Amazon affiliate on TV / SAT 3-21-26 / Not accepting, perhaps / Accepted defeat, in modern parlance / Things that are tough on the outside and doughy on the inside? / Creatures that attack Isengard, in fantasy / Sculptor Jeff known for his steel balloon animals / Cavalry member in Russia, historically / Parts of a story structure? / Titular Dr. Seuss character

Constructor: Boaz Moser

Relative difficulty: Easy

THEME: none 

Word of the Day: Nowell Codex / Cotton MS Vitellius A XV (2D: Classic poem whose sole surviving manuscript is kept in the British Library = BEOWULF) —

The Nowell Codex is the second of two manuscripts comprising the bound volume Cotton MS Vitellius A XV, one of the four major Old English poetic manuscripts. It is most famous as the manuscript containing the unique copy of the epic poem Beowulf. In addition to this, it contains first a fragment of The Life of Saint Christopher, then the more complete texts Wonders of the East and Letter of Alexander to Aristotle, and, after Beowulf, a poetic translation of Judith. Due to the fame of Beowulf, the Nowell Codex is also sometimes known simply as the Beowulf manuscript. The manuscript is located within the British Library with the rest of the Cotton collection. // The current codex is a composite of at least two manuscripts. The main division is into two totally distinct books which were apparently not bound together until the 17th century. The first of these, originally owned by Southwick Priory in Hampshire, dates from the 12th century and contains four works of prose. // It is the second, older manuscript that is more famous. This second manuscript is known as the Nowell Codex, after the antiquarian Laurence Nowell, whose name is inscribed on its first page; he was apparently its owner in the mid-16th century. At some point it was combined with the first codex. It was then acquired by Sir Robert Cotton. In his library, it was placed on the first shelf (A) as the 15th manuscript (XV) of the bookcase that had a bust of the Emperor Vitellius, giving the collection its name. The Nowell Codex is generally dated around the turn of the first millennium. Recent editions have specified a probable date in the decade after 1000.

• • •

Another easy one today. No particularly exciting elements, but it's sturdy, ungunky, fine. Strangely, I think the NE corner is my favorite part—I say "strangely" because corners in a puzzle like this can seem like an afterthought, since all the showy stuff is happening in the middle. The answers themselves aren't particularly showy through that middle section, but the large amount of white space is. This is a grid that's built to showcase the stacks of long answers running through the center. The corners take whatever shape they take and you fill them best you can, but those corners aren't (typically) the stars. Today, though, the central answers seemed admirably smooth, but not very grabby. I also don't know what FREE RUNNING is. I guess if you're doing it, it's probably exciting, but as a two-word phrase, seems kind of meh. PARKOUR—a great-looking answer. FREE RUNNING? Meh. The middle is also security-obsessed in a way that I find unappealing (ARMORED CARS, SECURITY LEAK). And INTERNET TROLL, while a perfectly valid phrase, feels redundant (unless you are specifically trying to differentiate it from the kind that lives under a bridge, you'd just say "troll"). Again, everything through that middle seems acceptable, and I do love SWEET AND SOUR ... anything, really ... but there's just something more exciting about the NE corner. The dramatic declaration of "I WANT OUT!" The cliffhanger of "NEXT TIME..." And the detectives (SLEUTHS) lurking in the margins, surveilling their targets from the booth of a diner, drinking coffee and eating STEAKS (they're called "steak-outs" for a reason!). True, that corner does have a certain TOILET REEK, but that's part of the charm. Seriously, though, "I WANT OUT!" over "NEXT TIME..." is particularly nice. 

As for difficulty ... no. There wasn't any. I thought there might be when I couldn't get the Acrosses in the NW corner at first, but then I started in on the short Downs (ASK / MEET / STRAY) and then TASTE was obvious, and then bam, there's my old friend YEETS, and now we got something:

From here I can work those NW Acrosses from the back end. I was already thinking of "story" as a building part, so I-BEAMS didn't take too long (if you've seen a lot of crosswords, you've seen a lot of I-BEAMS). Wanted "Ready" to precede "SET," but "GET SET" was my next guess. I had a brief moment of wondering why "ETC ETC ETC" wouldn't fit at 3D: "And so forth" ... but then realized that the answer was actually the fully written out ET CETERA. From there, the solve took a fairly predictable path, as I followed the path of least resistance and flowed from the NW corner right through the center of the grid to the SE corner and then looped back up again, leaving only the much more cut-off NE and SW corners.

