Strong-willed daughter on "Downton Abbey" / SUN 5-5-24 / Bouncer in an alleyway? / Lea low? / Francisco with frescoes / Vegas casino with a musical name / "Seize the day" of today / Crash before dinner? / Orange sushi topper / Stat that doesn't apply to E.V.s

Constructor: Daniel Bodily

Relative difficulty: Easy

THEME: "From the Astronaut's Logbook" — familiar phrases clued as imagined entries ... from an astronaut's logbook:

Theme answers:

• HAVING A BLAST (3D: Woo-hoo! The engines are firing, all systems are go, and we are feeling good!)
• SEEING STARS (70D: Ouch! Drifted too far and bonked my head on that darned window ... but wow, would you look at the view!)
• GATHERING DUST (32D: Our lunar rover is collecting samples at long last. It's been sitting in storage for months!)
• LOST IN SPACE (18D: Oops, zoned out for a sec. Houston, can you retransmit our coordinates?)
• OVER THE MOON (20D: Thrilled to report that we've made it to lunar orbit!)
• FLOATING ON AIR (34D: Moving in zero-G is just blissful!)
• DOWN TO EARTH (74D: Re-entry time—let's make sure we do this simply and practically!)
• OUT OF THE BLUE (13D: And just like that, sky and clouds are behind us!)
• "ROCKET MAN" (77D: Who's on a mission in today's puzzle?)
• ELTON JOHN (78D: Musician who sang about a 77-Down)
• NIXON (?) (121A: He place a call to Armstrong and Aldrin minutes after their landing)

Word of the Day: Suni LEE (72A: Gymnast Suni) —

Sunisa "Suni" Lee (born Sunisa Phabsomphou; March 9, 2003) is an American artistic gymnast. Lee is the 2020 Olympic all-around champion and uneven bars bronze medalist, the 2019 world championship silver medalist on the floor and bronze medalist on uneven bars. She was a member of the teams that won gold at the 2019 World Championships and silver at the 2020 Summer Olympics.

Lee is the first Hmong-American Olympian. She is also reported to be the first woman of Asian descent and first Asian Americanwoman to win the Olympic all-around title. She is a six-time member of the U.S. women's national gymnastics team, and with six world championship and Olympic medals, she is tied with Gabby Douglas, Kim Zmeskal, Kyla Ross, and Rebecca Bross as the tenth-most-decorated American female gymnast.

Lee has received numerous honors and awards. In 2021, she was named Female Athlete of the Year by Sports Illustrated, named Sportswoman of the Year by the Women's Sports Foundation, and included in Time 100, Time's annual list of the 100 most influential people in the world. She also received an Asia Game Changer Award. (wikipedia)

• • •

Shortish one today because, well, this puzzle was dreary and there's really not that much to say about it. You get a rudimentary picture of a rocket, so there's that, but pictures don't make a good puzzle, and this picture, aside from being kind of feeble, creates black-square configurations that really compromise the overall quality of the grid by ensuring that we're just awash in 3-4-5s. So. Many. 3-4-5s. You've got your themers and then ... really nothing else of note, fill-wise. You've got a handful of 8s up top, and then one 9 ... but it's ASPEN TREE. ASPEN ... TREE? What other kind of aspen was it going to be? ASPEN DUCK? ASPEN OREO? No, there's nothing here but the theme and the simplistic picture, and the theme is extremely standard, absolutely run-of-the-mill corny pun stuff (plus some bonus ELTON JOHN content, if that floats your boat). And the theme clues are eternal. Just ... paragraph-long clues I mostly didn't even bother reading because I didn't have to. The puzzle is so easy that once you get the gimmick, you just have to run a few crosses through those theme answers, imagine what kind of space-related pun it might be, and that's that. Some of the clues, I glanced at the first few words, but many of them I never even saw. So much writing, so many words, for very little payoff. There's no legitimate humor there. At first I thought the imagined "logbook" entries were supposed to be straight swaps for the answers, but that's not exactly what's going on. What you get, in every case, is a two-part clue, where one part of the "logbook" is a straight clue (e.g. "just like that" = OUT OF THE BLUE), and a second part is a space clue (e.g. "sky and clouds are behind us!" = we are OUT OF THE BLUE, i.e. we have left the place where one sees blue sky behind us). So there's a method here, but I only noticed after the fact, and anyway, whatever the method, the main reaction it got from me was "tl;dr."

