Habitat for sphagnum moss / SAT 8-24-24 / Drink of boiled grains with purported detoxifying effects / Country singer with the 2012 hit "Wanted" / Pop artist English / Second slide of many a meeting deck / Batman adversary with a stitched burlap mask / Commercial lead-in to bank / Start of a Spanish cheer / Creatures often depicted with green skin

Constructor: Ryan McCarty

Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium (except for a single square, which was a total guess)

THEME: none 

Word of the Day: RON English (52A: Pop artist ___ English) —

Ron English (born June 6, 1959) is an American contemporary artist who explores brand imagery, street art, and advertising. [...] English has produced images on the street, in museums, in movies, books and television. He coined the term POPaganda to describe a mash-up of high and low cultural touchstones, from superhero mythology to totems of art history, populated with his original characters, including MC Supersized, the obese fast-food mascot featured in the movie Super Size Me, and Abraham Obama, the fusion of America's 16th and 44th Presidents. Other characters in English's paintings, billboards, and sculpture include three-eyed rabbits, cowgirls and grinning skulls – visual, with humorous undertones. (wikipedia)

• • •

[21D: Batman adversary with a stitched burlap mask]

So yesterday, NANCHERLA provided an example of a pop culture name that (for me) stood out strongly for being the least familiar thing in the grid. If you don't know it (as I (mostly) didn't), it requires much more attention and effort than anything else in the grid, and thus makes the solving experience go kind of lopsided. But yesterday, all the crosses were fair. I felt like the puzzle was *helping* me to get it, was constructed in a way that made me enjoy (and not resent) learning the name. Cool cool. Now fast-forward to this puzzle, where (again, for me), virtually the same thing happens—the puzzle throws a long pop culture answer at me that I have never heard of in my life—but instead of the crosses being fair ... well, they are mostly fair, but they also include one short pop culture answer that I have never heard of in my life, and that, dear reader, that has made all the difference. And in a bad way, not a Robert Frost way. I worked this puzzle all the way down to ... this:

And then just shrugged. That "country singer" hasn't been much of anything, fame-wise, for a decade. I mean, I don't listen to pop country as a rule anyway, but I have a reasonable familiarity with the bigger names at least. But HUNTER HAYES (24D: Country singer with the 2012 hit "Wanted") ... I just looked up HUNTER HAYES and his albums since this mid-'10s ... if they fell in the forest, I'm not sure anyone heard them. Just crickets. But he seems to have been a thing for the first half of the '10s. Whatever, let's just say, he Missed Me Completely. I ended up being able to infer HUNTER easily enough, and ultimately I inferred the "H" in HAYES because it was obviously the best guess (HAYES being a name that I have at least seen, on presidents and Will and Grace actors and what not). But the director of CODA? No hope. Like the entire career of HUNTER HAYES, Sîan HEDER's name just missed me. My apologies to her: she's accomplished enough, for sure; won an Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay (for CODA). I've just never seen anything she's done. I know a Bill HADER, he's great, but as you can see, different spelling. The Napoleon Dynamite actor guy is a HEDER (Jon HEDER), I probably would've been more confident in that "H" if it had been him. But as is ... oof, that "H." So I've got two proper nouns [check] of less than top-tier fame [check] that cross [check] at an uninferrable letter [debatable]. I did infer the letter. So I guess it's not a true Natick. But I tell you, I had my finger hovered over that "H" key like "come on come on come on please be right big bucks no whammies!" And I was semi-surprised, though mostly just relieved, when the "H" ended up being correct. That crossing made an otherwise decent Saturday puzzle reeeeeeal unpleasant there at the end.

