Literally, "our thing" / FRI 6-21-24 / Shape of the Crab Nebula / Peddled good / Roughly half of mice / Island that's home to Popeye Village, a film-set-turned-theme-park / Nickname for a 3.2 million-year-old Australopithecus skeleton discovered in 1974 / Repeat an interviewer's question, perhaps / Burks, N.B.A. shooting guard since 2011

Constructor: Billy Bratton

Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium

THEME: none 

Word of the Day: LUCY (33A: Nickname for a 3.2 million-year-old Australopithecus skeleton discovered in 1974) —

AL 288-1, commonly known as Lucy or Dinkʼinesh (Amharic: ድንቅ ነሽ, lit. 'you are marvellous'), is a collection of several hundred pieces of fossilized bone comprising 40 percent of the skeleton of a female of the hominin species Australopithecus afarensis. It was discovered in 1974 in Ethiopia, at Hadar, a site in the Awash Valley of the Afar Triangle, by Donald Johanson, a paleoanthropologist of the Cleveland Museum of Natural History.

Lucy is an early australopithecine and is dated to about 3.2 million years ago. The skeleton presents a small skull akin to that of non-hominin apes, plus evidence of a walking-gait that was bipedal and upright, akin to that of humans (and other hominins); this combination supports the view of human evolution that bipedalism preceded increase in brain size. A 2016 study proposes that Australopithecus afarensis was also, to a large extent, tree-dwelling, though the extent of this is debated.

Lucy was named by Pamela Alderman after the 1967 song "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" by the Beatles, which was played loudly and repeatedly in the expedition camp all evening after the excavation team's first day of work on the recovery site. After public announcement of the discovery, Lucy captured much international interest, becoming a household name at the time.

Lucy became famous worldwide, and the story of her discovery and reconstruction was published in a book by Johanson and Edey. Beginning in 2007, the fossil assembly and associated artefacts were exhibited publicly in an extended six-year tour of the United States; the exhibition was called Lucy's Legacy: The Hidden Treasures of Ethiopia. There was discussion of the risks of damage to the unique fossils, and other museums preferred to display casts of the fossil assembly. The original fossils were returned to Ethiopia in 2013, and subsequent exhibitions have used casts. (wikipedia) [my emph., what the hell!? Were the archaeologists being punished? This sounds like torture]

• • •

Usual trouble up front and then usual Friday whoosh. Not particularly remarkable in terms of how it played, or how exciting it was. Solid. Fine. There's this meme (is it a meme?) going around on Twitter (which apparently we're just calling "X" now) where people are asked to post their most "boomer" opinion ("boomer" being a relentless and stupid byword for "old" and "out of touch" used by social media lemmings terrified of aging and death). Well, I have not as yet participated in this mass confession of "old man yells at cloud" opinions, but if I did, my own most "boomer" opinion—crossword edition—would be "Get Your Damn Emojis Out of My Crossword Puzzle!" I don't mind emojis, in their place. I use them. A bunch. Where they belong—in texts and social media posts. Every time I see the puzzle trying to be "modern" by using emojis for clues, I just feel very, very ... tired. Disappointed. Will Shortz absolutely changed crossword puzzles in the '90s by making them more contemporary, including more everyday phrases and names, steering puzzles away from arcane trivia and leaning more heavily into wordplay. His approach was a substantial innovation. If you're going to innovate, innovate. Adding emojis ... is not innovation. It's just bad redecoration. This is all to say that "THIS IS NOT A DRILL!" is a great answer (best in the puzzle, appropriately placed in a marquee position) and does not deserve to have its clue cheaply bedazzled by siren emojis, or any emojis (8D: 🚨"Serious situation developing!"🚨). It's degrading. I am exaggerating the extent to which I actually care, but I do think there's something Vegas-ugly about taking an elegantly designed thing like the crossword and slapping emojis, animation, etc. on top of it. It's not making the puzzles better. It's just making them tackier.

Beyond that one marquee central answer, the answers that really grabbed my attention weren't any of the long ones. Those are OK, for the most part, but they aren't showing me anything new. Even stuff that's trying to be fresh, like BOOTY CALLS and MANSPLAINS, feels already a little dated. Not bad answers at all, but not as funky fresh as I think they think they are. "Mansplaining" is already 16 years old, as a term (I mean, it's likely ancient, as a concept, but as a term—just 16!). I only just learned that the term was coined in response to a 2008 essay by Rebecca Solnit ("Men Explain Things To Me"). Here's the origin story, in her words:

