Big name in small loans / SAT 7-27-24 / Small craters in auto-body paint / Hot-pink fashion aesthetic / Swedish holiday in which crowns of candles are worn, familiarly / Alpine mountain climber / Literally it means "submission" / Santiago's catch in "The Old Man and the Sea" / Real first name of comedian Awkwafina / Chmerkovskiy, three-time "Dancing With the Stars" champion

Constructor: Barbara Lin and Matthew Stock

Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium

THEME: none 

Word of the Day: LUCIA (45D: Swedish holiday in which crowns of candles are worn, familiarly) —

Saint Lucy's Day, also called the Feast of Saint Lucy, is a Christian feast day observed on 13 December. The observance commemorates  Lucia of Syracuse, an early-fourth-century virgin martyr under the Diocletianic Persecution. According to legend, she brought food and aid to Christians hiding in the Roman catacombs, wearing a candle-lit wreath on her head to light her way, leaving both hands free to carry as much food as possible. Because her name means "light" and her feast day had at one time coincided with the shortest day of the year prior to calendar reforms, it is now widely celebrated as a festival of light. Falling within the Advent season, Saint Lucy's Day is viewed as a precursor of Christmastide, pointing to the arrival of the Light of Christ in the calendar on 25 December, Christmas Day.

Saint Lucy's Day is celebrated most widely in Scandinavia, Italy and the island nation of Saint Lucia, each emphasising a different aspect of her story. In Scandinavia, where Lucy is called Santa/Sankta Lucia, she is represented as a woman in a white dress symbolizing a baptismal robe and a red sash symbolizing the blood of her martyrdom, with a crown or wreath of candles on her head. (wikipedia)

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OK, much more alert this morning than yesterday morning, but I wish I could reverse things, i.e. I wish I'd been more alert yesterday than today, because yesterday's puzzle, in well-rested retrospect, seems better than I originally thought it was, whereas today's puzzle ... I wouldn't have minded being less alert for. Maybe then I wouldn't have noticed or cared about or even noticed so many of its unpleasant aspects. Or maybe I'd've noticed and cared about them more, who knows? All I know is that I did not DIG this one much at all, except for BARBIECORE (16A: Hot-pink fashion aesthetic), which really seems like the only reason for this puzzle to exist, and the good of which is almost completely undone by the odd gender-binary nonsense of FEMININE SIDE (20D: It might be expressed with emotion), my god I hate the concept. You'd only ever use it of men, first of all, and it's such a horrid idea—that emotion is "feminine." This is why men are broken (not you, you're great, I'm sure). Your Emotions Are Not Feminine, They Are Just Human—Feeling Things Is Human, Try It Some Time. Sigh. Is sighing "feminine?" Whatever. Moving on. Actually, let's rewind and start with the very worst thing about this puzzle—an absolute dealbreaker about which everyone involved should really be ashamed: the duplication of "EVEN" (EVENER, "I CAN'T EVEN"). That dupe is so jarring that when it came time to drop EVEN down into the SE, I just ... couldn't. "No way, they wouldn't," I thought. I mean, I already had to endure EVENER, which is barely a word (42D: Level, essentially), and now you want me (do you?) to write in "EVEN" ... again? Can't be. But it could be and did be. Awful. Not even sloppy, because surely everyone involved noticed. They just didn't care. That's malpractice, especially at the editorial level. 

Fill-wise, the thing that irked the most was the name barrage, once again. The puzzle was very very easy, in general, getting (almost) all of its "difficulty" (for me) from name grenades. For me, these were FELIX, VAL and KIVA (!?), with FELIX (because of its position), being the worst damage-doer of all. Just couldn't flow up and into the NE corner because FELIX was 80% blank (F----!). I was able to push through VAL and KIVA by overwhelming them with the surrounding fill. But I was lucky. I actually had at least heard of ETONIC and NORA and Nick NOLTE and WIM Wenders and TIG Notaro (the last of which was a *huge* help—first letters of all the long Downs in the SE!). But I can easily imagine other solvers not knowing one or many of those. I don't care so much about the fact of the names, which I think are mostly gettable, as I do about the fact that there were so many and that they were the only real speed bumps in this thing. Cluing was not that clever or thoughtful today. So it played like a triviafest—never my favorite kind of puzzle. But back to KIVA for a second ... I've never heard of it (55A: Big name in small loans). It is really well known. Merriam-webster dot com defines KIVA as "a Pueblo Indian ceremonial structure that is usually round and partly underground," so they're no help. Looks like it's a San Francisco-based microloan nonprofit. I will confess that financial stuff is really Really not my specialty, so I wouldn't be shocked if I was just part of an ignorant minority today. But as financial terms and names go, when the answer wasn't FICA (which I actually entertained, despite knowing full well it was wrong), I had nothing. KIVA sounds like a god, or something you'd name your SPCA rescue dog. I finished on the -IVA / -EG square and actually had to run the alphabet. I mourn for the people who both didn't know KIVA and had never heard of a KEG stand. I can only assume you wrote in "LEG stand" here. My condolences.

The puzzle started out like a Monday or Tuesday for me. Had those first three Acrosses in the NW done inside of five seconds (yes, really), and then in another ten seconds or so, I had the whole NW in place:

I hesitated on the word following STEM. Wanted SCIENCE, but it wouldn't fit. Blanked on the golf apparel, but it eventually came to me, and I was off and running. The only real trouble spot for me today, besides the FELIX dam, was the spot just east of the TOWER part of LEANING TOWER. Speaking of "east"—that was one of the problems there. I had the "-T" part of 37D: Left, in a way (PORT) and blithely wrote in EAST. I mean WEST. Damn it, my E/W dyslexia is so bad I can't even explain myself right. I definitely *thought* about a map, visualized it in my head, and wrote in WEST. WEST is "left," EAST is "right"—never gonna get over the fact that we *say* "east/west" (i.e "north south east and west," "from the east to the west, I love you the best," etc.) and "east/west" are the alphabetical order, but on the map, reading L to R, it's "west/east," ugh. Annnnyway, WEST screwed me up. Also, I couldn't figure out what 36A: Lap, say could be if it wasn't OUTRUN. I even tried OUTSWIM. Bah. Wanted LOOK AT at 41A: Check out, but the "K" seemed dicey, so I briefly tried LOCATE (?!). Before I had TOWER, I had no idea about WRENS (44A: Birds that can emit a "teakettle, teakettle, teakettle" call). So even though I guessed the TATS part of FACE TATS right (48A: Decorations for a mug?), I was stuck for a bit trying to make the SE happen. But everywhere else in this puzzle, I CRUISED.

Notes:

• 22A: Small crater in auto-body paint (FISH EYES) — not familiar. Didn't know if they were EYES or EGGS, and neither one of those options was any help in pushing through FELIX.
• 56A: One meaning of 👍  ("I NEED A RIDE") — The emoji does not mean that—an actual human thumb held out by someone on the roadside means that—so this was confusing. 
• 23D: He passed Babe in 1974 (HANK) — as in Aaron, as in "All-Time Home Run Leader." Bonds eventually passed Aaron in 2007, when he hit number 756, finishing up his career with 762 (a record that still stands, with or without an asterisk, whether you like it or not).

See you next time.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld 

P.S. here is an explanation of the "-CORE" suffix (as seen in BARBIECORE), in case it's unfamiliar to you

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