Food writer Molly / THU 1-15-26 / Idiomatic partner of "lose" / Brief letters? / Oft-quoted advice in Matthew 7:7 / Sol, but not Luna / Shiny little platters / Subject of astrobiology, in brief

Constructor: Wendy L. Brandes and Barbara Lin

Relative difficulty: The Easiest Thursday I've Ever Done (or close to it)

THEME: CONFIRMATION BIAS (62A: Tendency to reinforce one's established beliefs ... or a hint to answering the his puzzle's starred clues) — letters spelling out an affirmative response (or "CONFIRMATION") jut out (inside circled squares) at an angle (or "BIAS") from three theme answers:

Theme answers:

• SEEK AND YE SHALL FIND (18A: *Oft-quoted advice in Matthew 7:7)
• ALL DAY EVERY DAY (28A: *24/7/365)
• FAMILY GAME NIGHT (47A: *Evening spent playing with the kids, say)

Word of the Day: Molly O'NEILL (3D: Food writer Molly) —

Molly O'Neill (9 Oct 1952, Columbus, Ohio - 16 Jun 2019) was an American food writer, cookbook author, and journalist, perhaps best known for her food column in The New York Times Sunday Magazine and Style section throughout the 1990s.

O'Neill was born and grew up in Columbus, Ohio, the only girl in a family with five brothers born to Charles and Virginia O'Neill. In her 2006 memoir, she describes the family's strong interest in baseball. Her father had been a minor league pitcher before working for North American Aviation and later running an excavation business. Her younger brother Paul O'Neill became an outfielder for the Cincinnati Reds and the New York Yankees. (wikipedia)

• • •

[The Upturned Microscope]

Big week for non-standard puzzle dimensions. Fat one on Monday, skinny one on Tuesday ... I forget yesterday's (all I remember is a hat) ... but today: another fat one (16 wide). The wider grid was of course necessitated by the revealer phrase—an answer that would look great in any puzzle but works particularly well here as a revealer. That phrase provided my one moment of solving joy today. Actually got an "ah, good one!" out of me. Simple idea, perfect execution, no notes. The theme does give you *apparent* gibberish in the grid, but only if you mulishly insist on reading the answers left to right with no diversions. It's kind of fun reading them that way. "SEEK ANDY HALL FIND!" actually sounds like two phrases. The first a command ("SEEK ANDY!") and the second a response from a caveman named Hall ("HALL FIND! HALL FIND ANDY! HALL GOOD SEEKER!"). If someone tries to give you credit for something Dave Ryday did, you'd say "Wasn't me. That was ALL DAVE RYDAY." And finally, if the Garveys are trying to pick a family nickname and finally decide it should be FAMILY G, the father (let's call him Bob) might ask the rest of the family (slangily), "FAMILY G ... AIGHT?" But why would you indulge in such silliness? Grow up. Play along. Read on a bias, and everything's fine.

[Hall find you!]

It's a four-star theme idea with points deducted for the sea of boring short fill and more points deducted for truly obscene easiness. I didn't know Molly O'NEILL and I kinda sorta stumbled at the very end with the unit of measurement (ROD) and "astrobiology" (?!?) (ETS) and trying to differentiate from Sol from Luna (43A: Sol, but not Luna)—I was like "... NAME? No, Luna's a name ..." But honestly that part only *felt* slightly hard because it came at the very end of the puzzle, and I had encountered absolutely no resistance at all since Molly greeted me at the *beginning* of the puzzle. Read clue, write in answer, bam bam bam. The theme answers were simple, and once those circled squares began to fill themselves in, the trick became clear. I know I am a broken record on this point, but this elimination of difficulty from the days of the week that are, historically, supposed to be difficult is truly dismaying. Everything is being simplified because apparently *all* of the NYT Games have to be easily accessible and digestible. Yeah, you fail Connections from time to time, but that's not gonna be as time-consuming as failing a full-sized crossword, so it's not likely to put you off Connections. Whereas you might get put off crosswords if you routinely failed them. But that's the *&#^%ing point. Some things, you should have to Work For. It makes them Satisfying. Bring back difficulty. Make Failure Normal Again! Thursday should not be as easy as Tuesday. Those of you who have been solving for decades know exactly what I'm talking about. Shortz's legacy will be that he made the puzzle more playful and entertaining and inclusive, but it will also be that he presided over the great Dumbing Down. I happily accept my role as the annoying old man who can't stop telling you that the Old Ways were better. Because they were. Not all of the Old Ways, for sure, but the part where the puzzle difficulty really ramped up as the week went on—that was better. 

