King Arthur's slayer / SAT 8-20-22 / Moving film? / Locale for a pin / Enemy organization in Marvel Comics / Default avatar on Twitter once / Alternative to a finger poke / Van Duyn 1990s U.S. poet laureate / Bug-eyed toon with a big red tongue

Constructor: Hemant Mehta

Relative difficulty: Medium-Challenging

THEME: GOD YES! — a Biblical journey through just kidding it's themeless

Word of the Day: MONA Van Duyn, 1990s U.S. poet laureate (4D) —

Mona Jane Van Duyn (May 9, 1921 – December 2, 2004) was an American poet. She was appointed United States Poet Laureate in 1992. [...] Van Duyn won every major U.S. prize for poetry, including the National Book Award(1971) for To See, To Take, the Bollingen Prize (1971), the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize(1989), and the Pulitzer Prize (1991) for Near Changes. She was the U.S. Poet Laureate between 1992 and 1993. Despite her accolades, her career fluctuated between praise and obscurity. Her views of love and marriage ranged from the scathing to the optimistic. In "What I Want to Say", she wrote of love:

It is the absolute narrowing of possibilities

and everyone, down to the last man

dreads it

But in "Late Loving", she wrote:

Love is finding the familiar dear

To See, To Take (1970) was a collection of poems that gathered together three previous books and some uncollected work and won the National Book Award for Poetry. In 1981 she became a fellow in the Academy of American Poets and then, in 1985, one of the twelve Chancellors who serve for life. Collected poems, If It Be Not I (1992) included four volumes that had appeared since her first collected poems. It was published simultaneously with a new collection of poetry, Firefall. (wikipedia)

• • •

I laughed out loud at "GOD YES!" (49A: "Oh, hallelujah!"). Why? Because today's constructor is known professionally as "The Friendly Atheist" (wikipedia page, blog, podcast). There was also something funny (in a good-natured way) about THE MAGI and the RED SEA finding their way into this puzzle. Speaking of God, this puzzle felt like the Wrath of God up front, as a combination of brutal cluing (17A: Moving film?), impossible-for-me proper nouns (the poet, mainly), and my own stupidity / forgetfulness led to some real stuckness. And I had UMS / UPSHOT pretty quickly!; I just couldn't make the crosses work off of UPSHOT, including ODIE, which come on what the hell, how did I forget Crosswordese's favorite dog (sorry ASTA and FALA)!? Even later, when I "got" him, I wrote in OPIE at first! Forgot what "Louche" meant; I knew it was bad, but forgot how bad (SORDID). I did remember ODIE's fellow comics page resident Cathy, so "ACK!" went in, but the first thing I put in with confidence ... sigh ... was AD MAN (7D: Pro pitcher => AD REP). The worst bit of crosswordese in the grid, one of the worst kealoas* there is, and I step Right In It. That wrong MAN was the real source of my slowness, as it made the already tough SHRINK WRAP virtually impossible, *and* it poisoned what was already a pretty poisonous stack of three-letter answers (BED, CAP, and by proximity, MAT). Further ADMAN caused me to write in CAB for 20A: Truck part, and let me tell you I was pretty satisfied with ADMAN / CAB. Ugh, I also thought HYDRA was COBRA (19A: Enemy organization in Marvel Comics). Bah! That NW just knocked me around badly.  MALALA eventually ended up helping a lot, but still, coming out of the NW I was stuck. The one way out, the long Down, was a "?" clue, of course, and I just couldn't put it together from LOWB-

I ended up having to rebuild pretty much from the ground up; that is, from way down at the very bottom of the grid, with an answer I knew well: Juan SOTO (48A: M.L.B. star Juan). He recently turned down a 15-year, $440 million dollar contract with the Nationals. He's now a Padre, and he is expected to ink a contract worth northward of half a billion dollars. Why? He's one of the best hitters, through his very young age (23), in the history of the sport. He also helped me regain my FOOTING in this puzzle. Went from him and PSST and IDID to DONATED TO and very quickly the SW corner was done—that corner and the NE corner and frankly all the corners were much more forgiving than that NW corner was for me. The one real challenge left was the middle, where I was finally able to tease out LOW BATTERY (such a good clue!) (6D: Plight of the 1%?), and, with much struggle and quizzical grimacing, FORCED SMILE (30A: Expression in an uncomfortable situation) (absolutely diabolical use of "expression" there—I really wanted a spoken phrase). You know a puzzle is good when it smacks you around and yet ultimately makes you smile (in an unforced way). So I got FORCED SMILE, thought "yes, I UNDERSTAND," and then happily rode SISTER CITY down to an easy puzzle exit. Was the puzzle a satisfying Saturday experience? GOD YES!

More notables:

• 17A: Moving film? (SHRINK WRAP) — one of the hardest "?" clues I've ever seen. It's also borderline in terms of legibility. I guess that ... when the wrap (which is a kind of "film") is going on, it is shrinking and thus "moving." I honestly was looking at SHRINK-M-P at one point and thinking "what the hell is a SHRINKY MAP!?" [someone in comments suggests that you use SHRINK WRAP as packing material when "moving" to keep things from shifting around; I only know it as the material sometimes covering commercial products, though I guess even then the wrap probably does act as a stabilizing agent during transport]
• 25A: ___ Foundation (nonprofit with a history going back to 1984) (TED) — never heard of TED stuff until sometime in the '00s, I think, so this was a surprise.
• 26A: Locale for a pin (MAT) — had M-T, thought, "well, that's MAT ... but how does that make sense? You leave a *key* under the MAT, maybe, but a *pin"?? ... ohhhhhhhhhhhhhh, pin. Like wrestling. Now I UNDERSTAND!"
• 23D: People born on the 4th of July, e.g. (CANCERS) — I have no idea what any of the summer signs are. Everyone I knew and loved growing up was autumn winter and early spring, so after ARIES and before LIBRA, I am Zodiacally illiterate. This is all to say that today I found out that GEMINIS and CANCERS have the same number of letters.
• 26D: King Arthur's slayer (MORDRED) — the most up-my-alley clue in the whole thing. Chivalry's MR. HYDE (2D: Literary character who "alone in the ranks of mankind, was pure evil"). An agent of absolute destruction. Love him.

See you tomorrow.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld 

*kealoa = short, common answer that you can't just fill in quickly because two or more answers are viable, Even With One or More Letters In Place. From the classic [Mauna ___] KEA/LOA conundrum. See also, e.g. [Heaps] ATON/ALOT, ["Git!"] "SHOO"/"SCAT," etc.

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