Pirates' support group? / WED 4-30-25 / Stitchers' gathering / Alternative to a blur or pixelation / Wonderland interloper / ___ Ghani, former Afghan president / A reason to act this very instant ... / Spun some records, informally / Caveman's covering / Apt anagram for "brush"

Constructor: Adam Vincent

Relative difficulty: Easy

THEME: CLEAN / ONE'S CLOCK (6D: With 32-Down, beat an opponent soundly) — ordinary phrases are turned into clock + cleaning-related puns:

Theme answers:

• THE TIME IS RIPE (15A: A reason to act this very instant ... or why you might 6-Down 32-Down) ("ripe" here means "stinky" (def. 5b, here)—that's why you need to "clean" the clock)
• HAND SOAP (34D: Bottleful that might 6-/32-Down) (a clock has "hands")
• FACE WASH (39D: Bottleful that might 6-/32-Down) (a clock has a "face")

Word of the Day: ASHRAF Ghani (2D: ___ Ghani, former Afghan president) —

Mohammad Ashraf Ghani Ahmadzai (born 19 May 1949) is an Afghan former politician, academic, and economist who served as the president of Afghanistan from September 2014 until August 2021, when his government was overthrown by the Taliban.

Ghani was born in Logar, Afghanistan. After his grade-school education in Afghanistan, he spent much of his time abroad, studying in Lebanon and the United States. After receiving his PhD in cultural anthropology from Columbia University in 1983, he taught at various institutions and was an associate professor of anthropology at Johns Hopkins University. For much of the 1990s, he worked at the World Bank. In December 2001, he returned to Afghanistan after the collapse of the Taliban government. [...] 

In 2014, Ghani became president after winning the controversial 2014 Afghan presidential election. The election was so disputed that negotiations between Ghani and rival Abdullah Abdullah were mediated by the United States. Ghani became president and Abdullah chief executive, with power split 50-50. On 18 February 2020, Ghani was re-elected after a delayed result from the 2019 presidential elections. He was sworn in on 9 March 2020. // On 15 August 2021, his term ended abruptly, as the Taliban took over Kabul. Ghani and staff fled Afghanistan and took refuge in the United Arab Emirates. He later stated he left in order to avoid further violence, and that staying and dying would have accomplished nothing but adding another tragedy to Afghanistan's history. However, he was also condemned across various spectrums for abandoning Afghanistan to the Taliban and has been accused of corruption during his administration. (wikipedia)

• • •

[30A: Alternative to a blur or pixelation]

I liked the grid way more than I liked the theme (which I didn't really grasp as I was solving). The main (huge) problem, to my ears, is the ONE'S in the main phrase: CLEAN / ONE'S CLOCK. I can't see "ONE'S" without thinking of it as self-reflexive. DO ONE'S BEST, A LOT ON ONE'S PLATE, ATE ONE'S WORDS ... in all these cases, "one" does these things. One has a lot on one's plate. One does one's best. One eats one's words. But one does not (not not not not) CLEAN / ONE'S CLOCK. That you would mean you clean your own clock. But that's not how it works. You clean HIS clock, or THEIR clock—you do it To Someone Else. The idea that I'm supposed to read "one" as "an opponent"—as the "the other guy," not the "cleaner" themselves— ... it just doesn't work. Too awkward. That kind of kills the theme for me. But it's definitely an original idea, this clock-cleaning pun thing, so I admire that, just as I admire the overall grid shape here—a mirror-symmetry grid with really deep answer-banks on the bottom, where the bulk of the theme material is. Impressive that crammed in there with that theme material are other answers that are equally long, and at least as interesting: OLD FLAME, SEWING BEE, RESCUE DOG, FLAT FEES. These all gave the puzzle some character. And the shape of the grid—with that oddly difficult-to-access lower-center block—was fun to navigate. So I'm really just mad at the ONE'S today. And "mad" is perhaps an exaggeration. But sincerely, I don't think ONE'S works, on a fundamental, basic-sense level.

Flew through this with few hesitations. Absolutely no idea re: ASHRAF. The whole Afghanistan political situation was always way too chaotic for me to even begin to keep track of. I remember Hamid Karzai, but after him, my memory of Afghan leaders is faint. Not surprisingly, ASHRAF is a debut (a Modern debut—it appeared in the grid once, in 1972, clued as [Moslem elite] (??)). I can picture a CENSOR BAR (30A: Alternative to a blur or pixelation), but I didn't really know that that is what it was called, which is what made ACCESSing the lower-center part of the grid a bit of a challenge. Could not enter from the top—even with ONE'S CLOCK in place—so I had to get in from below, via PEGLEGS, which I got easily enough (52A: Pirates' support group?). So when I say that section was "a bit challenging," all I really mean is that my attempt to get into it in a kind of natural flow, from above, was thwarted, and I had to wait and come at it a different way. So not "difficult" to solve so much as "temporarily delayed." Kind of screwed up the SE corner briefly when I opted for "ALAS..." instead of [SIGH] at 53D: [Ah, woe is me!]. And I absolutely blanked on the Marvel supervillain (even with the "U" in place!) and had to wait for several crosses before I remembered it. I really do not care about the MCU at all now. I'm barely aware of the new movies that come out. There's one coming out Friday, apparently. Who cares? Why would you see that when you can see Sinners (again)? 

Other things:

• 1A: Leafy vegetable with a lot of vitamin K (KALE) — they should've worked "aptly" into the clue somehow. Vitamin "K" sounds like something I'd make up if I was trying to market KALE as a health food. Sounds like a marketing gimmick. But apparently it's a real vitamin. My vitamin alphabet runs out at "E." 
• 17D: Apt anagram for "brush" (SHRUB) — "brush" can be shortened form of "brushwood," which is "a thicket of SHRUBs or small trees."

• 47A: Obama-era policy whose last three letters spell a different Obama-era law (DACA) — Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (immigration policy). ACA is, of course, Obamacare (i.e., the Affordable Care Act).
• 7D: Wonderland interloper (ALICE) — because Wonderland is filled with strange creatures, I did a double-take on "interloper," like it was some kind of beast I couldn't quite remember... a tove or a Jabberwock or a Bandersnatch or some nonsense. Like a jackalope, maybe. But it's just ALICE. And "interloper" is just someone who intrudes.

One last, tiny thing—I don't understand why the cross-references are written out differently every time for the theme answers: the clue for THE TIME IS RIPE has "6-Down 32-Down"; for the FACE WASH clue, a slash is added ("6-Down/32-Down"), and then for the HAND SOAP clue, the cross-reference gets condensed down to "6-/32-Down." Tiny differences in each iteration, whyyyyyyy? It's bizarre. Seems intentional, and yet the differences are meaningless, so actually it just seems sloppy. If they are inconsistent for a reason,  I can't see it, and if they aren't inconsistent for a reason, why did no proofreader say "hey, uh ... why are these all different? Shouldn't we standardize them?"

See you next time.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on BlueSky and Facebook]