From there, it looked like the SW corner was going to be the harder one (tougher to get into a corner via the back ends of answers than the front ends), so I went there, expecting trouble, but instead I got TOOK THE "L" immediately (55A: Accepted defeat, in modern parlance). Like YEETS, it is slangy, and like YEETS, yes, you have seen it before. Well, not in the past tense—this is actually a debut—but there have been four TAKE THE "L"s since 2020—and I think I've posted this song every time:

Once TOOK THE "L" was in, the corner wasn't much trouble. IN DENIAL was slightly hard to parse (59A: Not accepting, perhaps), and I would've died on HIRONO without the crosses (40D: Hawaii senator Mazie), but the crosses were clear, so ... done. Finished up in the NE corner, which as I've said is my favorite part of the puzzle, so that was nice. Nice to end on a high note. All in all, clean, smooth, decent. Not much to excite or enrage, but ... it'll do.

[53D: Amazon affiliate on TV]
[She is affiliated with the Amazons]

Bullets:

• 27A: It's not nice to walk in this (SLEET) — I think I was thrown by the lack of wordplay in this clue. "Nice"? I was like "why that word? Is there some idiom being played on here?" But no. It's just ... unpleasant to walk in sleet. I would've said difficult, if not (at times) impossible. I remember trying to get home from school once in Ann Arbor and the streets and sidewalks were pure ice and my route was *slightly* uphill and ... things got comical. It was OK when I could just walk on people's lawns, but crossing streets ... even if I managed to stay upright, I sort of just ... slid ... back from where I came. It's possible I ended up (deliberately) on my hands and knees at some point. You gotta do what you gotta do.
• 31A: Brady bunch? : Abbr. (TDS) — ugh, a Tom Brady football clue. This was my least favorite thing about the NE. As "?" clues go, I liked the ARMORED CARS clue a lot better (35A: Things that are tough on the outside and doughy on the inside?) ('cause ARMORED CARS contain money, i.e. "dough").
• 43A: Sculptor Jeff known for his steel balloon animals (KOONS) — big weird puffy pink things, that's what I think when I think of KOONS. Whimsical. Vivid. Fun.

• 60A: Join arms? (ENLIST) — another "?" clue I didn't love. It just doesn't quite work, wordplay-wise. You join the army ... where you might carry arms ... I dunno. The phrasing just misses the mark. Also, still not really happy to see war-related answers right now (during "Operation: Furious Incompetence"), esp. when the puzzle tries to make it light-hearted.
• 25D: Valuable commodity in "Dune" (SPICE) — there's another Dune movie coming out later this year. Also, a Dune font generator has apparently been released for general use and as a result my social media feed has been overrun with textual ridiculousness. For example:

That's all. See you next time.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on BlueSky and Facebook and Letterboxd]
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Layer that a hovercraft floats on / TUE 6-3-25 / Cheery goodbyes / Where most songs use their titular lyrics / Disappointing awards season outcome for a critically successful movie / Pixar film that revived the song "Life is a Highway" / Site of an apocalyptic final battle in the Bible / Modern filmmaking tech, for short / Grp. sending radio signals into space

Constructor: Boaz Moser

Relative difficulty: Medium (normal Tues.)

THEME: LIGHT SLEEPER (50A: Easily awakened individual ... whose bed may feature a 20-, 31- and 41-Across?) — familiar phrases that contain parts of a bed ... and also ... things that are "light"? (I think?):

Theme answers:

• SHEET OF PAPER (20A: Input for a fax machine)
• AIR CUSHION (31A: Layer that a hovercraft floats on)
• CLOUD COVER (41A: Measure of how much sky is visible)

Word of the Day: CECIL B. DeMille (48D: "The Ten Commandments" director ___ B. DeMille) —

