Old world bird with distinctive ear tufts / SAT 1-15-22 / Crashing an online meeting / Catchphrase of Winnie-the-Pooh / What God is per an Ariana Grande hit / Spot for a bus stop in Bristol / Locale 60 miles south of the California/Oregon border / Creator of first pumped-up athletic shoe / Popular typeface similar to bauhaus / Boxy delivery vehicles of old / Dalmatian mascot of the National Fire Protection Association / 2010s fansite craze whose members joined Hogwarts houses

A lot of labor goes into producing this blog every day (Every. Day.) and the hours are, let's say, less than ideal (I'm either solving and writing at night, after 10pm, or in the morning, before 6am). Most days, I really do love the writing, but it is work, and once a year (right now!) I acknowledge that fact. As I've said before, I have no interest in "monetizing" the blog beyond a simple, direct contribution request once a year. No ads, no gimmicks. Just here for you, every day, rain or shine, whether you like it or, perhaps, on occasion, not :) It's just me and my laptop and some free blogging software and, you know, a lot of rage, but hopefully there's illumination and levity along the way. I do genuinely love this gig, and whether you're an everyday reader or a Sunday-only reader or a flat-out hatereader, I appreciate you more than you'll ever know.

I'll start with the place where I wound things up, which is the one part of this puzzle I really loved: the SE corner. I had THE NORM and ANTHEM in place, which put two "M"s at the front of 61A: Date format on digital forms (MM/DD/YYYY), and that made the answer soooooo much easier to get than it might have been otherwise. I have no idea if the unusual letter string in that answer flummoxed people or not. Maybe it was easy for everyone. I just know I felt lucky to have the "MM" up front. I did write in YEAR instead of YYYY at first, but that was easily fixed. I thought that answer was terribly clever. Tricky but fair. And then that whole corner opened up, and everything about it really shined. There's an old-fashioned vibe that is adorable rather than musty. "OH, BOTHER!" evoked childhood memories of my mother reading Milne to me (over and over and over, mostly the verse but sometimes the Pooh stories as well). And then you've got old-fashioned terms like NATTY (I think I learned that word from "Peanuts," weirdly) and MAKES HAY—I know the latter answer primarily from the expression "to make hay while the sun shines," which I think is a kind of folksy updated "Gather ye rosebuds..." Childhood memories continued with MOUNT SHASTA, which we used to drive past every summer on our annual trip from Fresno to visit relatives in Oregon and Washington. We drank SHASTA soda too, and played canasta and spit-in-the-ocean in the back of our red-orange conversion van. Ah to be 12 in 1982 California again. Good times!! (nostalgia is a hell of a drug). The throwback fill in the SE is tempered by the slangy modern "REAL TALK ...". It's weird that this corner features IT'S BAD, because it's not.

My feelings about the SE corner are basically rotationally symmetrical with those evoked by the NW corner, in that they are upside-down and backward. It's not a bad corner, in retrospect, not really, but my experiences with ZOOM-BOMBING make me inclined not to enjoy it as a crossword answer (19A: Crashing an online meeting). It sounds cute, but it was often used in really awful, disruptive, frequently racist ways all over the country, as trolls of various kinds took advantage of weaknesses in the system and user inexperience with the medium to f up what was already a pretty f'd up situation (pandemic, full lockdown). I DO YOGA so I didn't mind DO YOGA too much ... yeah, it's rubbing me some weird way, but I can't figure out why, so I'll let that be. A word about A WOMAN, though. I get that this puzzle is desperately in need of A WOMAN, but you can do better than what is basically A PARTIAL. All this answer did was highlight how incredibly bro-ey and devoid of women this grid is. I mean, *two* Super Bowl clues? You already had MAHOMES, did you have to go back to the NFL for BUC? Hmm, maybe you did. You probably had to stay in the sports realm, anyway. The Pittsburgh Pirates (baseball) are sometimes referred to (familiarly) as the BUCs. Anyway, A WOMAN (a single woman, a partial answer) stands more as an indictment than a marquee answer. It's the exception that highlights the rule: A WOMAN's place is (ironically) not in this puzzle. Dwarfs and SMURFS, but no human women. OK. 

Notes:

• 1D: Gets stuck, as an engine (SEIZES) — I wrote in ---S UP (I was probably thinking of "SEIZES up," weirdly enough). I then wrote in PRO for 26A: All ___ (SET). So yeah, not a great start.
• 44D: Country song (ANTHEM)— I don't really get the logic of "?" vs. no "?" on a clue like this. I have definitely seen this exact clue for ANTHEM before, but typically with a "?" (and as I write "typically," I realized I have seen this exact clue for ANTHEM a lot). Here, though, no "?" Some of the logic appears to be "well, it's literal enough not to need a question mark," and some of it seems to be "it's Saturday, we don't need no stinking question marks!" The point is that it's not always obvious when a clue calls for a "?" and when it doesn't. Typically, a "?" clue has some wordplay afoot, but you can have wordplay without the "?" if the clue is literal enough (as it is, I suppose, in this case).
• 9D: Eye-opening declaration? ("AMEN") — I went from hating to loving this one, once I figured out the context (I imagined the act of saying grace before a meal, but I suppose "AMEN" could come at the end of any prayer during which one conventionally closes one's eyes)
• 27D: 2010s fansite craze whose members joined Hogwarts houses (POTTERMORE) — ugh, this left several kinds of awful tastes in my mouth. Bygone fansite crazes ... already just a sad category. I have no memory of POTTERMORE. I had POTTER-ORE and sincerely thought it was POTTERCORE (like normcore or dadcore or cottagecore or mumblecore, where "-core" refers to a particular kind of aesthetic in music or fashion or whatever). I figure if you are "joining Hogwarts houses," you are engaged in some kind of weird dress-up games, virtual or otherwise, so POTTERCORE seemed apt. But mainly I hate this answer because JK Rowling has tragically and bafflingly chosen to spend her later years demonizing and dehumanizing trans people, trans women in particular, so there really aren't enough ways for me to tell her and her entire universe to **** off.
• 10D: One jotting down a few notes? (SONGWRITER)— had -GWRITER, wrote in BLOG WRITER. Then I watched myself gavotte. :)

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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