Bowling-pin shaped creature of Al Capp cartoons / THU 6-20-24 / Vape's lack / Sidekick of 1950s TV / Kids' menu go-with / Lead-in to normative / Airport acquisitions / Dancer's haul / Lorelai's place of business on "Gilmore Girls" / U.S. city where the frozen margarita was invented / Monk's style / Kind of electrons on the outermost shell of an atom

Constructor: Ella Dershowitz

Relative difficulty: Challenging (if you go down and get the "revealer" first, then maybe less challenging)

THEME: TRADE NAMES (55A: Commercial identifiers ... or what four pairs of answers must do in order to match their clues) — on four occasions, Across answers that share a row "trade" three-letter strings, which happen to be people's first "names":

Theme answers:

• INTIMATION / HALE (i.e. INHALATION / TIME) (17A: Breath / 19A: Marathoner's focus) 
• CANNON / SPRAYING (i.e. CRAYON / SPANNING) (24A: Kids' menu go-with / 26A: Reaching across)
• ALIVE / LEAST (i.e. LEAVE / A-LIST) (35A: Get out of Dodge / 36A: Fancy few)
• PICKED ON / PARTED (i.e. PICKETED / PARDON) (44A: Walked for a cause / 46A: Prisoner's reprieve)

Word of the Day: SHMOO (4D: Bowling-pin shaped creature of Al Capp cartoons) —

The shmoo (plural: shmoos, also shmoon) is a fictional cartoon creature created by Al Capp (1909–1979); the character first appeared in the comic strip Li'l Abner on August 31, 1948. It has had a considerable influence on pop culture, language, geopolitics, human history, and science. // A shmoo physically resembles a bowling pin with stubby legs. It has smooth skin, eyebrows, and sparse whiskers—but no arms, nose, or ears. Its feet are short and round, but dexterous, as the shmoo's comic book adventures make clear. It has a rich gamut of facial expressions and often expresses love by exuding hearts over its head. Cartoonist 

Al Capp ascribed to the shmoo the following curious characteristics:

• They reproduce asexually and are incredibly prolific, multiplying faster than rabbits. They require no sustenance other than air.
• Shmoos are delicious to eat, and are eager to be eaten. If a human looks at one hungrily, it will happily immolate itself—either by jumping into a frying pan, after which they taste like chicken, or on a grill, after which they taste like steak. When roasted they taste like pork, and when baked they taste like catfish. Raw, they taste like oysters on the half-shell.
• They also produce eggs (neatly packaged), milk (bottled, grade-A), and butter—no churning required. Their pelts make perfect bootleather or house timbers, depending on how thick one slices them.
• They have no bones, so there is no waste. Their eyes make the best suspender buttons, and their whiskers make perfect toothpicks. In short, they are simply the perfect ideal of a subsistence agricultural herd animal.
• Naturally gentle, they require minimal care and are ideal playmates for young children. The frolicking of shmoos is so entertaining (such as their staged "shmoosical comedies") that people no longer feel the need to watch television or go to the movies.
• Some of the tastier varieties of shmoo are more difficult to catch, however. Usually shmoo hunters, now a sport in some parts of the country, use a paper bag, flashlight, and stick to capture their shmoos. At night the light stuns them, then they may be whacked in the head with the stick and put in the bag for frying up later on.

• • •

I've been fed a steady diet of easy and easier puzzles for so long now that I'd forgotten what a properly Thursday Thursday puzzle felt like. This one absolutely ran me over. The theme made it so eight of the answers didn't ("didn't) make sense, and then the cluing overall felt turned up to 11, difficulty-wise. The NW... I mean, that's always likely to be the toughest part of a puzzle, in that it's where I start, and when you start, you have nothing to go on, but even adjusting for that fact, that NW was brutal. Starting with 1A: evidence collector, for short (CSI). A CSI ... is a CSI a countable thing? Is the "I" for "investigator," or is the "investigation" as a whole the "collector" in question? That clue on RUN was great but hard (14A: Homecoming, of a sort?) (you score a RUN when you come “home” … in baseball). Clue on STENO (20A: Court figure), also really hard (and would've been impossible for me without the "O" from SHMOO, which I somehow knew because I am old and so the world of Al Capp (exceedingly popular at one time, very much not popular now) is vaguely familiar to me). The [Brand for bakers] could've been anything (I started with TEC / TEFLON in the CSI / CRISCO slots). I figured tanning was involved at 2D: Get bronze but since the verb is generally just TAN, I could not see SUNTAN. And how many kinds of INTENT are there? (3D: Mens rea, for example). Mens rea is a kind of INTENT? I thought "mens rea" *was* INTENT, so I was looking for ... I don't know. Something related to "state of mind." Total faceplant. That NW also has *two* themers running through it, so ... yeah, haven't been thrashed like that in a long, long time. 