Cecil Blount DeMille (/ˈsɛsəl dəˈmɪl/; August 12, 1881 – January 21, 1959) was an American filmmaker and actor. Between 1914 and 1958, he made 70 features, both silent and sound films. He is acknowledged as a founding father of American cinema and the most commercially successful producer-director in film history, with many films dominating the box office three or four at a time. His films were distinguished by their epic scale and by his cinematic showmanship. His silent films included social dramas, comedies, Westerns, farces, morality plays, and historical pageants. He was an active Freemason and member of Prince of Orange Lodge #16 in New York City. [...] DeMille's first film, The Squaw Man (1914), was the first full-length feature film shot in Hollywood. Its interracial love story was commercially successful, and the film marked Hollywood as the new home of the U.S. film industry. It had previously been based in New York and New Jersey. Based on continued film successes, DeMille founded Famous Players Lasky which was later reverse merged into Paramount Pictures with Lasky and Adolph Zukor. His first biblical epic, The Ten Commandments (1923), was both a critical and commercial success; it held the Paramount revenue record for 25 years. // DeMille directed The King of Kings (1927), a biography of Jesus, which gained approval for its sensitivity and reached more than 800 million viewers. The Sign of the Cross (1932) is said to be the first sound film to integrate all aspects of cinematic technique. Cleopatra (1934) was his first film to be nominated for the Academy Award for Best Picture. // After more than 30 years in film production, DeMille reached a pinnacle in his career with Samson and Delilah (1949), a biblical epic that became the highest-grossing film of 1950. Along with biblical and historical narratives, he also directed films oriented toward "neo-naturalism", which tried to portray the laws of man fighting the forces of nature. 

• • •

I confess I don't really understand how this theme works. Specifically, I don't get what the "light" part of the revealer (LIGHT SLEEPER) is supposed to signify. My best guess is that the additional (non-bed) words in the theme answers are things that are famously "light." I know the phrases "light as AIR" and "light as a CLOUD," but PAPER? "Light as paper?" Is PAPER known for its "light"-ness. Maybe in relation to ROCK or SCISSORS, but ... in general? "Thin"-ness, yes. Something can be "PAPER thin." But SHEET OF PAPER just seems like a bizarre outlier to me ... and that's assuming I'm right about what the theme is even supposed to be, which I'm not entirely sure of. SHEET OF PAPER is also an outlier in terms of its structure (bed part comes first instead of last), but that bothers me less than the fact that PAPER just doesn't seem to work (or that the theme itself isn't crystal clear). The themers were just about the only thing I struggled with in this puzzle. Don't you load a bunch of paper at once into a fax machine? Or do you really just put in one sheet at a time? And AIR CUSHION? I guess I don't really know what that means at all, or what a "hovercraft" ... is. Looks like it's mostly watercraft: "Hovercraft use blowers to produce a large volume of air below the hull, or air cushion, that is slightly above atmospheric pressure. The pressure difference between the higher-pressure air below the hull and lower pressure ambient air above it produces lift, which causes the hull to float above the running surface. For stability reasons, the air is typically blown through slots or holes around the outside of a disk- or oval-shaped platform, giving most hovercraft a characteristic rounded-rectangle shape." "Hovercraft" are also known as "AIR CUSHION vehicles" (or ACVs), so the clue certainly fits. I just have no familiarity with that particular ... vehicle. "Hovercraft" sounds fictional to me—like a near-future sci-fi vehicle of some kind. Homer knows what I'm talking about ... 

Outside the theme, the puzzle played pretty typically for a Tuesday. The worst mistake I made came at 28D: Zorro, Superman or Indiana Jones, where I had A-TI- to start with. My brain just inferred an ANTI- beginning and so I wrote in ANTIHEROES ... even as I thought to myself "Really? Superman? Seems off." I also could not understand what the clue on CHORUS was trying to do (18D: Where most songs use their titular lyrics). What does it mean for a song to "use" lyrics, I wondered. It's not like a songwriter sits around with a pile of lyrics and thinks "hmm, where should I put these lyrics, which are also the title of the song?" [Where a song's titular lyrics are frequently found]?? [Part of song that often contains titular lyrics]?? Something about "use" just made the clue incomprehensible to me, in the moment. I also didn't like the clue on OSCAR SNUB (55A: Disappointing awards season outcome for a critically successful movie). The outcome of the season would not be a single SNUB. In fact, even the outcome of the Oscars alone wouldn't be a single SNUB, if we're talking about an entire film. An OSCAR SNUB relates to a single category. It's a "snub" to be omitted from one of those categories. A film might get shut out entirely, but that would involve multiple snubs. Precise wording on clues is important, and those clues both felt at least slightly tin-eared. 

