Ankh-holding deity / SAT 7-22-17 / cartoon avatars on Snapchat / single serve coffee holders / Wearer of h inscribed hat / Lead female role on Netflix's House of Cards / Big-box store founded in 1946 / Sportscaster Rich

Constructor: Zhouqin Burnikel

Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium (suuuuper-easy, I'm told, but I have a slight concert hangover this morning, so I was just fast, not Fast)

THEME: none 

Word of the Day: ALUM (8D: Application to a cut) —

noun: alum; noun: potash alum

1. a colorless astringent compound that is a hydrated double sulfate of aluminum and potassium, used in solution medicinally and in dyeing and tanning.

   • any of a number of analogous crystalline double sulfates of a monovalent metal (or group) and a trivalent metal.

     plural noun: alums

Must be very quick today, as I am writing inside an absurdly small window. Didn't get back from the ELVIS Costello concert at Brewery Ommegang in Cooperstown until well after midnight, and I have to be out of the house again at 7:30am. So you all get maybe half an hour this a.m.—and I've already used a good chunk of it writing these first two sentences. This puzzle is just fine, though it feels like a parody of a puzzle that's trying extra super special hard to be current. Twitter! Facebook! Two Snapchat clues! Kids like the Snapchat, right? Am I Relevant Yet!? We are living in a digital world, and I am a digital girl boy, but take it easy. I actually enjoyed LATTE ART and FOAM HAND more than any of the marquee social media stuff (or BITMOJIS, for ****'s sake). And it's weirdly extra jarring to see a puzzle be so Now and then have crap like SERT and AMENRA and ATBAR in it. Fustiness stands out by contrast. But as I say, overall, this is a win, and, if you're coming from a certain cultural space (under 50), it was likely Very easy for you (compared to other Saturdays, I mean).


Quick Stuff:

• ALUM— I apparently have no idea what this is (that is, if it's not someone who's REUNING); a large part of whatever stuck-time I had was spent here, trying to figure out how four letters ending in "M" was not BALM (8D: Application to a cut).
• KOJAK (27A: Lieutenant of 1970s TV)— In naming the detectives he used to watch on TV, Elvis Costello name-checked this guy last night, though he saved his most effusive praise (rightly, if possibly ironically) for one Ms. Jessica Fletcher (Angela Lansbury of TV's "Murder, She Wrote")

• LOOSE TEA (34A: What some caddies carry)— got the TEA part fine, but the LOOSE part, ugh. See also the latter part of CREED (26D: Seminary study).
• SATE (43D: Be adequate for)— Screw this word. One word should not be able to be clued [Be adequate for] *and* [Fill to the gills] (an actual clue once used in a puzzle by this actual constructor). I think it can also mean, simply, [Satisfy] or [Fill to something less than the gills], so this stupid word apparently means every single level of filling, and thus is useless. 

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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