Enhanced tape format released in 1987 / SUN 4-3-22 / Whirling toon familiarly / 1974 spoof with the tagline "Would you buy a used secret from these men?" / Car part the Brits call a wing / Word meaning desire in a classic Sanskrit text / Inscribed with some ancient characters / About 98% of the human genome

I am a longtime fan of Byron Walden puzzles, and this one has much to recommend it, but perhaps a bit too often the fill made me recoil a bit. Words that were more word-like than word-actual. LADE, I know. UNLADE ... erm, by inference, I guess, OK. GEYSER, yup. GEYSERED ... less familiar. WIRE I know, SAWS I know, WIRE SAWS ... are news to me. I do remember VHS, I do not remember SUPER VHS (though I like its moxie!) (35A: Enhanced tape format released in 1987). And so on. As for the theme, the theme is ... well, it's a theme. It's very, very simple, and that is OK with me. It doesn't exactly sparkle, but neither does it grate, or totally fall apart. It actually took me a wee bit to figure out how "soft" related to the theme. Is the SEA OF TRANQUILITY"soft"? SANDS are ... kinda soft? TRANQUILITY ... conveys softness ... somewhat. But then I realized that I was seeing OF in the middle of all the long phrases, and then I realized I was actually seeing OFT in the middle all the long phrases, and then I saw that all the long answers began with "S" and all of a sudden it made sense: not "Soft Options" but "S___ of T___ options." What is a "soft option?" I know it only from a throwaway line in the song "West End Girls" by The Pet Shop Boys. Ah, it just means "easier alternative." Mainly British. Which explains my ignorance. And the Pet Shop Boys.

I loved some of the mid-range fill in this one, but for every JUNK DNA (great) there was, I dunno, an EX ANTE (!?!?). I didn't just want to tear the SE corner out and rebuild it, I wanted to detonate it and leave it in rubble as a reminder to all future grids never to put EX ANTE (!?!?!) in your puzzle, for any reason, ever. What in the world? Crosswords already rely (over) heavily on Latin (ET TU ESSE INTER ALIA ETC.), I end up resenting deep dives into dead languages. And I *like* Latin. Studied it, even. Still, EX ANTE, yeesh and woof and start over. In that same corner, I think I also resented that it was GENX and not XERS, since XERS matched the clue better (99D: Kids of boomers). And then there were two proper names I didn't know, though I've at least heard of Joy ADAMS-N (81D: Joy who wrote "Born Free") ... I have tuned out politics So Hard that sincerely I had no idea who the current secretary of state was, first or last name (106A: ___ Blinken, Biden's secretary of state). I know, it's shameful. But it's not as shameful as the news itself, which takes days off my life every time I look at it. Annnnyway, luckily ANT-NY had to be ANTONY, so ADAMSON, so ... I survived that corner, barely. As for the rest of the grid, too often I was dealing with a lot of repeaters (OLEOLE ESTO ENTO etc.) or I was getting slightly held up by slight variations like AURAE (not AURAS), PST (not PDT), GUSTAF (not GUSTAV), and RUNED (not RUNIC). How is RUNED / RARA better than TUNED / TARA? Maybe TUNE is somewhere else in the grid; I haven't scanned. but RUNED is awkward and RARA is Latin, so TUNED / TARA is a win-win imho. 

I honestly thought there was some kind of Jesus / Easter theme afoot here for a very brief moment when I got to the middle of the grid and saw SHROUD OF TURIN crossing (crossing!) JESUS-LIKE. That is a great, great cross, in that the image on the SHROUD OF TURIN is indeed JESUS-LIKE. If that cross had been perfectly symmetrical, it would've formed a perfect (Christian) cross, and that would've been freaky. As it is, the cross is slightly asymmetrical, so ... crosslike. Perfect for something JESUS-LIKE. Anyway, as far as I can tell, there are no hidden religious messages in this puzzle. But people can convince themselves of anything based on very little evidence, so if you see the face of Jesus here, fantastic, more power to you. 

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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