Old Apple image-editing software / TUE 7-27-21 / Verdi opera set in Cyprus / B-52s hit named by Rolling Stone as the best single of 1989 / R&B singer with hyphenated stage name / Chinese steamed bun

Theme answers:

• REVITALIZE (eyes) (16A: Inject new life into)
• ENGINEERS (ears) (24A: Bridge and highway designers)
• VOLCANOES (nose) (44A: Hawaii ___ National Park)
• APOCALYPSE (lips) (57A: End of the world)

Word of the Day: ALEX Morgan (2D: Soccer star Morgan) —

Alexandra Morgan Carrasco (born Alexandra Patricia Morgan; July 2, 1989) is an American professional soccer player for the Orlando Pride of the National Women's Soccer League (NWSL), the highest division of women's professional soccer in the United States, and the United States women's national soccer team. She co-captained the United States women's national soccer team with Carli Lloyd and Megan Rapinoe from 2018 to 2020. (wikipedia)

Despite the unwelcome return of IPHOTO (what is even happening, why is this bygone i-word haunting my grids!?), I really enjoyed this theme. That is, I had no idea what the theme was, but the solving experience was pretty decent and FACE RECOGNITION was a pretty snazzy answer (despite its dystopian / surveillance state associations), so I was happily along for the ride, waiting to see what I would find when I went back at puzzle's end to figure out the theme. Before figuring out the theme, my impressions were "grid was kinda choppy, kinda fussy to navigate, seemed heavy on short stuff, but the fill was decent, and the longer Downs were fun and original ("LOVE SHACK!"), so let's hope this theme doesn't ruin everything." And then I looked at FACE RECOGNITION, took one look at the themers, and had Nothing. Didn't get it. Then I reread the clue and took another pass, and bam, there it was, plain as the nose (and other elements) on your face. Eyes ears nose lips. My favorite part of the theme was that my figuring out the theme was built into the theme itself; that is, I had to engage in FACE RECOGNITION in order to see the theme at all. My only complaint about the theme is that I think the term is more commonly known as FACIAL RECOGNITION. That is what the term wants to be in my head, what my brain wants the term to be. The wikipedia entry is for "Facial Recognition System." But a quick couple of google searches reveals that FACE and FACIAL are used pretty interchangeably out there, so judges say: no foul.

Looking back over the grid, it does have a lot of overfamiliar short stuff. I think it was less of an annoyance / distraction today because the cluing was decent, the themers were decent, the revealer was bright and original, and the long Downs really popped. As I've said a billion times (in different ways), when your marquee stuff is humming and your clues and fill aren't making solvers actually wince, no one's going to notice or care about the short fill too much, even if you've got an EENY-NE-YO-ASTO pocket or two. There weren't many places that caused significant hesitation on my part, so sometimes you're just going too fast to notice any infelicities, I guess. I knew Kevin NEALON but was not entirely sure of that last vowel in his name, so I left it blank at first (31A: Kevin once of "S.N.L."). I thought ALEX was ABBY (confusing my soccer stars). When I got to TRY TO ___, I wanted that last word to be BREATHE, but, for obvious reasons, it wasn't, so I needed a cross or two to get RELAX (17D: "Take a deep breath ..."). I had METE before DOLE (in part because I came into that section from underneath and had the "E" in place first—the only letter those two words share) (34D: Portion (out)). I am happy the puzzle is continuing to clue RONA as Jaffe and not the damn disease (I saw a puzzle try to get cute with 'RONA, cluing it as slang for the virus, and my response to that is, please, constructors and editors, I am begging you, read the room). I finished in the NW, which is a slightly weird place to finish an easy puzzle—I'm almost always down at the bottom, especially on the fast days. But this one just swung me in a "U" shape, down the west and back up the east. Played myself out with the CORNET, a musical end to a brisk, lively puzzle.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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