It is not OK to have OKED in the same puzzle as OKAY, SURE. Lazy. Bad. Also bad: AGENT K? Like ... that role is not important enough to be in crosswords this many decades later (8D: Tommy Lee Jones's role in "Men in Black"). For most people, that's going to be AGENT [who the hell knows what letter?]. Luckily the "K" in "I TAKE IT" is ultimately gettable, but still, bah to that '90s-era answer for sure. "YES, BOSS" is some obsequious, bootlicking garbage. Pass. VIBRATOS is one letter away from being a great answer, but as is, it's just a weird plural (that is, a weird word to find in the plural). But overall, there wasn't much in the fill to get actively mad at. The puzzle was clean enough, just far, far too easy. The only thing in the whole grid I didn't know was HOT SWAP (123A: Replacement of a computer part without powering down), which was easy to infer. In a Sunday-sized grid, I'd expect a bit more challenge, a bit more ambition and breadth to the fill.  Also, maybe a little more, let's say, currency. YOLO being clued as 79A: "Seize the day" of today made me laugh, first because carpe diem is still the "seize the day" of today, and because YOLO is from 2012 and no one has actually said it since 2014. It was popularized by the 2012 Drake song "The Motto." Fast forward a decade, and Drake is at the center of pop culture again ... but primarily for being the subject of this epic new Kendrick Lamar diss track. 

[rap beef: explained]

The puzzle is so simple overall that there's not even any clues to explain or anything. Nothing odd or tricky or clever in the cluing. Just straightforward clues, everywhere you look. Even the handful of "?" clues are not hard to get your head around. [Olympic tracks?] = ANTHEMS because those are songs (or "tracks") you hear at Olympic medal ceremonies. [Bouncer in an alleyway?] = ECHO because sounds echo (or "bounce") in an alleyway. But you knew all this. Do people really (still? ever?) bang a GONG to signify that supper's ready? (95A: Crash before dinner?). Also, do you really pronounce "Lea" like "lay"??? Because that's the only way the pun in 59A: Lea low? makes any sense ("lea" = meadow, "low" = cow sound), but I always thought it was pronounced more like "lee." Merriam-webster.com helpfully/unhelpfully features both pronunciations at the top of its entry for the term. 

[If you get one track stuck in your head today, let it be this dude saying AVONLEA at different speeds]

Notes:

• 1A: Language suffix (-ISH) — I had -ESE. First clue I saw was also my only mistake in the whole dang grid.
• 82D: Window, e.g. (PLANE SEAT) — this was good. This one got me. More of this tricksy energy, please.
• 37A: "Sounds to me like ..." ("I TAKE IT...") — parsing problems aplenty. Had "IT-" and assumed I was dealing with an "IT" phrase, most probably "IT SEEMS..." But no. 
• 89A: Make malleable using heat (ANNEAL) — one of the few answers that isn't an ordinary word / term / name. Also what you say when you see an eel.

Time now for the ... 

April 2024 Puzzles of the Month:

Themed: 

• Hanh Huynh, "HOLY COW!"  (Thursday, Apr. 25, 2024)
• David Kwong, A STAR IS "B" OR "N" (Thursday, Apr. 18, 2024)

Themeless: 

• Jess Rucks (PADIDDLE, HAPPY NOW?, IS THAT A NO?) (Saturday, Apr. 13, 2024) 

That's it. See you next time. 

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]