Star Wars is back in the puzzle again today (20D: Created Yoda, he did = LUCAS), but it's worth noting that this is, unbelievably, just the second Star Wars clue of the new year! Once a week, I can definitely handle. That's a very tolerable SW rate. Funny to see not one but two callbacks to Monday's "rhyming advice" puzzle today: we get  (non-rhyming) "advice" in the first themer (18A: *Oft-quoted advice in Matthew 7:7), and then we get an echo of one of Monday's bits of "advice": "You SNOOZE, you lose!" (55A: Idiomatic partner of "lose"). On the whole, the non-theme fill was Dullsville—with so much of it in the 3-4-5 range and absolutely none of it 7+, this is not surprising. TSA SNL ETS IRENE ETTA CENA YALIES EATME SSN IDNO UMNO on and on and on. If you imagine a KRAKEN with a WEDGIE, you can squeeze some extra enjoyment out of this one, and the "Z" definitely livens things up (SNOOZE x/w FAZING) but otherwise, all the pleasure is in the theme. If there were "hard" parts today, I can't see them. Good theme, but real flat outside the theme, and criminally easy overall. 

Bullets:

• 1A: Cattle calls (MOOS) — watched Howard Hawks's Red River (1948) earlier this week. Lots of cattle in that one. Lots. Like, oceans of cattle. The whole premise of the movie appears to be "people will like watching the spectacle of cattle ... moving ... over land." I'm sure this played well on the big screen in the late '40s, but on the small screen in the mid '20s ... meh. It was obviously an impressive and elaborate feat of film-making—cattle choreography—but it just wasn't that exciting to me. I did like watching John Wayne and Montgomery Clift clash—this is the movie where John Wayne first leaned into darkness. He's pretty much the "bad guy" of the film. Clift keeps trying to save him from himself, but Wayne ultimately feels so betrayed that he decides to hunt Clift down and kill him. These are two incredibly beautiful men, so it's fun to watch. The human drama is great; the grand cattle drive adventure of it all was far, far less interesting to me. Why am I telling you all this? Oh, right: MOOS. The movie had a lotta MOOS.

• 12D: Title for any male in the House of Saud (EMIR) — easy ... once I read the clue correctly. On first pass, what my brain registered was: "Tiny house for any male Saudi." I was like, "whoa ... obscure. Wait ... why do they have tiny houses? For prayer? Weekend getaways? I want a tiny house!"
• 26D: Brief letters? (BVD) — a very old brand of underwear. Do they still make them? They used to be really common / well-known, but I honestly haven't thought about this brand in years. Decades? "BVDs" were just standard language for jockey shorts. Tighty-whiteys (whities?). Now, I dunno. I did an image search and got like one pair of underwear (from Japan??) and then a bunch of infographics related to something called "Binocular Vision Dysfunction."

• 38D: Fortune competitor (INC.) — they're both business-oriented magazines.
• 67A: "Sorry ... hard pass" ("UM, NO!") — absolutely impossible to differentiate "UM, NO" from "UH, NO" without the cross. "OH, NO" could've worked here as well, though that's usually an expression of dismay or concern.
• 45D: Sixth word of the Gettysburg Address ("AGO") — anybody else literally count it out on their fingers? All of you? I thought so.

