Counterpart of she-shed / MON 8-15-22 / Footwear giant headquartered in Boston Mass / Fast-food pork sandwich / Kind of technology in some modern military aircraft / Global center of Shia Islam / Toy that attaches to a garden hose / Ump's call after a first pitch / Minor hurt in kidspeak

Constructor: Simon Marotte

Relative difficulty: Medium-Challenging (for a Monday ... those big corners were weird / slowish)

THEME: STRIKE ONE (37A: Ump's call after a first pitch ... or a hint to the ends of 17-, 25-, 53- and 63-Across) — each of the endings is a thing you can strike, i.e. you can STRIKE ONE of the following:

Theme answers:

a balance (NEW BALANCE) (17A: Footwear giant headquartered in Boston, Mass.)

a deal (DONE DEAL) (25A: Fait accompli)

a pose (YOGA POSE) (53A: Downward dog, for one)

a chord (MINOR CHORD) (63A: Group of notes that often sounds sad)

Word of the Day: SELA Ward (40A: Actress Ward) —

Sela Ann Ward (born July 11, 1956) is an American actress, author, and producer. Her breakthrough TV role was as Teddy Reed in the NBC drama series Sisters (1991–96), for which she received her first Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Drama Series in 1994. She received her second Primetime Emmy Award and Golden Globe Award for Best Actress – Television Series Drama for the leading role of Lily Manning in the ABC drama series Once and Again (1999–2002). Ward later had the recurring role of Stacy Warner in the Fox medical drama House, also starred as Jo Danville in the CBSpolice procedural CSI: NY (2010–2013)^[3] and starred as Dana Mosier in the CBS police procedural series FBI (2018–2019).

She also played supporting roles in films, including The Man Who Loved Women (1983), Rustlers' Rhapsody (1985), Nothing in Common (1986), Hello Again (1987), The Fugitive (1993), My Fellow Americans (1996), The Badge(2002), The Day After Tomorrow (2004), The Guardian (2006), The Stepfather(2009), Gone Girl (2014), and Independence Day: Resurgence (2016). (wikipedia)

• • •

Hello, I'm back, no thanks to the good people at Delta, or to my car, which gave out at 70mph on the I-86 today, about ninety miles west of my final destination, i.e. home. We got in to Detroit after midnight, drove a couple hours to a tollbooth rest area plaza dealie, slept in the car for three hours, then drove back through Ohio and Pennsylvania to New York, where the car died, after which we spent hours waiting for a tow truck that was supposed to take half an hour the *first* time we called (we called at least four times), and even then since it's Sunday and we were ninety miles from home there was nothing much to be done so the car is back in Bath, NY waiting to be seen by Some Garage, which will tell us that it's a small thing or a big thing, and it will cost a little money or a lot of money. Anyway, thank god for friends, who came and rescued us and took us home. Now I'm all jet-lagged and obsessed with the fact that my house doesn't smell right. It doesn't smell bad, it just doesn't smell like I've been living in it. Not sure what the missing ingredient is yet. Coffee, probably. And scented candles. So yeah I've had about three hours sleep in the last 36 hours but at least I'm well fed (thawed some soup—magic). And now there's this puzzle, and it's fine, I guess, but it's built weird, I think. Giant corners and a super-choppy, hole-ridden center. Big corners might hold delights, the delights that longer answers often bring, but today they don't, not really. They're pretty shruggy. As for the theme, I didn't like the revealer at first because the ONE part felt awkward, but now I think maybe I like it fine. What might you do with each of the ending words? You might STRIKE ONE. None of the themers is that interesting on its own, but the theme holds up fine. Fine enough for Monday. I am only now learning that there is such a thing as MICROSLEEP (heard of "micronap," but not "-sleep"). I don't think it's clued well, though, since the clue implies that it's something that's intentional and possibly refreshing, whereas it's a no and no on both counts."People who experience microsleeps often remain unaware of them, instead believing themselves to have been awake the whole time, or to have temporarily lost focus" (wikipedia). I liked remembering SLIP 'N' SLIDE—do they still make them? I thought maybe they had been outlawed, like Jarts (lawn darts), since they were the cause of many a backyard injury, for sure. 

had a great two-week vacation, first in Northern Michigan and then in Los Angeles. I'll discuss it over the coming week. Or I won't. We'll see. I gotta prepare for the start of the Fall semester (a week from tomorrow), and as I say, I gotta deal with my car, and on top of it all I have jury duty starting Tuesday. The highlights of L.A. were the New Beverly Cinema (I saw "Cinderella" (1950) and "Moonraker" (1979)), the Getty (esp. the Cy Twombly exhibit), and the Huntington Library/Museum in Pasadena (finally got to see the most important Chaucer MS on the planet, as well as other beautiful things. 

at The Huntington

Not much to say about the fill in today's puzzle except that MANCAVE and "she-shed" are some vomity gender-binary nonsense. "She-shed" is actually physically painful to see and say, I can't believe women let themselves be talked into that bit of tin-eared marketing terminology. You don't even get a place in the actual house? Just ... a shed? Shed? That's the word for the dank cobwebby place you put dirty tools or whatever. And "she-shed" sounds like a hair and/or skin problem. Nah, you got the short end of the stick there, for sure. What else? I had LEGO ___ and no idea what followed, possibly because nothing made out of Legos qualifies as ART. Also, AH is not a sound of "contented pleasure." That's AAH, or possibly AHH. "AH" is a kind of unimpressed "I see," or else what you say at the dentist's office (28A: Sounds of contented pleasure = AHS). I had PUG for POM and SAYS YES instead of SAYS I DO, and I really truly believe it's spelled 'eeny' not EENIE. OK, glad to be back, etc. See you tomorrow.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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