Other mistakes? Yes, minor ones. MULES before ASSES (12D: Stubborn animals).ORC before ELF (38A: Pointy-eared inhabitant of Middle-earth). ORCs have pointy ears, don't they? Yeah, pretty pointy, I'd say:

My brain glitched at 41D: Pixar film that revived the song "Life is a Highway" (CARS). I had the "C" in place, took one look at the first words of the clue, went into my big bag of animated movies one might find in crosswords, and came out with ... COCO. That's got music in it, right? Probably not "Life is a Highway," though. Man, why anyone would want to "revive" that song is beyond me. It was so hard to kill the first time! (if you were alive in the early '90s, you know).

What else?

Bullets:

• 9A: Cheery goodbyes (TATAS) — we had TADAS the other day and I just let it slide, but I can't be so generous every time. Like TADA, TATA should never be pluralized. Tear that corner out and start over.
• 10D: Site of an apocalyptic final battle in the Bible (ARMAGEDDON) — I definitely forgot this. I only know ARMAGEDDON as a generic term for "a world-ending conflict," or as a mildly regrettable Ben Affleck vehicle.

["I was surprised when I heard Criterion was doing ARMAGEDDON..."]

• 32D: "___ if I know!" ("HELL") — Really wanted "DAMNED" so went with "DAMN" ... might've been confusing the clue phrase with "DAMNED if I do, DAMNED if I don't," but then again, maybe not. 

[they sound pretty good for a hovercraft]

See you next time.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

P.S. Happy 80th anniversary to the best HITLER clue. On June 3, 1945, the NYTXW clued HITLER as [Man with glowing future.]. When I first saw the clue, I thought it was predicting that the U.S. would nuke Germany, but no, better: it was (I think) predicting that HITLER, who had died just two months earlier, would spend the rest of eternity in hell. Amazing. I think we're probably better off without HITLER in the grid (last seen Oct. 12, 1984), but if the NYTXW wants to go hard against tyrants, I'm not gonna stand in their way.

[Follow Rex Parker on BlueSky and Facebook]

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Attire often used in filming C.G.I. scenes, informally / FRI 3-21-25 / Target of the 1890 Sherman Act / Bad thing to blow / Handful on the farm / Features of the sci-fi planet Arrakis / Some digital assistants, informally / How Mario introduces himself in video games / Country represented by the Black Star of Africa

Constructor: Boaz Moser and Jacob Reed

Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium

THEME: none 

Word of the Day: Sherman Act (8D: Target of the 1890 Sherman Act) —

The Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890 (26 Stat. 209, 15 U.S.C. §§ 1–7) is a United States antitrust law which prescribes the rule of free competition among those engaged in commerce and consequently prohibits unfair monopolies. It was passed by Congress and is named for Senator John Sherman, its principal author.

The Sherman Act broadly prohibits 1) anticompetitive agreements and 2) unilateral conduct that monopolizes or attempts to monopolize the relevant market. The Act authorizes the Department of Justice to bring suits to enjoin (i.e. prohibit) conduct violating the Act, and additionally authorizes private parties injured by conduct violating the Act to bring suits for treble damages (i.e. three times as much money in damages as the violation cost them). Over time, the federal courts have developed a body of law under the Sherman Act making certain types of anticompetitive conduct per se illegal, and subjecting other types of conduct to case-by-case analysis regarding whether the conduct unreasonably restrains trade.

The law attempts to prevent the artificial raising of prices by restriction of trade or supply. "Innocent monopoly", or monopoly achieved solely by merit, is legal, but acts by a monopolist to artificially preserve that status, or nefarious dealings to create a monopoly, are not. The purpose of the Sherman Act is not to protect competitors from harm from legitimately successful businesses, nor to prevent businesses from gaining honest profits from consumers, but rather to preserve a competitive marketplace to protect consumers from abuses. (wikipedia)