That's it for today. See you next time.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

P.S. really enjoying the mail I've been getting this week (from my fundraiser drive last week). First batch of thank-you cards are already in the mail. E-thank-yous are forthcoming. You people are the best.

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Cute little mishap / TUE 6-13-23 / Cocktail garnished with an orange slice and a maraschino cherry / Classic theater name

Constructor: Juliana Tringali Golden and Wendy L. Brandes

Relative difficulty: Challenging (for a Tuesday)

THEME: "READY TO GO?" (34A: "Got everything before we leave?" ... with a checklist seen in the circled letters) — theme answers contain the "checklist," which checklist includes ID, CASH, KEYS, and PHONE:

Theme answers:

• TAXI DRIVER (17A: One hailed on city streets)
• VOLCANIC ASH (23A: Output from an eruption)
• WHISKEY SOUR (49A: Cocktail garnished with an orange slice and a maraschino cherry)
• KEEP HONEST (57A: Hold to a moral code)

Word of the Day: ELSTON Howard (27A: Yankee great ___ Howard) —

Elston Gene Howard (February 23, 1929 – December 14, 1980) was an American professional baseball player who was a catcher and a left fielder. During a 14-year baseball career, he played in the Negro leagues and Major League Baseball from 1948 through 1968, primarily for the New York Yankees. A 12-time All-Star, he also played for the Kansas City Monarchs and the Boston Red Sox. Howard served on the Yankees' coaching staff from 1969 to 1979.

In 1955, he was the first African American player on the Yankees roster; this was eight years after Jackie Robinson had broken MLB's color barrier in 1947. Howard was named the American League's Most Valuable Player for the 1963 pennant winners after finishing third in the league in slugging average and fifth in home runs, becoming the first black player in AL history to win the honor. He won Gold Glove Awards in 1963 and 1964, in the latter season setting AL records for putouts and total chances in a season. His lifetime fielding percentage of .993 as a catcher was a major league record from 1967 to 1973, and he retired among the AL career leaders in putouts (7th, 6,447) and total chances (9th, 6,977). (wikipedia)

• • •

PKW. That was the original checklist, the original mnemonic, which I think I got from "Broad City" like a decade ago. The most useful thing I ever learned from a television comedy, by a mile. I say it to myself, mentally and/or out loud, virtually every time I leave the house. My wife and I both do this. We sometimes say it to each other, with a question mark on the end. "PKW?" It's like "You got everything?" And then we literally, ritualistically touch every item on the list to make sure we got it. The "W" here stands for wallet—we both carry wallets, though sometimes I think my wife's wallet goes inside a little purse, depending on what we're doing. Anyway, the point is, it's a very, very useful mnemonic. PKW! P.K. Dubs! It's short and sweet and it works. I've tried to add letters at times, but they don't really stick. "Mask" was something I tacked on to the end during the first COVID years, but "PKWM" just didn't want to happen. I sometimes need to remember "glasses" (sun- or regular, depending on which I currently have on) or "headphones" (if I'm going to be walking for any distance, which is often). But the core house-leaving mnemonic is unchanging: PKW. The holy trinity. This will perhaps partly explain why the concept of this puzzle is appealing to me, but the execution feels slightly off the mark. Now, I don't expect everyone to share my particular checklist/mnemonic. I just need to believe in the checklist itself, and I don't really believe in this one. I specifically don't believe CASH, and I'm iffy on I.D. I like to have CASH on me sometimes, but it's not essential—nowhere near as essential as PHONE and KEYS, and anyway, WALLET takes care of it. WALLET also takes care of I.D. (which I would never say—"I.D." is what a bar might ask for, but it's not a term I'd use when referring to my drivers license). Is IDCASHKEYSPHONE a common mnemonic? ICKP? ICK-P? It's a plausible checklist, for sure, but the items on the checklist don't feel tight. The first two feel less on-the-money than the second two. I don't know why the checklisted items are embedded in longer answers. Is something conceptual happening there? Maybe the answers "have" those things the way you need to "have" those things when you leave the house? OK. As a revealer, "READY TO GO?" felt less-than-snappy when I first wrote it in, but the more I say it out loud to myself, the better it sounds. 

