Shamash holder / THU 6-4-26 / Italian liquor distilled from winemaking leftovers / Freudian censor / Altered excerpts of a film posted to social media, say / Broad-shouldered Titan / Faux flattery / Sons of ___, exemplars of biblical wickedness / Middlemen in illicit transactions / Historic Bulgarian ruler / Beer brand with the slogan "La Playa Awaits" / Site of an 1899-1909 gold rush

Constructor: Joe Deeney

Relative difficulty: Easy

THEME: BIG BOX STORE (61A: Large retail establishment ... and a hint to four squares in this puzzle) — big (slightly oversized) "boxes" hold the names of "stores" (I guess all the "stores" are themselves examples of "BIG BOX STOREs," though I've never thought of ALDI that way...)

Theme answers:

• LOCAL DIVE / VIVALDI (20A: Neighborhood watering hole / 4D: "The Four Seasons" composer)
• SLOWEST / LOW ESTIMATES (11A: Last over the line, say / 12D: Conservative guesses)
• YOGA POSES / MEGAPLEXES (47A: Downward dog and others / 39D: Movie theaters with many screens)
• LIKE A CHARM / STRIKE A POSE (50A: Exactly as desired / 36D: Fashion photographer's direction)

Word of the Day: GRAPPA (45A: Italian liquor distilled from winemaking leftovers) —

Grappa is an Italian alcoholic beverage: a fragrant, grape-based pomace brandy that contains 35 to 60 percent alcohol by volume (70 to 120 US proof). Grappa is a protected name in the European Union.

Grappa is made by distilling the skins, pulp, seeds, and stems (i.e., the pomace) left over from winemaking after pressing the grapes. It was originally made to prevent waste by using these leftovers. A similar drink, known as acquavite d'uva, is made by distilling whole must. The original date grappa was created cannot be determined, but was likely first made pre-1300s as distillation arrived in Italy during the Middle Ages.

In Italy, grappa is primarily served as a digestivo or after-dinner drink. Its main purpose is to aid in the digestion of heavy meals. Grappa may also be added to espresso coffee to create a caffè corretto, meaning "corrected" coffee. Another variation of this is the ammazzacaffè: the espresso is drunk first, followed by a few ounces of grappa served in its own glass. In Veneto, there is resentin: after finishing a cup of espresso with sugar, a few drops of grappa are poured into the nearly empty cup, swirled and drunk down in one sip. (wikipedia)

• • •

Very short write-up today, as my router just ... died yesterday. Dead. Done. Kaput. So while I'm waiting for the new one to arrive, I'm using a Personal Hotspot on my phone for connectivity, and while it seems to be working, everything feels insanely unstable and I just want to get something posted quickly before Things Fall Apart again. Can't print the puzzle out because my stupid printers can't seem to "find" the network I'm on. Bah. This is what happens when you set things up in a way you understand, a way that works for you, and then well over a decade goes by and you forget how any of it is held together and one little thing goes wrong and ... chaos. Already dreading the new router set-up. Annnnnyway, puzzle! Quickly! 

Uh ... sure. Those are big boxes, alright. And there are stores inside them. ALDI is just a supermarket to me, so I wouldn’t have put it in the BIG BOX STORE category, but it's a chain, and the stores are ... box-shaped, I guess, so shrug, why not? I think of GAP as more of a mall store than a BIG BOX STORE, but whatever. I can be a little flexible on this matter (as it's something I don't think about or care about at all). Because the rebus boxes are flagged today (by virtue of their bigness), the rebus was especially easy to pick up. There may as well have been arrows and flashing lights pointing at the relevant squares saying "Enter Rebus Here!" The first rebus square would've been a cinch without the big square telling us it's a rebus—I mean, ["The Four Seasons" composer]? Everyone's gonna know that's VIVALDI, see it doesn't fit, and go, "well, rebus square, I guess." But you can't very well have those rebus squares be normal sized, or your whole theme premise disappears. So extreme easiness is the price we pay for this concept. Oh well. It wasn't unfun. I like the rebus answers, for the most part, esp. LOCAL DIVE and YOGA POSES / MEGAPLEXES and LIKE A CHARM / STRIKE A POSE. You've also got some like eight 7+-letter non-theme answers livening up the grid. Pretty remedial rebus with an odd-man-out "box store," but still a pretty good time.

