Spicy condiment from North Africa / FRI 8-7-20 / Crunchy candy bar since 1930 / Broadway hit informally / Drink that's hard on the stomach / High-risk bond rating / Breaker of celebrity breakup maybe / Symptom Checker offerer / Line-skipping option at airport for short

Constructor: Tom Pepper

Relative difficulty: Medium (not sure, solved on paper in leisurely fashion)

Theme: none

Word of the Day: NOYES (32D: Poet whose name consists of side-by-side opposites) —

Alfred Noyes CBE (16 September 1880 – 25 June 1958) was an English poet, short-story writer and playwright. [...] "The Highwayman" is a romantic ballad poem written by Alfred Noyes, first published in the August 1906 issue of Blackwood's Magazine, based in Edinburgh, Scotland. The following year it was included in Noyes' collection, Forty Singing Seamen and Other Poems, becoming an immediate success. In 1995 it was voted 15th in the BBC's poll for "The Nation's Favourite Poems". (wikipedia)

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I see that this grid has a bunch of reasonably modern answers, and yet the smell of mothballs and mildew and staleness on this one is Strong. Puzzle started losing me almost immediately with a. a "?" clue at 1-Across (I wasn't in the mood to start that way) and (more substantively) b. BOFF. If I have to think of this (olde-timey, right?) bit of Broadway slang, it's BOFFO, isn't it? Yes, yes it is. "Extremely sensational," says merriam-webster.com. But BOFF ... BOFF is a verb, and, uh, not a verb you'd expect to see in the NYTXW. 

The informal term is BOFF*O* and BOFF is vulgar slang. Maybe somebody sipping SANKA while reading Alfred NOYES and tsking "THAT'S A SHAME" calls a Broadway hit a BOFF, but that answer feels like insular, musty slang. The old-fashioned AURA kept creeping back into this puzzle. I think it's an editorial oldness, like the frame of reference for the clues is super-familiar and 20th-century. High-risk bonds and minor poets and quaint slang and twee French phrases and the like. In short, "youthful" answers like FAN SITES and UBERED and TMZ and POPO are fooling no one. I very much liked SCOOCH OVER (though spelling SCOOCH was an adventure), and ROLEPLAY and BODYSHOT are just fine, but most of the rest of it was without snap crackle or pop. The construction is solid enough, I guess, but the whole frame of reference, in the fill and particularly in the cluing, just felt ... unfresh. Tippi HEDREN, DANNY OCEAN and "ZELIG"—they're all fine, but with no modern cultural counterbalance, they really anchor this grid in the long-ago and the far-away. The EPIGRAMS of Martial and the [Ancient Greek birthplace of Parmenides] aren't helping. The bar is high on Fridays, and this one just didn't clear it. Not enough delight. 

I posted my hand-filled grid today so you could be reminded of my terrible handwriting and so that you could see both my annotations and my hesitations. For instance, if you look closely, you can see where I wanted 5D: "C'mon, tell me!" to be SPILL ... something (it's "SPIT IT OUT"), and also where I wanted THEN to be THUS (39D: "And so ..."). Erasures are a map back in time, traces of your solving path and your struggle. The immaculate, software-smooth final grid is fine for public consumption, but there is this way that it hides yourself from yourself. Look up your errors, ye mighty, and despair! Also, if I'm solving in pencil, I can make my puzzle annotations in real time. For instance, that "UGH" pointing to NOYES is very authentic. Could not wait til I was done to write that bit of marginalia in there. Also, you can see how I wrote an "ugh" out of frustration and then changed it to "OK" after I got the actual answer at 41A: "Too bad" (THAT'S A SHAME). I had "THAT'S ..." and it seemed like infinity things could follow, so I wrote an annoyed "ugh" in the margin. But later I had to admit that that was just a frustration ugh and not a "this is genuinely terrible" ugh. As much as software-solving makes my life easier, there's something to be said about the personality-revealing aspects of hand-solving.

The thing that actually made me write profanity in the margins, though (not pictured), is the clue on TENURED (42D: Hard to let go of, in a way). There's something about living through a crisis in which teachers are being denigrated and demeaned, in which huge swaths of the public want to use teachers as lab rats in a return-to-school experiment, in which the OPED PAGE contains condescending calls for teachers to "do their jobs" in the fall, as if "subject yourself to disease and death" were in the job description, as if most teachers weren't actually working twice as hard to figure out how to  "do their jobs," as well as *take care* of their students emotionally (which is work nobody talks enough about), yes, there's something about being alive now and being married to a teacher now that makes me not want any part of your cutesy-clued fantasy of firing teachers. Oh, are TENURED teachers "hard to let go"? Are they? THAT'S A SHAME. Hey, you want to know who's *really* "hard to let go," let's talk about the editor of the NYTXW. I mean, if we're being honest. In short, tax billionaires, feed / educate / love children, vote for competent leadership, and STFU. Good day.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld 

P.S. an EASTER EGG is a hidden / bonus feature on a DVD / Blu-Ray, in my experience, though the term might apply elsewhere (35D: Bonus feature, of a sort)

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