The puzzle as a whole was way, Way harder than most Tuesdays for me. Well, I was way slower, anyway, for sure. Those corners are massive, and a lot of the longer Downs needed many crosses before they became clear. INAHOLE TALKSUP SAWPAST and then *all* the Downs in the SE: ANTBEAR (bear!?) MOVESIT STARTLE. All required work before I could parse them. I feel doomed never to remember ELSTON. I've seen his name a bunch in puzzles, and yet it won't stick. I had EASTON there at first today. The preponderance of two-letter words in today's puzzle made things tough. SET AT was SET TO at first (31A: Programmed to, as a thermostat) (yes, I see that "TO" was in the clue ... now). MOVES IT. TALKS UP. GEAR TO, yeesh, that one was brutal somehow (37D: Make specifically for). MAY NOT, also bizarrely hard for me to parse (48A: Is forbidden to). I had VOLCANO LAVA before VOLCANIC ASH. I couldn't make heads or tails of ITEM as the answer to 29A: Meeting point? until after I was done with the puzzle (I thought maybe it was referring to two people who, having ... met? ...  became a romantic ITEM, but it's the ITEM on any "meeting's" agenda. Seems obvious ... now. 

Would never spell OOPSY that way (or at all) (51D: Cute little mishap). Kept trying to make OWIE stretch to five letters somehow. We get double Spanish gender confusion at the bottom of the grid, in practically adjacent answers, with ESA and MUCHOS (not ESO or MUCHAS, both of which were reasonable answers). The fill felt a little on the weak side overall today, despite those reasonably solid longer Downs in the corners. APOLO SETAT ARIE ATIT KBS SITU ESA ERTE, stuff like this made the grid feel stuffy / clunky at times. But overall it's probably got more life than most Tuesdays. See you tomorrow.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld 

P.S. Clue on CITY BUS wasn't great (24D: Subway alternative), since the alternative to the subway is the bus, just the bus, that's it. If you're going to clue it that way, it's bus. You're clearly, obviously in the "city," since that's the only place you'd find a subway. ("Subway" had me looking for a sandwich shop). Also you probably should take "city" out of that TAXI DRIVER clue (17A: One hailed on city streets) (why in the world didn't that clue reference the movie???)

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One-named satirist of ancient Greece / TUE 11-22-22 / Moth's cocoon phase / Chinese dialect spoken mainly in Hunan province

Constructor: Wendy L. Brandes

Relative difficulty: Medium

THEME: CUTTING THE CARDS (7D: Part of a blackjack dealer's ritual ... or what this answer is doing vis-à-vis the answers to the starred clues) — 7-Down literally "cuts" (through) five types of "cards" (that is, words that can precede the word "card")

Theme answers:

• 17A: *1971 film about coming of age in a small, one-cinema Texas town, with "The" ("LAST PICTURE SHOW")
• 22A: *Eloquence said to be acquired by kissing the Blarney Stone (GIFT OF GAB)
• 33A: *Exams that value analysis and understanding more than rote memorization (OPEN-NOTE TESTS)
• 43A: *Van Morrison song aptly featured in "An American Werewolf in London" ("MOONDANCE")
• 50A: *Owning, as an achievement (TAKING CREDIT FOR)

Word of the Day: LUCIAN (19A: One-named satirist of ancient Greece) —

Lucian of Samosata (c. 125 – after 180) was a Hellenized Syrian satirist, rhetorician and pamphleteer who is best known for his characteristic tongue-in-cheek style, with which he frequently ridiculed superstition, religious practices, and belief in the paranormal. Although his native language was probably Syriac, all of his extant works are written entirely in ancient Greek (mostly in the Attic Greek dialect popular during the Second Sophistic period). (wikipedia)

