Temporarily banished from a dorm room, in a way / SAT 9-3-22 / Cartoon known for bursting out of a drum / Somers in the hall of fame for infomercials / Yas and jas / First name in gin production / Cocktail named for motorcycle attachment / Cork launcher / Sometimes-purple tuber / Lead-in to hickey

Constructor: David Distenfeld

Relative difficulty: Easy

THEME: none 

Word of the Day: "DANNY Deever," Rudyard Kipling poem (7D) —

"Danny Deever" is an 1890 poem by Rudyard Kipling, one of the first of the Barrack-Room Ballads. It received wide critical and popular acclaim, and is often regarded as one of the most significant pieces of Kipling's early verse. The poem, a ballad, describes the execution of a British soldier in India for murder. His execution is viewed by his regiment, paraded to watch it, and the poem is composed of the comments they exchange as they see him hanged. [...] George Orwell considered Danny Deever as an example of Kipling "at his worst, and also his most vital ... almost a shameful pleasure, like the taste for cheap sweets that some people secretly carry into middle life". He felt the work was an example of what he described as "good bad poetry"; verse which is essentially vulgar, yet undeniably seductive and "a sign of the emotional overlap between the intellectual and the ordinary man." (wikipedia)

• • •

Yesterday, VASECTOMY. Today:

That's back-to-back immediate, confident, and wrong 1-Acrosses. Quite a triumph. In both cases, my imagination was much stronger and more creative than what the puzzles ultimately had to offer in that space, and in both cases the wrong answer was so obviously wrong (once I checked the crosses) that it didn't hold me up for too long. In fact, today, nothing held me up for long. I'd say most of my stuck time was spent trying to undo ZIGZAG, which meant attacking the short stuff to start with (ADO, PASS), and then getting EXPOSE / SEXILED, and on from there. I watched "Ford v Ferrari" earlier this year, and I know one of the guides at the Petersen Automotive Museum mentioned SHELBY's name while describing one of the cars when I visited there last month, but I still needed a bunch of crosses. So the NW played like a typical Saturday—took some real work to get going, but I got there. Once I got *out* of the NW, though, things got much, much easier, and for the last 1/3 of the puzzle or so I was going at Monday speed. Ended up in the opposite corner from where I started, with the opposite amount of resistance (little v lots). 

The thing is, when you come out of that NW corner, you've got the front ends of all the long central Acrosses lined up, and those first few letters are all you need for any of them. I went DIRTY-MINDED YAM STEAMED OPEN ARMED FORCES in virtually no time. UNPIN was a gimme (36A: Remove, as a corsage) and made the SW easy to get into (though POP GUN was briefly elusive—I had POPPER, i.e. the one ... who pops ... the champagne, I guess? (38D: Cork launcher). I also had to sort out which of this century's seemingly infinite "Star Wars" movies was supposed to go in the slot at 50A: 2016 prequel to the highest-grossing movie of 1977 ("ROGUE ONE"). But after that, it was easy to whoosh, right up the middle of the grid with those long Downs. No resistance. Got RANK AND FILE without ever seeing the clue (14D: Ordinary members). Never ever heard of "DANNY Deever," so that was weird, but I just sort of tiptoed around him, which was very easy to do, and after that, the east side of the puzzle fell like dominoes. I went from top to bottom of the grid writing in answers as fast as I could read the clues. Once I hit bottom, I had only tiny details to work through—like changing SNOOTY to SNOTTY (41D: Stuck-up) and remembering that AMULETs are for "wearing in health" (I think of them as just a jewelry type). Unfortunately for this puzzle, I ended on the sourest possible note: the ridiculousness that is LET DRY. *LET*??? Do you know how dumb that sounds, esp. after you've written in the far better, far more appropriate AIR DRY (57A: Put on the line, say)? Oof. LET DRY ... I guess when you AIR DRY things, you are, in fact, LETting them DRY ... but I have written "LOL bad" in the margin there because it is. Unsurprisingly, this is the NYTXW debut of LET DRY. Congrats? 

Luckily, most of this puzzle was nowhere near "LOL bad." It's sturdy and (LET DRY aside) cringe-free. SEXILED into DIRTY-MINDED is either clever or trying a little too hard, depending on your perspective, but I actually think it's the strongest part of the grid. I'll take show-offy naughtiness over dullness any day. Anything left to explain? Let's see ... ELI is the [First name in gin production?] because it's the cotton gin, not the gin that goes in a SIDECAR (just kidding, there's no gin in a SIDECAR: it's lemon juice, brandy, and an orange liqueur like triple sec, which I have typed as "triple sex" three times now) (24D: Cocktail named for a motorcycle attachment). Oh, I just remembered another mistake I made. Had the -R in 47D: Junior, perhaps (HEIR) and wrote in YEAR. As with ZIGZAG, I was verrrrry confident. See you tomorrow.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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