The word mansplaining was coined by an anonymous person in response to my 2008 essay Men Explain Things to Me and has had a lively time of it ever since. It was a New York Times word of the year in 2010, and entered the Oxford English Dictionary in 2018; versions of it exist in many other languages from French to Icelandic, and the essay itself has appeared in many languages including Korean and Swedish. People often recount the opening incident in that almost 15-year-old essay, in which a man explained a book to me, too busy holding forth to notice that I was its author, as my friend was trying to tell him. (The Guardian, Feb. 9, 2023)

It's a fine answer, MANSPLAINS, it's just not giving wow at this point. I was more taken with the lively colloquial phrases today, "I WOULDN'T..." and "WE GET IT." There's something about hearing the voices of people saying these things in my head that is wonderfully entertaining. I like hearing the mock-urgency in "THIS IS NOT A DRILL!," the diplomatic reserve of "I WOULDN'T," the eye-rolling impatience of "WE GET IT!" What I like less is the awkward plural HOLES-IN-ONE (valid, but dumb-looking and -sounding). SLIME TRAIL gets a thumbs-up for daring to be gross, and for giving the puzzle that lovely SLIME/GRIME juxtaposition. Most of the rest of the answers in the grid just take up space. I don't mind them. There they are. Existing. Doing what they do...

Clues on ELK (18A: Colorado's ___ Mountains) and ALEC (49D: ___ Burks, N.B.A. shooting guard since 2011) were totally meaningless to me. Sports names are always going to be problematic for a certain sizable subset of solvers, so as a rule those names should belong to players for some distinction. Now, you have to be a very good basketball player to have the kind of longevity that ALEC Burks has had (13 years in the league now), but ... no All-Star appearances, no championships, no "most this" or "highest that" or "league-leading something or other" or really anything beyond just being a solid player (sometimes starting, but mostly off the bench). He's got a name-like name and the crosses are easy, so no harm no foul (!), but there should probably be Some kind of bar that athletes have to clear before being considered crossworthy. I know you desperately want to deliver a new and better ALEC for the crossword solvers of the world, but ... come on.

Had some great mistakes / wrong thoughts today, starting with trying to make NOTRE DAME work at 1A: Literally, "our thing despite knowing very well that that is not what NOTRE DAME means. I'd like to thank ASS for giving me the "A" that helped me remember COSA NOSTRA, which jump-started the NW and sent me no my way, with no real hesitations or slow-downs thereafter, though there were a few "huh?" moments. I was very unsure about what was going on with half of all mice (27A: Roughly half of mice). Wanted SHES (!?)—the crossword puzzle has insisted over the years that HES is a plural known for "males," so why not SHES? Once I got it down to -OES ... I'm just happy I (sorta) knew they were DOES (like the deer, the female deer), and also knew the term DOPE SHEET, because I'm imagining a world where someone thinks a bookmaker publishes the betting odds on a HOPE SHEET (because bettors "hope" they win??), and then the mice would end up as HOES, which would be ... confusing, probably. I thought the decor at a lake house was an OIL ("couldn't those hang in any house?") (30A: Piece of wall décor at a lake house, perhaps), I thought SANK was FELL (3D: Didn't go down well?), and when the [Shape of the Crab Nebula] wasn't CRAB, I was fresh out of ideas there. Found the clue on WAS extremely awkward ("that WAS that"??? I've heard "that's that!" but ick this past tense version feels contrived) (11A: What might come between "that" and "that"). But I loved the clue on STALL (15D: Repeat an interviewer's question, perhaps)—again, imagining the context is part of the fun—and the clue on WARE is particularly great, with its fake bad grammar (36A: Peddled good) ("it's peddled well!" I can hear someone prematurely shouting)

Notes:

• 35A: Island that's home to Popeye Village, a film-set-turned-theme-park (MALTA) — was puzzled / intrigued by this seemingly bizarre bit of trivia until I remember that MALTA is where Altman filmed his 1980 movie Popeye, and yeah, that outdoor set is elaborate, stunning. The kind of place a kid (like me, at the time of the movie's release) would in fact want to run around in. (Note: it's ... not really a kids' movie, despite being about a kids' cartoon character and starring that guy who played every 1980 kid's favorite sitcom character, Mork from Ork)

• 56A: "Hang on!" ("HOLD IT A SEC!") — got the "HOLD IT," which seemed a complete answer in itself. My brain wanted only "HOLD IT RIGHT THERE!" 
• 52D: Translation material (RNA) — "Translation is the process by which a protein is synthesized from the information contained in a molecule of messenger RNA (mRNA)" (nature.com)
• 55A: Shares on X (RTS) — “X,” formerly known as Twitter. RTS = “retweets” (because RXS already has a meaning?)

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]