• • •

Hey all. I'm on (Thanksgiving / birthday week) vacation, so in order to spend maximum time with my family (whom I actually like), I'm gonna be microblogging for the next few days. Is that a term, "microblogging?" I feel like I've heard it. And now I'm doing it. Speaking of "Is that a term?": POLLER. Is POLLER a term? Well, funny story: I took a poll. Because I'm solving out of my element (i.e. at my mom's house, i.e. not in my office), I just decided to solve wherever I could get space, which meant the dining room table, which is less than shouting distance from the living room, which was where all my family was sitting. So I hit POLLER early (third answer I got), and I inaudibly groaned and sank in my chair, and then I asked my family, "Hey, what do you call [One sampling public opinion]!?" And my sister goes "... POLLSTER?" at the same time that my wife also goes "POLLSTER" and then I say "thank you!" and then my wife looks at me in horror and asks "omg did they try to foist POLLER on you!?" Yes. Yes they did. Therefore, because of this dramatic polling incident, I can say, with confidence, with the unbiased backing of at least two other reasonably intelligent people, that POLLER is a garbage non-word. 

I also asked the room, "Hey, for [Part of a blackjack dealer's ritual], how would you fill in the blank on the following phrase: 'CUTTING THE ___'"? I got three "DECKs." So again I say, with confidence, that today's puzzle is not [dramatically removes sunglasses] dealing fairly! These mots are not the mots justes. And the fill in general was a little subpar, a little xwordesey, a little hard to take (EIRE ETNA ÊTES etc etc). This is all too bad, as the theme is kinda cute. And of course it has to be "CARDS," not "DECK," or the entire premise doesn't work. So that's fine, actually. Just not a phrase I'd use for blackjack. Maybe clue it as part of a card trick? I dunno. Anyway, the theme works great. I don't really know what a PICTURE CARD is ... but I assume it's something, so ... thumbs up to the theme.

[You can see that the wikipedia entry is for "Cut (cards)" but when I add 
"blackjack" to the search terms, predictive texts wants "deck"]

OK, this blogging is not micro- enough for my (and possibly your) tastes, so let's move quickly to ... 

Five Bullet Points:

• 19A: One-named satirist of ancient Greece (LUCIAN) — this seems an extremely non-Tuesday name. I barely know this guy, and I've spent a good deal of time around classical literature. This answer and XIANG (30A: Chinese dialect spoken mainly in Hunan province) really upped the level of difficulty today, though both answers were easy enough to get from crosses, and the rest of the puzzle was no harder than a normal Tuesday.
• 29A: Lustful, informally (RANDY) — I can't stop laughing at "informally." Is "Lustful" formal? When you're black-tie horny: Lustful. When you're casual-Friday horny: RANDY.
• 14A: Words of sudden recognition ("OH, IT'S YOU") — we interrupt this broadcast for a very necessary and relevant playing of "Escape (The Piña Colada Song)":

• 49A: Careless or carefree (BLITHE) — a perfectly reasonable word, but I struggled to come up with it. Since the two clue words seem miles apart from each other, I couldn't grab hold of a word that seemed to fit.
• 11D: Gritty residue in a chimenea (ASH) — whoa, I'm only noticing just now that the clue does not say "chimney"! I have never, ever heard of this term! "A chimenea /tʃɪmɪˈneɪ.ə/, also spelled chiminea (from Spanish: chimenea which derive from French cheminée, "chimney"), is a freestanding front-loading fireplace or oven with a bulbous body and usually a vertical smoke vent or chimney." (wikipedia). I didn't know these had a name! I'm just glad I saw "chimenea" in a clue before I got run over by it as an answer!  

OK, that's all, see you all tomorrow. 

