus, the theme answers themselves, as answers, are really lively and entertaining—I've never heard of "GOODBYE TIME," but I've also never tried to hide a YETI before. I imagine one gets desperate. So I can tolerate "GOODBYE TIME" because it's inventive (as YETI storage goes) and it sounds like a song I want to hear. "YOU FOOL!" is probably my favorite of the set. What a colorful way to hide "UFO." And that's the other thing—the subjects of the blurry photos are well and truly hidden in their answers. That is, they break across two words and you'd never notice them there unless someone highlighted them for you. Every word in every theme answer touches a BLURRY PHOTO subject with at least one letter. It's elegantly done. 

I don't know if the fill is great (ORA ORS OLES UTES ATTY LLDS BABA BAAED AAH ELSA EYRE etc.), but it's OK, and I enjoyed seeing CRO-MAGNON JUDY BLUME (!) as well as RIMSHOT, and parsing MA AND PA was fun as well. I had a good time, so ... mission accomplished.

[I was wrong; I do not care for this song; oh well]

[No. 7 on the Country charts, so "Country hit" is technically correct]

The things that held me up today were oddly tiny. Like, I couldn't figure out ROBED (28A: Like a boxer before a fight, typically). The clue isn't wrong, but I was thinking about the boxer's mental or emotional status, or else the physical status of his body (OILED? TONED? ANTSY?). Crosses took care of it, but when the puzzle is pretty easy and you don't blank that often, the blanks stand out. I also blanked at the last square in ADV (37A: Shortly, e.g., for short). The "for short" part threw me. I thought it was supposed to indicate "Shortly"'s relationship to the word "short," and maybe it does (since shortly is the adverbial form of "short"), but primarily the "for short" part indicates that the answer itself ("adverb") is an abbreviation. [Shortly, e.g.] = "adverb," while "for short" takes that "adverb" and makes it ADV. Too thinky for my amped-up solving brain. I got muddled up. The idea that "Bros" and SIBS stumped me too (52D: Bros, for example). This is mostly because I've never heard or seen the word "SIB(S)" outside of crosswords. People tend to say "brother" or "sister" or "brothers & sisters" or the whole "siblings." So I've written SIB(S) into any number of crosswords over the years, but it always feels like some abbr. from some other world or bygone time. Other problems: I don't know stadium names (though LEVI'S makes sense for S.F.); I had -T-S and didn't know instantly if it was UTES or OTOS/OTOE (58A: Some Four Corners natives) (I actually know that can't be OTOS/OTOE (they're midwest) but at speed I get confused); wrote in AHH before AAH and AVER before AVOW (the latter is among the worst and most common of the kealoas*) (41D: Declare boldly). I also kept trying to guess the last blurred squares (ELVIS) and failing. "ELVES?" 

["Elvis is in your jeans!"]

Bullets:

• 10A: It's over $30 trillion for the U.S., in brief (GDP) — never sure if I'm dealing with GDP or GNP. Looks like GNP is now a dated term. replaced by GNI, which I hope to never see in crosswords. GNI really wants to be the new GNU and we can't let it:

Gross national income (GNI), formerly known as gross national product (GNP), is the total amount of factor incomes earned by the residents of a country. It is equal to gross domestic product (GDP), plus factor incomes received from non-residents by residents, minus factor income paid by residents to non-residents. (wikipedia)

• 19A: Sporting blade that's an anagram of 16-Across (OAR) — I like this a lot better without all that anagram business. I can see it's an anagram. It's not interesting that it's an anagram. It's a three-letter word. ERA is an anagram of EAR and ARE. You see how that's not interesting. I like [Sporting blade] all on its own. Gets you thinking about EPEEs or something like that, but no! Wrong blade. Wrong sport type entirely!
• 22D: Apt name for a caroler (other than Carol) (NOEL) — excellent clue, particularly the parenthetical part. Made me laugh.

• 24D: Old-timey "Whoa!" ("EGAD"!) — I fear "Whoa" itself is becoming "old-timey," as everyone younger than me insists on spelling it "woah" now. I used to almost be able to accept this if the exclamation was one of surprise, but I saw that spelling yesterday from someone who clearly meant, "hang on, hold up, slow down," and dammit that is a horse command and it is always "Whoa." These things I believe! 

• 47D: Toy that can "walk" down stairs (SLINKY) — "... alone or in pairs!" Does this "toy" still exist? Does anyone Gen Z or younger know about it? If you're over 50 and you watched TV as a child, then you saw ads for this thing a lot, which means you probably remember the jingle, which the clue practically quotes, which made this clue transparent.

That's all for today. See you next time.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

*kealoa = a pair of words (normally short, common answers) that can be clued identically and that share at least one letter in common (in the same position). These are answers you can't just fill in quickly because two or more answers are viable, Even With One or More Letters In Place. From the classic [Mauna ___] KEA/LOA conundrum. See also, e.g. [Heaps] => ATON or ALOT, ["Git!"] => "SHOO" or "SCAT," etc.   

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