I had exactly one problem area, and it was (briefly) a doozy. I just stared at S-T / -TIMATES and ... nothing. The only -TIMATES I could think of were "guesstimates" and "estimates" and neither of those yielded a box store (and neither worked with the cross). I wanted 11A: Last over the line, say to be LAST and 12D: Conservative guesses to be GUESSTIMATES, but as you can see both "Last" and "Guess" are in their respective clues, *and* they don't work both directions, so ... total failure. Total stoppage. Squinting. Head-tilting. Staring. Resigning myself to failure ... and then I start mulling 12D: Conservative guesses ... "'conservative' ... so, they're probably on the lo-" And that was that. Low. LOWES! SLOWEST / LOW ESTIMATES. The Down was not one word but two! Phew. That was a harrowing few seconds (5? 10? 15 seconds? Felt like forever). The rest of the puzzle basically filled itself in. Don't know what a "Shamash" is but managed to get MENORAH off just the "ME-" anyway (a MENORAH "holds" candles, and "Shamash" sounds Hebrew so ... ta da!) (the "Shamash" is the candle used to light the other eight candles of a MENORAH). Oh, and I needed a few crosses to get FAN EDITS. No good reason I didn't get that right away, I just didn't (5D: Altered excerpts of a film posted to social media, say). 

Bullets:

• 1A: In "The Tempest," when Miranda says "O brave new world, That has such people in't!" (ACT V) — one of the first Shakespeare plays I ever read, along with Richard II (such a weird play for high schoolers to read, but we read whatever was going to be on at the Ashland (OR) Shakespeare Festival that year (we took a week-long trip there in both my junior and senior years), and The Tempest and RII were what was playing in '86 and '87, apparently)). The whole "Brave new world" speech comes late in the play, when Miranda sees actual people (besides her father Prospero and Caliban) for the first time. I don't know I could've told you with certainty it was ACT V, but I know it wasn't ACT I, and no other Acts fit, so ... success!
• 19A: "American ___" (PIE) — the preceding Across clue is 17A: Forbidden idol so my brain was like "American IDOL!? But they just used 'idol' in the cl- ... ah, I see, not IDOL. Doesn't fit."
• 34A: Bob who narrated "How I Met Your Mother" (SAGET) — perennial "what is Bob Sag-t's second vowel" problem.
• 35A: Historic Bulgarian ruler (TSAR) — "Bulgarian"!? What do I know about Bulgaria (almost zero). I guess not using "Russian" was a way to try to slow the solver down. Didn't work.
• 38A: Faux flattery (SMARM) — people say they hate the word "moist" but I think SMARM might beat "moist" on my ickword list. Somehow "smarmy" doesn't rankle, but SMARM, ew, get it off me!
• 41A: Broad-shouldered Titan (ATLAS) — me: "... all of them? Oh, right, it's the 'carries the world on his back' guy. Makes sense."

• 6D: Sons of ___, exemplars of biblical wickedness (ELI) — got this off the "I" but only because ELI is a biblical name I know. Wait, is ARI biblical? Of course it is. Means "lion." So I guessed right on the three-letter "I"-ending biblical man's name. If there's another example of such a name, do not tell me, this part of my brain is full up.

Not as short a write-up as I imagined. I'll try harder (less hard?) tomorrow. See you next time.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld 

PS someone in the comments mentioned the POSE dupe (STRIKE A POSE, YOGA POSES) and yes that is pretty bad. Can’t believe I missed it.

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