[Longmont, CO: The morning view from mom's dining room window]

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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Cigarette that's assembled by hand, informally / SAT 10-2-21 / Pearl Harbor her for whom a future U.S. aircraft carrier is scheduled to be named / Lawn game seen regularly on ESPN beginning in 2017

Constructor: Wendy L. Brandes

Relative difficulty: Easy—even though I finished with an error :(

THEME: none 

Word of the Day: DORIS "Dorie" MILLER (20A: Pearl Harbor her for whom a future U.S. aircraft carrier is scheduled to be named) —

Doris "Dorie" Miller (October 12, 1919 – November 24, 1943) was a United States Navy cook third class who was killed in action during World War II. He was the first black American to be awarded the Navy Cross, the second highest decoration for valor in combat after the Medal of Honor.

Miller served aboard the battleship West Virginia, which was sunk by Japanese torpedo bombers during the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. During the attack, he helped several sailors who were wounded, and while manning an anti-aircraft machine gun for which he had no training, he shot down several Japanese planes. Miller's actions earned him the medal, and the resulting publicity for Miller in the black press made him an iconic emblem of the fight for civil rights for black Americans. In November 1943, Miller was killed while serving aboard the escort carrier Liscome Baywhen it was sunk by a Japanese submarine during the Battle of Makin in the Gilbert Islands.

The destroyer escort/Knox-class frigate USS Miller (reclassified as a frigate in June 1975), in service from 1973 to 1991, was named after him. On January 19, 2020, the Navy announced that a Gerald R. Ford-class nuclear powered aircraft carrier, CVN-81, would be named after Miller. The ship is scheduled to be laid down in 2023 and launched in 2028. (wikipedia)

• • •

There may as well be only one answer in this puzzle, as far as my solving experience was concerned. The entire puzzle was easy, even when familiar answers (e.g. ROLLIE) were given really unfamiliar clues (e.g cigarettes, not baseball). Easy ... except for one answer. One proper noun I had never heard of. A long one. And I came close. I really did. But I muffed one of the crosses right from the beginning, and the resulting answer looked sufficiently namelike to me, and so, ultimately, failure. I finished, but I didn't get the little "you have successfully solved the puzzle" message, which is how I know something's wrong—all the squares filled in, but no message. So I start scanning the grid like mad and everything looks good, so then I'm like okay, focus, go to the answers that you are definitely not sure about and check their crosses. Checked the ROLLIE crosses, nothing. Checked the whole SO GLAD / LAD area, nothing. Well, probably nothing. I still don't really get the whole [Sprout] = LAD thing. Is that a name you'd call a young boy? "Sprout"? In what year, exactly, would you do that? Weird. Anyway, didn't see any way SO GLAD / LAD could be wrong. GREEN TAX feels made-up, but it also feels like a thing the NYTXW would embrace (what with its whole ECO- obsession), so I figured it was probably right (17A: Penalty for a polluter). Then, finally, I went to the elephant in the room, the biggie, the one answer I definitely did not know. And I said to that answer, I said, "OK, Miss TORI S. MILLER, if that is indeed your real name, let's see if your crosses all check out." Reader, they did not.

I assumed TORI S. MILLER was in the puzzle for reasons of inclusiveness, to highlight a war hero who was a woman and not (as one might expect) a man. And even after I realized, D'oh, it's DORIS, not TORI S., still I thought I was dealing with a woman. But no. Doris is a man. "Dorie," more commonly. I was right about the inclusiveness part, just wrong about the kind of inclusiveness that was in play (DORIS MILLER is Black; see "Word of the Day," above). Apparently there were other answers in this grid, but the whole name change / gender change DORIS MILLER extravaganza really made the rest of the puzzle kind of disappear. What in the world (!) was I thinking with that Café du MONTE nonsense!? (5D: Café du ___ (landmark shop in New Orleans's French Quarter) (MONDE)). It's not even proper French. Café du MONTE ... if MONTE Hall had a café, maybe, but even then it's probably de MONTE, not du MONTE, and wow I am still thinking about this somehow.

