Emotional assessment of one's surroundings in lingo / SAT 2-11-23 / Wheat variety for a grain bowl / Unlikely trait for a beekeeper / Sustainable engineering field informally / Expanse on a Spanish explorer's map / Capital known as Keijo before the 1940s

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My wife and I were watching The Fabelmans a couple of weeks ago and afterwards she said, "That main kid ... he reminded me of somebody ..." and I had thought the same thing, but just couldn't place it. I had been thinking "I know that kid ... from somewhere." Then much later, after we got home from the theater, my wife shouts at me from the next room: "Sam Ezersky!" And I was like "oh my god that's it!" If you know Sam (today's constructor), or look at a picture of Sam alongside the young actor in question, Gabriel LaBelle, you'll probably think, "hmm ... I dunno ... not really seeing it. I mean, they're both handsome young men, but ... nah, seems like a stretch." But someday you will maybe be watching The Fabelmans, which you'd always meant to do but never did because there was book club and then "Real Housewives" was on and the laundry's not going to fold itself for god's sake ... and you'll be watching and Teenage Spielberg will come on screen and you'll notice, something in his affect, something in the way he speaks, and all of a sudden you'll be just like that Leonardo DiCaprio GIF, you know the one ... pointing at the screen is astonished recognition, and you'll say, "There it is ... oh yeah ... I SEE it ..." Anyway, The Fabelmans was a good movie and this is a good puzzle. [Nailed the landing, once again]

This one opened like a super-wide Friday for me; that is, it was very whoosh-whoosh, and there was an odd horizontality to the initial whooshing, which made me notice that the grid was horizontally oversized. This was the opening gambit:

The most impressive thing about this grid to me is not the grid-spanners (although they're nice). It's the prodigious NW and SE corners. I left that NW corner thinking, "Damn ... that is a nice corner." If you'd told me yesterday, "hey, tomorrow, you are going to love a corner that's got EPODE CHOO and EBB" in it, I'd've said "who are you and how do you know this?" And I probably wouldn't have believed you. But VAMPIRES / VIBECHECK is a 1A/1D crossing for the Ages, and everything inside it is tight and bright—and there's just so Much inside it. The whole thing should creak under the weight of all that white space, but it doesn't. It holds up. More than holds up.

TO BE FRANK, I am not a fan of PSALM ONE (though I am a fan of "TO BE FRANK...")—you'd write PSALM ONE as "Psalm 1" and anyway there are a 150 of them, can we just put any number after PSALM now? But then right next to it, you've got LOWER G.I., which I loved. So the icky is offset by the ironically not-icky LOWER G.I. tract. I'm not too keen on having the feds in this puzzle not once but twice (CIA andFBI). Grid could use some more counterculture to offset the cops, not to mention the corporations (specifically Big PHARMA). Cops in SOFT ARMOR (sung to the tune of "Knights in White Satin")?—no thanks. The pronoun "I" appears at least three times in the grid, but it's just one letter so who cares? ("I SEE, I SAY, therefore  I AM"—Descartes's lesser-known See 'N' Say theory of being). I didn't have a negative reaction to very much in this grid. I guess I've heard / would say KILLING IT well before SLAYING IT. "SLAYING" in my limited vernacular experience often (usually?) occurs without the "it." But it seems valid, and anyway I got it easily. 

Had ORAL before ANAL because well because because because because because ... wishful thinking, I guess (49D: ___ stage (concept in psychosexual development)). Had me wondering when this tradition of people RAPping on Jan. 1 had started and how I had missed it (57A: Many people do this on January 1 => NAP). There were a lot of tricky, initially mystifying clues today. Worst, for me, was 42A: K, for Kay (KARAT). "Kay" here is the damned jewelry company!!!! So in the context of jewelry, specifically gold, yes, "K" stands for KARAT, aargh. Thought the "Ah" follower might be ... well, it's four letters, so think four-letter words, and you'll have some idea what I was thinking. Had HEEL for 56A: Stiletto feature (HAFT), and I can't believe I'm alone there. The stiletto here is the knife, not the shoe. The clue on LOWER G.I. was wicked, in that I thought "Colon" was a punctuation mark, a name, a geographical location ... all of those things ... before I settled on the body part (63A: Colon's place, familiarly). Nice little scatological gag (!) there, btw: crossing LOWER G.I. with ANAL. Grateful for my relatively recent bird knowledge, which didn't give me SKYLARKS right away, but did at least let me know that I was dealing with birds. Seems entirely possible that "pipits" are not immediately recognizable as birds to many people (66A: Pipit lookalikes). The sides of a square are STS because streets make up the "sides" of some (town) squares (53D: Sides of a square, maybe). Does anything else need explaining? Oh, EGOTS are sets of all four major entertainment awards: Emmy/Grammy/Oscar/Tony. Viola Davis just completed hers last week, winning a Best Audiobook, Narration, and Storytelling Recording Grammy for her memoir Finding Me. Now, you will find me ... in the kitchen, with the cats, making coffee. Good day.
Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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