Toponym in the dairy aisle / SAT 6-26-21 / Tropical island whose name comes from Spanish for snows / When Ma is gettin kittenish with Pap in Carousel / Ungrammatical title of 1984 Cyndi Lauper hit / Labor-intensive tattoo type /Test that uses radioactive tracers / Literary team playing in front of "ten thousand eyes" / Times when NPR listeners are engrossed enough to linger in their idling cars

Constructor: John Lieb and Brad Wilber

Relative difficulty: Medium

THEME: none 

Word of the Day: CLU Gulager (5D: Actor Gulager of TV's "The Tall Man") —

William Martin "Clu" Gulager (born November 16, 1928) is an American television and film actor and director. He first became known for his work in television, appearing in the co-starring role of William H. Bonney (Billy the Kid) in the 1960–1962 NBC television series The Tall Man and as Emmett Ryker in another NBC Western series, The Virginian. He later had a second career as a horror film actor, including a lead part in Dan O' Bannon's The Return of the Living Dead (1985). He also was in A Nightmare on Elm Street Part 2: Freddy's Revenge (1985). In 2005 he started acting in his son's horror films -- the Feasts movies and Piranha DD -- in his 80s. 

Gulager's first major film role was in Don Siegel's The Killers (1964) with Lee Marvin and Ronald Reagan in his only movie role as a villain, followed by a supporting part in the racing film Winning(1969) opposite Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward; in Peter Bogdanovich's drama The Last Picture Show (1971); and opposite John Wayne in McQ (1974). In the 1980s, Gulager appeared in several horror films, such as The Initiation (1984) and the zombie comedy The Return of the Living Dead (1985). In 2005, he appeared in the horror film Feast, as well as its sequels. He also appeared in the independent film Tangerine (2015) and in Quentin Tarantino's Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019). (wikipedia)

• • •

Get a CLU!

This is a wonderful example of how a puzzle can be old-fashioned but In A Good Way. By "old-fashioned" I mean it's not flashing ultra-contemporary colloquial phrases and pop culture names, but its fill still feels thoughtful, polished, fresh, and very much in the (general) language. It feels like the best-constructed stuff used to feel a decade+ ago, but unlike a lot of older puzzles, it is conspicuously lacking in the kind of short repeaters that pros know by heart and novices just stare blankly at (i.e. a certain kind of crosswordese). In short, this didn't feel like it was *for* younger solvers, but it also didn't feel particularly exclusionary of them. And that's all anybody (i.e. me) wants—make the best puzzles you can make, and make them to *your* tastes, but give *everyone* a way to enjoy them. Balance out your cluing so that people outside your particular demographic feel invited in, not ignored. That way, we get a huge variety of puzzle styles and sensibilities, and everyone's mostly happy most days. This is the future liberals (i.e. me) want!* Old and young, content streamers and eremitic cave-dwellers, cats and dogs, all solving contentedly together! It would be weird, yes, but like popping bubble wrap (apparently), it would also be ODDLY SATISFYING.

["Well I spent some time in THE MUDVILLE NINE ..."]

The 15s on this are both solid and stylish. Three of the five are general phrases anyone might say, the other two are narrower in their focus and do suggest a lean toward a certain demographic (i.e. NPR listeners old enough to have "Casey at the Bat" be a seminal part of their elementary school experience), but you wouldn't call either DRIVEWAY MOMENTS or THE MUDVILLE NINE particularly obscure or dusty. In fact, the only answer in this puzzle that made me think "whoa, there's a throwback" was CLU Gulager, a name you used to see a lot but don't see much any more, as his career faded more solidly into the past and constructors began using software that helped them be less reliant on the proper-noun repeaters of yore. But just as I think older (say, my age and older) solvers should come around to learning new pop culture names (within reason! I still have "YouTuber" resistance!), I think it's important for younger solvers to look on old stuff they don't know not always as stuffiness or staleness, but as stuff they just didn't know yet. Also, CLU Gulager is great! Try some! Watch 1964's "The Killers," where Gulager and Lee Marvin just ooze bad-guy cool ... also co-starring Angie Dickinson, John Cassavetes, and Ronald Reagan in his final film role ... as the movie's *real* bad guy. It's fun.). Anyway, though the puzzle feels like its cultural center of gravity is well back in the 20th century, it comes forward a number of times, picking up the magnificent DANA Owens (aka Queen Latifah) and Cyndi Lauper and TARA Westover and trap music (ATL) and a lot of other things that remain current. I enjoyed this a bunch.

I never got very hung up during this puzzle, but I never really got up a racer's pace either. Faster toward the bottom, but that's pretty typical (the more you've got in the grid, the easier the rest of the grid gets, in general). I thought I might race through the grid after I blew the top section open very early:

But THE MUDVILLE NINE took some work, for sure, and difficultish cluing made the short crosses not always easy. I struggled to get stuff like SUM TOTAL (great answer) and to remember stuff like NEVIS and to parse stuff like THE ONE. I also did not understand the clue on TOES (3D: Answer that would be more apt at 10 Down?) since 10-Down was [Romantic's dream] and yeah, *some* people are romantically into TOES, it's true, but I still felt like I was missing something there. Then I noticed there was no "-" in "10 Down," which made me look at that phrase a new way ... and *then* the aha dropped. You have "10" TOES "Down" ... well, down there, where your feet are. Assuming you have both your feet. A fake cross-reference! Turns out I like those better than I like real cross-references! 

Some more things:

• 26D: Topographical map feature (RIDGE) — had RI-G-, wrote in RINGS :(
• 23A: When "Ma is gettin' kittenish with Pap," in "Carousel" (JUNE) — I don't think I've seen "Carousel," and the clue gave me strong Ma & Pa Kettle / L'il Abner vibes, so I thought the answer would be more yokelish slang, and I had -UNE, and, well, I am not ashamed to tell you that I sincerely considered SUNE (a backwoods variant of "soon"?!?)
• 40A: Give away (RAT ON) — had --T ON, wrote in LET ON :(
• 32A: English football powerhouse, to fans (MAN U.) — short for "Manchester United." I've seen it in puzzles before and every time I look back over a grid that it's in, for a brief moment I think "What the heck is MANU!? I don't remember that clue?" It is bizarre in that it looks like some awful obscure crosswordese but it's actually a right-over-the-plate (to borrow a metaphor from a different sport), perfectly common colloquial term for one of the most famous football clubs in the world. MANU > NANU (NANU)

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld 

P.S. omg does the DRIVEWAY MOMENTS clue actually have an NPR pun in it!? 58A: Times when NPR listeners are enGrossed enough to linger in their idling cars ... as in Terry Gross? Host of "Fresh Air"? Well, if it wasn't intentional, I still heard it, so the violation stands! 

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