Just like yesterday, the proper noun debacle stood in stark contrast to the rest of my solving experience, as I blew through most of the rest of the grid, no problem. I blew through it a little faster yesterday, true, but that's why Friday is Friday and Saturday is Saturday. Relative to their expected levels of difficulty, F and Sat were equally easy for me. The SW corner today played like a Monday; I doubt I was down there for more than 30 seconds. The NW gave me YUCA, which looks all kinds of wrong—I want there to be two "C"s in there, but YUCCA is a perennial shrub, where YUCA is another name for "Cassava," a root tuber. Ah, well, looks like the confusion is baked into the name itself from way back: "Early reports of the species [yucca] were confused with the cassava (Manihot esculenta). Consequently, Linnaeus mistakenly derived the generic name from the Taíno word for the latter, yuca." But even though that spelling was unfamiliar to me, I still wanted YU(C)CA, so I was prepared for the letters when they came, and the rest of that corner was a cinch (thank you, Crosswordese Ambassador James AGEE for granting me access) (9D: "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men" writer, 1941) [side note: AGEE was hired by TIME, INC. as a reporter, right out of college]. The NW corner (where I started) was also pretty easy, once I got past my initial error: DAR / REPOTS instead of ABU / UNPOTS (I was thinking of DAR es Salaam, the "largest city and financial hub of Tanzania," which is not a capital, last I checked, was not in the "Mideast," alas). The capital of Tanzania, by the way, is DODOMA, which has never appeared in the NYTXW, despite its seemingly favorable letter configuration (short, lots of vowels, alternating vowels and consonants, terminal "A"). Now you're prepared for when DODOMA eventually drops, which it will, some day, trust me. 

That just leaves the SE, easily the toughest of the puzzle's corners. Again, proper nouns come into play, as I had no idea who RON English was. He was apparently on "The Simpsons," but well after I'd stopped watching it. I had the last letter of his name as an "S" because I assumed 37D: Many Grindr users (GAY MEN) was going to be an "S"-ending plural. I also had MBA before MFA (47D: Deg. from Yale's Geffen School), SOFT SPOT before SOFT SIDE (the former being waaaaaay more of a thing than the latter) (49A: Vulnerable part of one's personality), and I didn't really know that BIG AIR was an event. Snowboarding, sure, BIG AIR, uh uh. Still, though, that corner played like an average Saturday corner, in terms of difficulty—took some work, but it was all ultimately gettable. The only thing that was truly harrowing about this puzzle was the HEDER / HAYES "H"-bomb. I defused it, but only barely. Speaking of barely ... BARLEY. Specifically ... BARLEY WATER!? (8D: Drink of boiled grains with purported detoxifying effects). Yeesh, between HUNTER HAYES and BARLEY WATER, it's like this puzzle is trying to be actively unappetizing. Luckily there's a cute FOSTER KITTEN (6D: Candidate for a "forever home") and some TURKEY JERKY and a copy of "Batman" with THE SCARECROW on the cover, so the puzzle was not without its pleasures. In fact, the longer answers (of the non-BARLEY non-country music persuasion) are really solid across the board. Also SHTICKY and "DID I ASK?!"—both winners.

Notes:

• 5D: Strong, as a bond (AAA) — that's a financial bond rating
• 20A: Prominent feature of a jacket (TITLE) — that's a book jacket
• 14A: Actress who voiced Mei Lee's strict mother in Pixar's "Turning Red" (SANDRA OH) — almost none of the words in the clue mean anything to me, but I still got SANDRA OH off the SAN-.
• 30A: "Pleeeease?" ("CAN'T I?") — look, if you elongate the clue, I'm gonna want to elongate the answer, those are just the rules. This is how I explain that the first thing I wanted to write in here was "CAAN I?" Also, no kid says "CAN'T I?" with a "T," that's absurd. It's "CAN I?" or nothing.
• 16A: Second slide of many a meeting deck (AGENDA) — no idea what a "meeting deck" is. Is this some kind of cartomancy ritual performed in board rooms? ... Wow, I was pretty close.
• 35A: Habitat for sphagnum moss (BOG) — is that where they grow the barley for HUNTER HAYES' BARLEY WATER? Sounds like it. [grimace]

See you next time.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]