• • •

I know the phrase "dirt cheap." CHEAP AS DIRT, not so much (33A: For a song). Why would you say this when the terser option is Right There? Seems wordy and sounds slightly archaic. Then there's DAT and DOIN', partial slang phrases that together seem just a little TOO CUTE (though I did appreciate the Friends reference in the DOIN' clue—Joey always was the most underrated Friend). As for "IT'S A ME...," again, it's just a partial phrase—I've seen the full phrase in the NYTXW before, once as an answer, and another time as one of the greatest theme clues ever conceived—in a puzzle with the theme HOLLYWOOD SHUFFLE, where actors were clued via anagrams, ["It's-a-me, Mario!"] was used as the clue for ... MARISA TOMEI. Truly, one of the greatest anagram finds in anagram history, congrats to Erik Agard on that one (not many clues that stick in my mind years later). So today's partial "IT'S A ME..." didn't really have the novelty impact that maybe it had on you. I normally really enjoy colloquial stuff in the puzzle, but today, that stuff was slight, partial, kinda clunky in my ear. And Pokémon is also of no interest to me (also: Mario and Pokémon in the same puzzle? Give it a rest), but at least GOTTA CATCH 'EM ALL was easy, I guess. I loved MEDIA DARLINGS, which is located where it belongs: in a marquee position, dead center (14D: People always getting favorable news coverage). ARTISTIC LICENSE isn't exactly exciting, but it's perfectly solid. The rest ... I wouldn't say it SPARKLES, but it does alright. Difficulty could've been amped up slightly today, but overall, I thought the puzzle was fine.

There were precisely two sticking points for me today. The first, as is typical, came early, in the NW corner, before I'd gotten any real traction. I guessed (correctly) that the quadruple-double was an example of a RARITY (1A: Basketball's quadruple double, e.g.), and then was pleased as punch (SLANG!) to "confirm" the "R" with ... RURAL ... and then "confirm" the "I" with ... ICED. Also confirmed (no scare quotes) THOR and YAP, but the RURAL ICED damage was done. Took a bit of work to get going again after that. ETSY's "Y" was the thing that helped me start to dig out. I knew a [Corsair] was a ship, but RAIDER was not on my ship list (!), so yeah, there was some flailing up there, early on. After that, I whooshed down the west side, only to hit another bank of short Downs that stymied me for a second. I had BIG and guessed LEAD at 29A: Bad thing to blow, but could not confirm any of LEAD at first. Clue on ALES is very tough (in that it seems to point you to mountains, not beer: I almost wrote in ALPS) (26D: Sierra Nevadas, e.g.). As for TEAT, I try to think of that word as little as possible, so my first stab at 27D: Handful on the farm was REIN. Then there's FLAP, which puts us back into "slang I don't use" (23D: To-do), so ... yeah, confirmation of the LEAD part of BIG LEAD was not forthcoming. But, as with my mistakes in the NW, the trouble here was minor. I got out of it without too much fuss, and never struggled again for the rest of the solve.

There's one truly original answer today, and that's MOCAP SUIT (MOCAP stands for "motion capture") (43A: Attire often used in filming C.G.I. scenes, informally). The first time I looked at that clue, I had many letters in place, but still just stared at the answer like "how do those letters make ... anything?" I think I had all of MOCAP-from crosses before my brain remembered the term I was looking for. Even if you've never heard the term, you've probably seen the suits before. I feel like they've been used in ads—I think of them as being used for CGI not just in movies, but in video games as well, particularly sports video games, when they want to get an accurate simulation of bodies in motion. Somebody who knows what they're talking about can explain better than I, but the point is that after I got MOCAP-, I could instantly see (in my mind's eye) the SUIT in question—a bodysuit with little globes all over it, if I recall correctly ... yup, here we go:

Bullets:

• 9D: Some digital assistants, informally (AIS) — no amount of wishing or praying or modernizing the clue is gonna make AIS good fill. In fact, by making it stand for "Artificial Intelligence"s, you've somehow made bad fill worse. No one wants that **** in their grids. It's awful and dehumanizing, pretending to be human by feeding off the work of actual humans. It's poisoning our information ecosystem (already pretty sickly). When A.I. is used in search engines, it absolutely positively measurably Does Not Work. So in puzzles, for me, just like TESLAS, "A.I." is a buzzkiller. And plural like this!? God no. You may as well go back to Sue Grafton's "___ for Alibi" if you absolutely positively have to stick AIS in your grid. (I have other ideas about where you can stick AIS, but let's just move on)
• 23A: It's a short walk from home (FIRST BASE) — hurray for the two baseball clues today—three if you count BIG LEAD. I was up at 6am Tuesday and Wednesday to watch the Japan Series between the Dodgers and Cubs—the first real games of the season. Dodgers took 'em both. Ohtani (the biggest star Japan has) hit a home run, because that's just what he does. Good times. Now I gotta wait an eternal (checks calendar) six more days for the real (stateside) Opening Day. Go Tigers.