It was clear pretty early on that if I'd only gone down and looked at the revealer (instead of working my way methodically down the grid, always working off crosses, as per uzh), I could've moved things along quicker. But I'm stubborn. So I just kept fighting my way through, assuming I'd get the trick eventually. And I did. I got the switch thing (*eventually*) but the fact that the switched things were names didn't register. Also, somehow knowing that a switch was involved didn't make everything magically Easy all of a sudden. With HALE, ALIVE, and LEAST, the "name" part is so much of the answer that it's hard to guess the (actual, literal) answer from the remaining letters. I mean, [Marathoner's focus] and all I get is the "E"? I thought ...  maybe PACE? Or an ACHE? Or the RACE itself? Or the TAPE at the end? Also, if you give me [Prisoner's reprieve] and PAR- followed by three letters, well, I'm sure PARDON is the best guess there, but PAROLE fits, *and* OLE is a (Danish/Norwegian) name, so ... oof. 

So it was hard, but was it good? Yes. I didn't like some of the cluing, but the theme itself is really SLICK. A simple concept resulting in a very difficult solve. The revealer is perfect. Almost too perfect. Uncannily perfect. TRADE NAMES is about as exact and concise a description of what happens, thematically, as you're ever gonna see. You get eight "unclued" answers, but they're all technically clued ... once you do the name trade thing. The fact that the pre-trade answers are perfectly legitimate-looking words and phrases is remarkable. Nothing feels forced or awkward in the entire theme set. I resented slightly having to know "Gilmore Girls" lore today, especially for a clue as innocuous and infinitely clueable as INN (Lorelai's place of business on "Gilmore Girls"). The problem wasn't the clue/answer per se, it was the answer's position—probably the most load-bearing Down answer in the whole puzzle, with 2/3 of its letters running through those damned traded names. If that clue weren't in such a high-value position, it would've been just another pop culture thing I don't know, la di dah, who cares? Today, ugh. The only TV INN workers I know are the Newharts. I know that Rory (is it Rory) goes to Yale (?) at some point (?), but otherwise I don't know that show. Speaking of things I resent: yet another Yale clue for you today (56D: Certain Ivy Leaguer (ELI)). Like many Yale grads, the puzzle just can't stop mentioning Yale. It never ends. I wonder where the constructor went to sch- ... oh, hey, whaddyaknow? Shocking. (I'm just teasing) (it's true, though).

PHAT is very much "bygone" and should be marked as such (60A: Dope). To call the SLEIGH Dancer's "haul" is awfully, terribly, painfully forced, especially as you're already desperately trying to misdirect solvers with "Dancer" (on its surface, not obviously a reindeer name). I guess the thing that you are hauling is your HAUL? Sigh. OK. I think of HAUL as your total take: say, of candy at Halloween, or medals at a dancing competition (if you're a dancer, and not a Dancer). They did that hide-a-name-at-the-beginning-of-the-clue thing again with 34D: Monk's style (BEBOP). All clues start with capital letters, so there's no reason you'd read Dancer or Monk as proper nouns in their respective clues. Mask the capital, fool the solver, trick as old as time. Oldie but a goodie. I definitely thought "monks have style now?" Even after I realized Monk could be a name, I somehow ended up thinking of the wrong Monk:

Explainers:

• 4A: Airport acquisitions (STAMPS) — jeez, this is brutal. STAMPS are "acquired" ... in your passport, if you are flying internationally. Lots of context left out of this clue. Very Saturday-level stuff.
• 31: Hanger-on (LEECH) — in addition to the fact that I still can't spell LEECH (or, to be more accurate, can't distinguish between LEECH and LEACH), I had trouble here because the clue seems like a stretch. I mean, an actual LEECH does "hang on" you (I got some on me in a river in Oregon once—freaky). But metaphorically, I don't think "hangers-on" are necessarily LEECHes. It's a jump from mere hanger-on to actively soul- / energy- / money- (if not blood-) sucking LEECH.
• 40A: Staff note (MEMO) — another misdirect. Clue looks musical. Isn't.
• 50A: Sidekick of 1950s TV (TONTO) — Vino TINTO is red wine in Spanish cuisine. TINTO is a word you see on wine labels a lot. Just ... throwing that out there.

• 27D: "Wild" ingredient in some beers (YEAST) — had the "Y" and first thought, swear to god, was "... YUCCA?"
• 22D: U.S. city where the frozen margarita was invented (DALLAS) — again, just brutal Saturday-level cluing. I just made a "U.S. city" out of whatever scraps I could turn up in this word.
• 47D: He played Mary Richards's boss at WJM-TV (ASNER) — Would've been way harder as [Famed Grant portrayer]. Or [Emmy-winning Grant portrayer]. Something like that. As is, this was one of the gimmes for me today. Did a full "MTM" watch earlier this year. About as good as the live-action network sitcom ever got.
• 61A: Roger's cousin ("YES, SIR!") — "Roger" as in the affirmative ("received and understood") in radio communication.
• 39A: Loud kiss (SMACK) — Hey, look, it's SMACK again. Back-to-back SMACK. Return of the SMACK. Mwah. Nice.

Hope you survived (and enjoyed) today's puzzle. See you next time.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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