Japanese condiment sprinkled on rice / SUN 11-14-21 / Metric for online traffic in brief / Historical subject of Hilary Mantel's 2009 novel Wolf Hall / Children's author DiCamillo with two Newbery Medals / Slogan about willpower / Like bacon and lobster in Jewish law / Day celebrated by Star Wars fans

Constructor: Aimee Lucido and Ella Dershowitz

Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium

THEME: MIND OVER MATTER (124A: Slogan about willpower ... or a hint to four pairs of answers in this puzzle) — word meaning (roughly) "mind" appears directly above a word describing (precisely) a type of matter, x 4:

Theme answers:

• PREGNANCY BRAIN / SOLID FOOD (23A: Forgetfulness experienced by soon-to-be moms, informally / 28A: What a baby might start eating at around six months)
• STREET SMARTS / LIQUID DIET (47A: Worldly wisdom / 53A: Juice cleanse, essentially)
• MOTHER WIT (???) / GAS GIANTS (65A: Common sense / 75A: Jovian planets, by another name
• POOL NOODLE / PLASMA SCREEN (92A: Simple flotation device / 97A: TV display option)

Word of the Day: FURIKAKE (117A: Japanese condiment sprinkled on rice) —

Furikake (振り掛け / ふりかけ) is a dry Japanese condiment to be sprinkled on top of cooked rice, vegetables, and fish, or used as an ingredient in onigiri. It typically consists of a mixture of dried fish, sesame seeds, chopped seaweed, sugar, salt, and monosodium glutamate. Other flavorful ingredients such as katsuobushi (sometimes indicated on the package as bonito), or okaka (bonito flakes moistened with soy sauce and dried again), freeze-dried salmon particles, shiso, egg, powdered miso, vegetables, etc., are often added to the mix.

Furikake is often brightly colored and flaky. It can have a slight fish or seafood flavoring and is sometimes spicy. It can be used in Japanese cooking for pickling foods and for rice balls (onigiri). Since 2003, furikake has increasingly gained popularity in the United States (particularly in Hawaii and on the West Coast) as a seasoning for baked or fried fish, raw fish salads and snack foods such as furikake party mix. (wikipedia)

• • •

This puzzle has its fun parts, and the theme is well-meaning, but the "mind" parts of the equations felt like real stretches in a couple of cases. The "matter" parts were unimpeachable. There are four states of matter observable in everyday life, and this puzzle touches all of them. For "mind," though, I dunno. NOODLE and BRAIN are basically the same thing, and they work OK as a substitute for "mind," but SMARTS really feels like it's a type of mind. Like "she has a good mind" might mean she has SMARTS, but "mind" for SMARTS does not feel like a straight swap. Worse is WIT, which feels like something very specific that someone with a certain kind of mind might exhibit, but I just don't buy that "mind" = WIT. Maybe you can just horseshoes-and-hand-grenades the whole thing; just say "eh, close enough, it's fine." I guess so. That's charitable. And why not be charitable. But the iffiness of the "minds" really stood out in relation to the exactness of the "matters." Further, what the actual hell is MOTHER WIT? I'll be 52 next week and I've never ever heard that phrase. The fact that WIT wasn't a good fit for "mind" and the surrounding fill in that area (namely AFR, ADT, DAWG) is rough made that section by far the diciest of the day. I also don't know what a "Jovian planet" is. I know who Jove is. I was like "... JUPITERS?" I've heard of GAS GIANTS, but "Jovian planet" is a new one to me. Apparently they're called that because they (JUPITER, NEPTUNE, URANUS, SATURN) are all, compositionally, like Jupiter ... in that Jupiter is a gas giant.Their Jovian-ness has nothing to do with the god per se. OK, well, at least I'm learning something.

I am dubious about the spelling of HOWDEDO? How do you do => How d'ye do? => HOW D'E DO? Is that it? Also, I am dubious that the expression has anything to do with the "afternoon" (!?). Wanted HOW-DI-DO, like LA-DI-DA(H), but that didn't work out. I'm also having mild trouble with the (slightly archaic?) STAND TO (98D: Get ready for action). Without "reason" or "gain" following it, STAND TO looks weird. But it also sounds like something military. And yes, google says it means "stand ready for an attack, especially one before dawn or after dark." That section was also slightly dicey, as INEZ is often spelled with an "S" and I only kinda sorta know what TAZO tea is, so the "Z" there wasn't totally obvious to me. But TASO looked real wrong, so I correctly chose "Z." I don't really get why you give the perfectly nice and normal word ALIGN such a horrid corporate-speak clue (39D: Get on the same page, in corporate-speak). Why would you voluntarily corporate-speakify a word that isn't corporate speak by nature? Perverse. 

Absolutely loved GO NIGHT NIGHT (6D: Get ready to sleep, cutesily). I wanted to stop right there. Right here.

PATOOTIE kind of went a little too far for me, baby-talk-wise (as did the clue, [Heinie]), but baby-talk that isn't euphemisms for body parts of toilet stuff, that's the baby-talk I can get behind. GO NIGHT NIGHT! Absolute winner. Unfortunately all the joy of that answer was offset by the slumping 'ugh' feeling I got from the tedious, how-is-it-still-a-thing MAY THE FOURTH. A one-off pun somehow becomes an annual tediumfest. Bah and humbug. I learned that OLEANDER were poisonous in the '80s when my sister and I tried to use the flowers as drink garnishes at my father's big outdoor office party, which took place in our backyard (93D: Poisonous shrub). Not sure whose bright idea it was to leave a tween and a teen in charge of liquor distribution. The funny thing is that I know it never even occurred to me to try any of the alcohol myself. LOL, such a rule-follower, I was. Anyway, some kind person notified us that OLEANDER were actually poisonous and by some miracle we killed no one. OK, that's all. This one has a lot of bounce in the fill. The theme was hit/miss for me. Enjoy your mid-November Sunday.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld 

P.S. I didn't know SEO was a "metric" (95D: Metric for online traffic, in brief); I thought it was the shit you do to game the system so that search engines will drive traffic to your site. It stands for "Search Engine Optimization." You try to increase traffic (which is a metric, i.e. a measurable thing), but the optimization process itself doesn't seem like a "metric." It's a set of practices. Maybe I don't know all the meanings of "metric," but it doesn't seem like the right word here.

P.P.S. Hey, constructors, it might be advisable to delete LAPP(S) (1D: Nordic native) from your wordlists. Per wikipedia: "The Sámi have historically been known in English as Lapps or Laplanders, but these terms are regarded as offensive by some Sámi people, who prefer the area's name in their own languages, e.g. Northern Sami Sápmi."

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