• 37A: Show again, as a historical event (REENACT) — "show"? "Perform," maybe, but "show" seems weird.
• 38D: Philippics (TIRADES) — a great word ("Philippics"), as somewhat arcane words go. 

A philippic (/fɪˈlɪpɪk/) is a fiery, damning speech, or tirade, delivered to condemn a particular political actor. The term is most famously associated with three noted orators of the ancient world: Demosthenes of ancient Athens, Cato the Elder and Cicero of ancient Rome. The term itself is derived from Demosthenes's speeches in 351 BC denouncing the imperialist ambitions of Philip of Macedon, which later came to be known as The Philippics. (wikipedia)

• 42D: Features of the sci-fi planet Arrakis (DUNES) — yesterday, one of my students talked about loving the book Dune, and he said that there were lots of other Dune books besides Dune, but they were written by Herbert's son and not really worth reading. I said, "Wait, there's a Dune sequel? What's it called? ... DUNES?" Apparently there's a whole Dune universe (or, as I call it, Dune-iverse). The things your students teach you...

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on BlueSky and Facebook]

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Comic Gillis / FRI 9-13-24 / Boon for grizzly bears / Old ___ country standard performed by Johnny Cash and Elvis Presley / Numbers 1 through 36 are found in it / Extraterrestrial menace in 5-Down / Eyed food, informally / Sch. in Ypsilanti whose mascot is an eagle, not another large bird

Constructor: Boaz Moser

Relative difficulty: Medium-Challenging

THEME: none 

Word of the Day: XENOMORPH (36A: Extraterrestrial menace in 5-Down) —

The xenomorph (also known as a Xenomorph XX121, Internecivus raptus, or simply the alien or the creature) is a fictional endoparasitoid extraterrestrial species that serves as the titular main antagonist of the Alien and Alien vs. Predator franchises. [...] The xenomorph's design is credited to Swiss surrealist and artist H. R. Giger, originating in a lithograph titled Necronom IV and refined for the series's first film, Alien. The practical effects for the xenomorph's head were designed and constructed by Italian special effects designer Carlo Rambaldi. Species design and life cycle have been extensively augmented, sometimes inconsistently, throughout each film // Unlike many other extraterrestrial races in film and television science fiction (such as the Daleks and Cybermen in Doctor Who, or the Klingons and Borg in Star Trek), the xenomorphs are not sapient toolmakers — they lack a technological civilization of any kind, and are instead primal, predatory creatures with no higher goal than the preservation and propagation of their own species by any means necessary, up to and including the elimination of other lifeforms that may pose a threat to their existence. Like wasps or termites, xenomorphs are eusocial, with a single fertile queen breeding a caste of warriors, workers, or other specialist strains. The xenomorphs' biological life cycle involves traumatic implantation of endoparasitoid larvae inside living hosts; these "chestburster" larvae erupt from the host's body after a short incubation period, mature into adulthood within hours, and seek out more hosts for implantation.

• • •

I have awakened / awoken with an absolutely terrible headache neckache jawache, lord knows why, but lord, thy vassal doth not deserve this, truly. Anyway, I'm quite certain this has colored my solving experience, and maybe made the puzzle seem tougher than it was. All three of the short Acrosses in the NW were totally inscrutable to me, which made starting the puzzle ... difficult. Short crosses are supposed to come through for me, and those ... didn't. Even (finally) guessing ACME at 1D: Summit didn't help much. No idea what "jackknives" are or what they "cut," would never (ever) say "CRAP out" (I had CONK), and as for a cob ... I guess that's a male swan (?) ... yes, my crossword memory is telling me that's correct ... but I couldn't get off corn, or ... I wanna say "salad," but I know that's the two-B "cobb." Since I had CONK (not CRAP, ugh), the "bit of foam" in 13D: Bit of foam, perhaps (PEANUT) remained a mystery, even though I knew immediately that it was *packing* foam. I wanted KERNEL, gah. Abandoning this section and moving one over gave me ALIEN and ALAMO and LAX and IMF and (after a few beats) VALID, but "DO-" as a 8D: Enthusiastic assent??? No idea. "D'OH!? That's not an assent," I correctly reasoned. Oof. So just getting the ball rolling today was ... well, I got the ball rolling the way Sisyphus got the ball rolling, basically. Rough. 