The rest of the grid felt a little on the blah side to me, though EXIT INTERVIEW and CORNHOLE definitely had something going for them. Something ENTO and ERTE and OBIES and ORT just gave the grid a bit of a musty smell. ONLY ONCE is an odd stand-alone phrase, and ON RICE feels awkward on two counts: first, it's another odd stand-alone phrase, and second, it seems like the wrong phrase. "Over rice" feels like the more in-the-language phrase, though maybe chili has its own specialized vocabulary, I don't know (42D: One way to serve chili). I was getting my cab from a WINE ROOM, but then the server in the WINE ROOM went and got it from the WINE RACK (56A: Place to get a cab). I don't think there was any other struggle or excitement. In summation, TORI S. MILLER, I know you're out there, and I salute you.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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Sorting header in music app / FRI 12-25-20 / Fictional hero whose name is Spanish for fox / Supreme Egyptian god / Popular fantasy film franchise for short / Fishing gear left underwater / Toy associated with France

Constructor: Erik Agard and Wendy L. Brandes

Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium (5:25)

THEME: none 

Word of the Day: Madame NOIRE (57A: madame ___ (online lifestyle magazine)) —

MadameNoire is an international online magazine that is geared toward the lifestyles of African American women as well as popular culture.

In 2015, MadameNoire had 7,116,000 unique visitors monthly, making it the most trafficked site oriented to African Americans--ahead of The Root, BET.com, and Bossip.com. (wikipedia)

• • •

A very Friday Friday. Friday done right. A bouncy, easyish themeless, with interesting longer answers and mostly decent fill and some clever cluing. If I get this on Friday, I'm good. There were maybe a few more brief frowny moments than I expected from constructors of this caliber. AMEN RA and EELPOT are, of course, actual things, but they're the kind of old-school crosswordese I usually only see these days in grids that are struggling for one reason or another to keep their heads above water. The EELPOT section is actually conspicuous for how glutted it is with "E"s and "R"s. On my printed-out grid, I've drawn a boomerang shape with green pen encompassing I'M FREE over REFEREE and then turning south to pick up EELPOT and EERIE. I'd throw ÉTÉS in there too, as it is plural foreign crossordese abutting boomerang in question. That SW section isn't bad, it just has ... a little wobble. Not as tight as it might be, esp. in a highish-word-count themeless grid. I have trouble with GALOSH in the singular, although I guess if they come in pairs, there must be a singular, technically. Still, you hear "sock" and "shoe" but GALOSH ... not so much. But honestly, I don't hear the plural that much either. That's pretty much it for dings, and none of the dings really mitigated my overall enjoyment all that much. In the end, NOT BAD AT ALL.

As often happens, my experience with 1-Across set the tone for the whole puzzle. Today, got it right away, or, rather, thought I had it, and then tested the crosses to make sure. So RABBI AMEN RA BONE-IN (nice) and off I went. Got CZAR off the "R" and guessed the correct spelling because the rule is: actual former Russian leader = TSAR, honcho of some sort = CZAR. Use this rule for first guesses, with the understanding that the rule is not actually a rule, more a guideline (but a pretty reliable one). Struggled with both of the four-letter movie franchises in the middle of the grid, LOTR (i.e. "Lord of the Rings") because I just didn't have enough to go on (28D: Popular fantasy film franchise, for short), and HULK because I got GRETA THUNBERG confused (I think) with American movie producer Irving THALBERG, which gave me HA-K for 32D: "The Avengers" role, which made me think maybe someone named ... HAWK? ... was in "The Avengers." Hawkman is a superhero, but he's DC. Oh, yeah, I didn't have the "L" for HULK because 38A: Command after a crash (RELOAD) was not all clear to me. I have never had occasion to use said command. Reboot restart helpme ... but not RELOAD. Slowed me down considerably, that little snarl-up, but it was all ultimately very sortoutable. "Rent-to-own" is a familiar phrase to me, LEASE-TO-OWN isn't, but it wasn't hard to figure out the gist of that one. No idea about Madame NOIRE. Seems like the "most trafficked site oriented to African-Americans" might be worth knowing. And now I know. 

Merry Christmas to all who celebrate!

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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