Fictional company famous for its duds / FRI 9-25-26 / Rapper and actor Smith / Ptolemaic royal, familiarly / Olympic slalom equipment / Poke alternative / Spanish sparkling wine / Stew on it! / Second Freudian stage

Constructor: Rafael Musa

Relative difficulty: Challenging

THEME: none 

Word of the Day: Alek WEK (30A: Supermodel Alek) —

Alek Wek (born 16 April 1977) is a South Sudanese–British model and designer who began her fashion career at the age of 18 in 1995. She has been hailed for her influence on the perception of beauty in the fashion industry. She is from the Dinka ethnic group in South Sudan, but fled to Britain in 1991 to escape the civil war in Sudan. In 2015, she was listed as one of BBC's 100 Women. (wikipedia)

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I smiled when I opened the puzzle and saw that Rafa made it. So nice to get a puzzle from one of my regular guest writers on any day, but especially today: the 20th anniversary of the blog [cue the balloons ... champagne corks popping ... OK, that's enough]. I figured I would breeze through it the way I have breezed through most puzzles of late (the difficulty of all puzzles having substantially dropped over the last 20 years), but hoo boy, nope, no, this one threw me around the room. The NW corner of my puzzle print-out is entirely covered in green ink, which is a good indication of how completely lost I was up there. The only thing I managed to squeeze out of there at first was AKIN / ENO. I didn't get back to it until the very end, and even then, yikes: getting up into that corner from below just wasn't a cinch. The VOTES part of VOTES YES, not clear (8D: Gives one's approval, in a way). The ORAL part of ORAL HEALTH seemed clear, but I had ORAL as my Freudian stage, and even changing that to ANAL and writing in ORAL didn't get me going up there, so I kept doubting both of them. Then I spelled AIGLETS thusly, so ... that was fun (5D: Certain loopholes = EYELETS). And getting to CUDDLE from [Spoon, e.g.], again, not easy. If you put "slalom" in your clue I will always, 100% of the time imagine skiing. LOL, CANOE (1A: Olympic slalom equipment). I nearly wrote PARKA in there at one point. LOL also at my knowing a *character* from My Brilliant Friend (3D: ___ Sarratore, "My Brilliant Friend" character). Not ODD at all that I could not see ODD at 4D: "How ___" (ODD). The long Acrosses up there ended up being reasonably easy, but only after I got a handful of crosses—which, as you see, took (seemingly) ages. Outside the NW, this played like a regular Friday; inside, however ... that was an ordeal.

I like the zoom and the whoosh on Fridays, and I didn't get that sensation once today, but many of the longer answers were still winners. "I KID YOU NOT" over TINDER DATE is lovely, GAME THE SYSTEM is ... well, not great in real life, but as an answer, mwah, wonderful. "BE RIGHT BACK!," "THAT REMINDS ME...," both strong. ENEMY SPIES felt redundant, somehow. Or, maybe it's that the clue didn't seem to signal the "ENEMY" part very well. SPIES are [Invasive plants?] no matter whose side they’re on. I guess I'm supposed to understand that they're "invasive" to me. Not at all clear while solving. Some of the cluing in other places seemed much more off. You might find stew in a LADLE, but on it??? (20A: Stew on it!). Did not like that. Also, I don't think I'd ever describe a whodunit where the butler did it as BANAL, if only because the butler almost never does it (21A: Like a whodunit in which the butler did it [duh!]). Also, didn't like the "duh" bit, which is misleading. "Duh" = "it's obvious, [dummy]" and I don't equate "obvious" and BANAL; the latter has more to do with being ordinary or commonplace. "Duh" somehow hits the wrong note. I don't see how MEDITATION is any more a [Breathtaking activity?] than, say, anything else someone might do. You have to take breaths to live. You might focus on your breath in meditation, but you're always "taking" breaths, no matter what you're doing. The trick clues worked better in other places—with ORAL HEALTH (15D: Focus for the foul-mouthed?), for instance, or ECONOMISTS (11D: Some experts of interest?), or ACME (16A: Fictional company famous for its duds) (timely!).

Bullets:

• 22A: Device seen on a front desk (BELL) — another huge ??? for me. I just couldn't picture it or parse it. I kept trying to think of what a "front desk" even was, and all I could see was ... telephones? I dunno. The whole idea that you hit a quaint little BELL to get service—couldn't conjure it up. 
• 37A: ___ Minor (ASIA) — klassic kealoa* (URSA v. ASIA). Luckily, today, I had the "S" in place before I saw the clue, so ... no confusion.
• 36D: Ganja (MARYJANE) — you know, marijuana. Pot. Weed. 

• 39A: "Karma is a cat / Purring in my ___ 'cause it loves me" (Taylor Swift lyric) ("LAP") — I would complain about the idea that I'm supposed to know a Taylor Swift lyric (give me the song title, at least), but "LAP" is very inferable here.

[Karma, aka Ida]

• 48A: Rapper and actor Smith (JADEN) — when WILLOW wouldn't fit, I was stuck. She doesn't rap, but hers was the only Smith name I could remember. Forgot her brother's name entirely. Hey ... WILLOW for (dad) Will Smith. JADEN for (mom) Jada Pinkett Smith. I can't believe I only just got that.
• 10D: Sources of some rock (GARAGE BANDS) — true, but ruthlessly vague. The GARAGE part, you have to guess / hack at.
• 60A: The Devil's domain (TAROT) — so ... not HADES, then.

• 50D: Part of a full house (PAIR) — oh, that kind of full house. I was thinking of a packed theater.
• 51D: Ptolemaic royal, familiarly (CLEO) — I honestly thought a "Ptolemaic royal" was going to be the name of some kind of animal. A snake or fish or something. But no, CLEOpatra, part of the Ptolemaic dynasty.
• 52D: Poke alternative ("PSST!") — if your first thought here was raw tuna (as in a "Poke bowl"), you, my friend, were not alone.

Thank you for making me feel less alone for however many of these past twenty years you've been reading. On September 25, 2006, I started yelling into my computer about the puzzle, and it wasn't long before a whole universe of like-minded people materialized out of nowhere. I had no idea there was this kind of community to be found in the world of crossword puzzles. For those first few months, almost no one read me. It would've been so easy to stop after a few posts. I'm glad I didn't.

That's all for today. See you next time, for the start of year 21 ... 

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

*kealoa = a pair of words (normally short, common answers) that can be clued identically and that share at least one letter in common (in the same position). These are answers you can't just fill in quickly because two or more answers are viable, Even With One or More Letters In Place. From the classic [Mauna ___] KEA/LOA conundrum. See also, e.g. [Heaps] => ATON or ALOT, ["Git!"] => "SHOO" or "SCAT," etc.   

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