After that, things settled into normalish Friday territory, but I was still thrown off repeatedly by a cluing style or voice, and a cultural frame of reference, that I just didn't connect with. I had the SH- at 23D: Improve, as an argument, and was certain it was SHORE UP ... only to find out it was SHARPEN. Had the -MORPH part of the Alien answer but absolutely no idea what the first part should be. Eventually reasoned XENO- from my knowledge of what that prefix means (namely, "alien"), and assumed (then) that XENOMORPH was a generic term for "alien life form" ... only to find out (Word of the Day!) that it's a franchise-specific life form found exclusively in Alien properties. Huh. Not a franchise I've spent a lot of time with, so ... shrug. No idea what this alleged country "standard" is ("Old SHEP"), and no idea who SHANE Gillis is, so that cross was ... fun! (Though absolutely not a Natick—"S" is the only good guess there, though it would've been hilarious (to me and my headache) if it had been "Old WHEP" and WHANE Gillis, which sounds like a comedy duo to rival Wayland Flowers and Madame.

I don't know what you call this particular clue style: 49D: A good way to feel / 34A: Bad thing to be out of (or why one of those clues starts with an indefinite article and the other doesn't), but it's not my favorite. It could be bad to be out of ... TIME, LUCK, YOUR MIND, TOILET PAPER ... sigh. That SEEN / DEN crossing was oddly hard for me, as I thought the ottoman itself had a setting (low?) or else we were dealing with actual historical Ottomans, and thus some location in the Middle East (or its time zone?). Do homes still have DENs? It's such a funny word. It's just a room with a couch and a TV, possibly a fireplace? What any of that has to do with bears, I have no idea. Speaking of bears, I liked SALMON RUN, as well as "DON'T ANSWER THAT" and "CITATION NEEDED," though those are the only answers that rise to the zingy standards I have for marquee answers on a Friday. SIX FIGURES and ACTION POSE aren't bad, or at least they seem original, but SIX FIGURES is kind of off-putting (innocent enough, but my brain keeps hearing it in the voice of a certain kind of guy who likes to talk about what he earns and what other people earn ... he's not a pleasant guy), and ACTION POSE ... not sure why I'm neutral on that one. I think it's a standard enough term from drawing and comics. A static rendering of a body in movement. I guess one could pose *as if* one were performing an action, that might count too. I dunno ... answer's fine, just not exciting the way the more colloquial stuff, and the grizzly bear stuff, was.

Bullets:

• 9D: Account of a wild night out? (TAB) — if you have a wild night out of drinking, then you might end up with a sizable bar TAB (an actual, financial "account" of your drinking)
• 48A: Sources of high-quality wool (ALPACAS) — read this as "high-quality wood" and was briefly flummoxed. "AL...DERS? AL...ABAMA?"
• 9D: Numbers 1 through 36 are found in it (TORAH) — lol no idea. Baffled. Completely got me. Even when I got it, I didn't get it. Figured that my not being Jewish was the problem here, but ... no. No specialized knowledge required, really. There are 36 chapters in (the Book of) Numbers, which is one of the first five books of the Bible, i.e. the TORAH.

[Warning: aggressively sentimental dog death]

• 33A: Sch. in Ypsilanti whose mascot is an eagle, not another large bird (EMU) — Eastern Michigan University, right down the street from where I went to grad school (Go Blue). YPSI has been in the puzzle just once, but I would welcome it back with open arms. 
• 45D: Eyed food, informally (TATER) — read this as "Eye food," which I assumed was something like "eye candy" (!??), and thought "do we call hot people TATERs now? What TikTok trend did I miss this time!?" Did I mention I woke up with a headache? Ugh. 

Gonna go eye some (non-potato) food now. Actually, first coffee, then sit in "DEN" do Wordle, later food. Good day.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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