Polyamory portmanteau / FRI 7-28-23 / Titular protagonist in a Marcel Proust novel / Thin pancakes in Mexican cooking / Mexican garments also called jorongos / Mints sold in transparent plastic boxes / Move in a flash hypothetically / Apple product that once had an X added to its name

Constructor: Rafael Musa and Hoang-Kim Vu

Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium

THEME: none 

Word of the Day: Mancala (61A: Pieces in the game mancala = STONES) —

Mancala (Arabic: منقلة manqalah) refers to a family of two-player turn-based strategy board games played with small stones, beans, or seeds and rows of holes or pits in the earth, a board or other playing surface. The objective is usually to capture all or some set of the opponent's pieces. // Versions of the game date back past the 3rd century and evidence suggests the game existed in Ancient Egypt. It is among the oldest known games to still be widely played today. (wikipedia)

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Super-psyched when INCH UP proved correct at 1A: Edge forward. Less psyched that "UP" ended up crossing the "UP" in UPDO (5D: Certain bun), but I think that's it for UPs in this grid, so as violations go, it's pretty minor. Getting 1-Across right off the bat on a Friday (or Saturday) is typically a harbinger of a fast solve, and today was no exception. The quadranted structure kept the puzzle from getting too whoosh-whoosh (a sensation I associate not just with speed, but with dramatic darting around the grid), and yet it still had a nice flow and a bouncy demeanor. Low proper noun factor, so it felt very accessible. I'm slowly reading Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu or In Search of Lost Time or whatever the current favored translation of the title is, and by "slowly" I mean I am still in the first part, which is called "SWANN's Way" (20D: Titular protagonist in a Marcel Proust novel). It's great, really beautiful, but I've been reading it before bedtime and ... it's not that kind of book. It dwells on little things for long periods of time, really turning over both objects and feelings and examining them from different lights, and without a strong, clear narrative through-line (it's deliberately meandering), it's easy to forget what the hell you were reading the night before. Still, gorgeous. NYRB recently reissued James Grieve's 1970s translation of "SWANN's Way," and that's the one I'm reading. You don't need to know this, but maybe you were thinking about reading it some day. The Grieve translation is clean, crisp, clear. Recommended.

Not recommended: the word THROUPLE. The state of THROUPLEdom, I'm agnostic on, but the word THROUPLE is singularly ugly. And nonsenscial. A couple is two. I get that you are reconceiving "couple" but why not just make it its own thing. I proposed THREEDOM and my housemates (not that drunk) thought it was pretty good. "We Invite You To Celebrate Our THREEDOM!" "Let THREEDOM Ring!" You can do a lot with THREEDOM, I'm just saying. I'm also not loving OVERDRAW as a verb. I'm sure it exists, but we're sitting here trying to use it in a plausible way and not really succeeding. Also, it's not a concept having to do with "credit," so the clue kinda clanked as well (16A: Take more credit than warranted?). I'll trust you that LAND ART is a thing, but that was one of the hardest answers in the puzzle for me, for sure (27A: Outdoor installation using earth, rocks, vegetation, etc.). "WHO DOES THAT?" was also hard to come up with, or at least mildly challenging (17D: "The nerve of some people!"). The clue suggests being affronted, where the answer suggests mere astonishment. I see the connection. Now. But not then. MAC OS feels bad. Can't put my finger on it. Just bad. It's a debut, and I'm ... not surprised. Kinda telling that no one's ever touched this. MAC OS is just ... descriptive. The Mac operating system. Doesn't really feel like a "product" in the sense of a brand. I know only OSX, and apparently, the OS is past X now, so ... something about the wording just felt odd or off to me. The housemates (who work in software, in various capacities) think the clue is fine, but they're also disagreeing mightily about minutiae so who knows if they know what they're talking about. I mean, they're my friends, they're very smart, but you never know. 

[From the vacation house in Grand Marais, MN:
Two group portraits: one with my ass, one without]

I had Gretzky as The GREATEST instead of The GREAT ONE. Apologies to Muhammed Ali. CREEDS before CREDOS (3D: Tenets). Kealoa* at HURTS / HARMS (4D: Damages). I said this puzzle was lightish on proper nouns, but there are a few potential stumpers, like Marc COHN, really surprised that I retrieved that name as easily as I did (48A: "Walking in Memphis" singer Marc). My friend Shaun (sitting over there, on the couch) has a "soft spot" for this song, but when I asked her how to spell the singer's name just now, she said "C-O-E-N," so even the soft-spotted person couldn't spell his damn name right. I think he's the most obscure name in the grid. Certainly more obscure to me than SWANN or Janis IAN or J.P. SOUSA or Bob SAGET or TIG Notaro or even MR. BLUE, though there were lots of Mr. Colors in that movie. That's all you really needed to know about the movie to solve that answer. I ended on TAMPON, which was a total surprise. I had PAD but was thinking "What could a PAD alternative be?" Not the direction I imagined the cross-referenced pairing was going to go. Don't normally love an informationless cross-references like this, where you have to solve one answer (via crosses) before having a hope at the other, but finishing on TAMPON was oddly ... I want to say thrilling. I may be overselling it. But I was happy the puzzle went there, having been squeamish about such things for many, many years. I hope you found things to like about this one. See you tomorrow.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld 

*kealoa = a pair of words (normally short, common answers) that can be clued identically and that share at least one letter in common (in the same position). These are answers 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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