Ancient undeciphered writing system / FRI 11-13-20 / Wikipedia articles that need expanding / Hijiki or arame in Japanese restaurant / Successful shot from downtown in basketball lingo / Prominent feature of babirusa deer-pig

Constructor: Sawyer Tabony and Ashton Anderson

Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium (high 5s, w/ sleep still in my eyes)

THEME: none 

Word of the Day: WORD (CLUE) —

DEFINITION

• • •

Would you like your bread singed? I didn't think so. SINGES connotes an unwanted light burning (as when you can't get the gas element on your stove to light and then it suddenly bursts to life, singing the hair on your hands, and hopefully only your hands), whereas "Toasts" suggests an intentional, delicious browning. I guess you could singe marshmallows, but come on, you don't singe marshmallows. You Toast Them. ANYWAY ... I had the -GES at 42A: Toasts, say and eventually wrote in WEDGES ... which, while implausible, seemed, and still seems, way more plausible than SINGES. Happily for me, and you (probably), that [Toasts, say] clue on SINGES is probably my biggest gripe today, as the grid was full of mostly delightful answers and very few of the clues had me wanting to hurl my computer out the window (it's been very warm, so. the storm windows are not yet up). In a perfect world, you probably wouldn't cross WAY and AWAY (see the NW corner), or have NO IRON, NO WORRIES, NO ONE, *and* NO FEES in the same grid, but we live in a postlapsarian world, and so we mortals will just have to be happy with great-but-flawed until the coming of the New Crossword Jerusalem (sorry, I've been teaching Paradise Lost, and I can't stop saying "prelapsarian" and "postlapsarian," and then the weird religious words just follow from there...) (no, seriously, Paradise Lost is just trampling through my brain at the moment; I spelled the [Soup dumpling] W-A-N-T-O-N at first, probably because Milton describes Eve's hair waving in "WANTON ringlets" ... Mmmm, wanton soup ...)

As happens so often, I struggled most with the NW (where I started). Even after getting the front ends of the longer Acrosses, I'M ON A ROLL was the only one of them I could manage to throw down successfully (15A: "Look at me go!"). "LET'S ..." man, that could've been anything, "an outstretched hand" suggesting so many things. I thought maybe the hand was trying to shake yours, or else trying to help pull you to safety after you managed to nearly fall off the face of Mount Rushmore (in addition to reading Milton—watching Hitchcock). And NO WORRIES is clear enough once it's filled in (17A: "You're good"), but if you've only got the first three letters, and you have no idea of the context for / tone of "You're good," then you're left wondering "NOW" what? Add in that I forgot Awkwafina's real first name was NORA (20A: "___ From Queens," comedy series co-created by Awkwafina), and that section became something of a bear. So I floated downstream, down the west side of the puzzle, where I found much less resistance, and didn't actually get back to finish up the NW until the very, very end ("C" in CLEANED was my last letter) (8D: Hit the jackpot, with "up"). 

Five things:

• 35A: Key of Dvorak's "Serenade for Strings": Abbr. (E MAJ.) — this answer is fair enough, I guess, but DMIN and EMAJ and all these musical key abbrs. are really a PAIN in the rear to fill in unless you are one of the few people who know this kind of stuff cold. I got the "E," wrote in the "M," then had to go retrieve the crosses. Actually, I inferred pretty quickly that it was EMAJ, not EMIN because the "J" was in an initial position (where "J"s usually are found), and also wow EMIN is really truly ugly ... I had to have faith that these constructors wouldn't do that to me. Faith rewarded! Paradise regained! (Sorry, the Milton again...)
• 47A: Cousin of "OMG!" ("WHOA!") — I was genuinely concerned that the puzzle was going to try to perpetrate WOAH on me. Have you seen this stylization of the exclamation? It's remarkably, disturbingly, obscenely common among, uh, younger people. Sorry, younger people. I try to love everything you do. But this is a line in the damned sand.
• 37A: "Think so?" ("YEAH?") — among the hardest clues of the day. Intonation is *everything* here, and YEAH is not a word I would normally read as interrogative. I did like the overall slangy, colloquial feel of the grid, "UP TO YOU" was another one that was tough to pick up, but once picked up, felt right (12D: "I'm good with whatever").
• 18A: Excited (ASTIR) — ASTIR is what you are when you first wake up in the morning, EAGER is what you are when you are excited. And of course the first letter I had in place was the "R" ...
• 11D: Prominent feature of a babirusa ("deer-pig") (TUSK) — no idea what animal this is. Still, this would've been easy enough to pick up off the "K" in NIKOLA, if I hadn't typoed STUBS (10A: Wikipedia articles that need expanding) as SRUBS and somehow never noticed (!) ... so I lost a lot of time first working through every cross in RUSK and then wondering what part of the deer-pig body was the RUSK. Actually abandoned the section, went and finished up the puzzle, then had to come back to RUSK to find my error. So I guess the "T" in TUSK was, technically, the last letter I entered in the grid. See, this is why my early-morning solving times are not to be trusted. I'm happiest in the early morning, but I am not my sharpest, that's for sure.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld 

P.S. Happy birthday, mom :)

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]