What might be out for a spell? / WED 10-9-24 / Soldier for hire, in brief / Dwarf planet with the largest mass / "I'm on vacation" email inits. / Counterpart of flow / Common clown name / Coat, as with flour / Big name in tourism guides / Jackson 5 song that begins "You went to school to learn, girl"

Theme answers:

• CAMERA FLASH (18A: Photography option commonly represented by a 37-Across)
• CHARGERS (23A: N.F.L. team whose helmet features a 37-Across)
• GATORADE (50A: Drink with a 37-Across in its logo)
• HARRY POTTER (56A: Character with a 37-Across on his forehead)

Word of the Day: "'TIS the Voice of the Lobster" (12D: "___ the Voice of the Lobster" (Lewis Carroll poem)) —

"'Tis the Voice of the Lobster" is a poem by Lewis Carroll that appears in Chapter 10 of his 1865 novel Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. It is recited by Alice to the Mock Turtle and the Gryphon. // "'Tis the Voice of the Lobster" is a parody of "The Sluggard", a moralistic poem by Isaac Watts which was well known in Carroll's day. "The Sluggard" depicts the unsavory lifestyle of a slothful individual as a negative example. Carroll's lobster's corresponding vice is that he is weak and cannot back up his boasts, and is consequently easy prey. This fits the pattern of the predatory parody poems in the two Alice books. [...] As published in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1867):

[After the Gryphon and the Mock Turtle have sung and danced to the Lobster Quadrille, Alice mentions the poems she has attempted to recite, and the Gryphon tells Alice to stand and recite "'Tis the voice of the sluggard", which she reluctantly does] "but her head was so full of the Lobster Quadrille, that she hardly knew what she was saying ..."

'Tis the voice of the lobster; I heard him declare,
"You have baked me too brown, I must sugar my hair."
As a duck with its eyelids, so he with his nose
Trims his belt and his buttons, and turns out his toes.

[The Gryphon and the Mock Turtle interrupt with a brief exchange about what this unfamiliar version of the poem means, and then insist that Alice continue:]

I passed by his garden, and marked, with one eye,
How the owl and the oyster were sharing a pie—

[Alice's recitation is cut short by the Mock Turtle, who finds the poem "the most confusing thing I ever heard".]

Usually the themes get more interesting and complex as the week goes on, but today, after two puzzles with very clever concepts and revealers on Monday and Tuesday, we get this, which is blandly straightforward. The illustration / animation / connect-the-dots is, I guess, supposed to be some kind of bonus or value-added, but there's nothing particularly eye-popping or elegant about it, and from a solving standpoint, it does nothing. It's a cheap piece of glitz slapped on at the end to make you think something special has happened, when really all that has happened is that you've written in four things that feature LIGHTNING BOLTs, which the puzzle spells out for you, with a revealer that's merely descriptive. No wordplay, no trickery, nothing to figure out. And yes, those four theme answers do indeed feature LIGHTNING BOLTs, can't argue with that ... although I can argue with the phrase CAMERA FLASH, which felt painfully redundant. I had the FLASH part and thought "... but that's it ... the bolt represents the flash ... what is this extra stuff in front of flash?" After a couple of crosses got me the so-obvious-it's-difficult CAMERA, I thought "your clue says 'photography,' of course it's a CAMERA, yeesh." And since that was the last themer I got, that was how I ended the puzzle—at its weakest point, thematically. When I first worked out "flash," I thought the answer was going to have something to do with the DC superhero THE FLASH, whose symbol is also a LIGHTNING BOLT, I'm pretty sure (yes—see picture). Speaking of "flash," that's about how long it took me to figure out the theme:

For someone who has (fairly recently) watched every Friends episode, I had an oddly awkward start today at 1D: Friend on "Friends" (MONICA) when I (mentally) wrote in PHOEBE and then tried (briefly) to convince myself that maybe RuPaul's Drag Race aired on ... PBS? (1A: "RuPaul's Drag Race" airer (MTV)). Seemed ... unlikely. I mean, maybe someday that is where it will air, but not in these times. Probably. I also tried to make the "I'm on vacation" message be BRB, which is now making me laugh—"Be right back! In just two weeks! Please hold!" But no, it's OOO ("Out of Office"), which you'd use in business settings, in texts or in business communication apps like Slack. But these opening hiccups were just that—slight delays, not real obstacles, and there's not one other part of this grid where I struggled even a little. The puzzles have been almost absurdly easy this week. 

Notes:

• 8D: Soldier for hire, in brief (MERC)— never saw this clue (the puzzle was so easy that some of the answers just filled themselves in from crosses), but I have a question. A pronunciation question. If MERC is short for "mercenary," which has a soft "c," then do you pronounce MERC with a soft "c" as well, so that it ends up sounding like "murse," or do you go with the hard, manly hard-"c" sound, so that it sounds like ... Merck? As in "The Merck Manual"? Or is this word only for writing, and you're not supposed to actually pronounce it? It just seems awkward any way you slice it. The Chicago Mercantile Exchange Center is known as "The MERC," and there, the pronunciation is unambiguous (because of that hard "c" in "Mercantile"). Same with MERC as an abbreviation of the bygone car brand, "Mercury." I just can't imagine calling some (theoretically) tough dude a "murse." And yet "merk" also seems wrong ... [fiddles with internet] ... OK, well, Merriam-webster dot com is telling me it's "merk." Rhymes with "Herc." Or "jerk." Not a fan of this "c" sound switch, but I (obviously) don't make the rules.

• 63A: Drink aptly found within "social event" (ALE)— condescendingly easy, especially for a Wednesday. Adds to the "child's placemat" quality of this connect-the-dots puzzle. Also, I don't know that ALE is more "apt" to be consumed at a "social event" than any other beverage. Tea coffee wine cocktails. Maybe your breakfast beverages, your milks and your juices, and not particularly social, but most of the rest of the beverage category goes that direction. I don't think of ALE as iconically "social."
• 30D: What might be out for a spell? (WAND) — hands down, far and away the best clue in the puzzle. A real bright light in an otherwise (ironically) unflashy puzzle. 
• 51D: Was part of a series (ACTED) — I said I had no trouble after the small trouble in the NW, but I did have some more small trouble here. "Series" was sufficiently ambiguous that I needed several crosses to realize it was a television series.
• 39D: Common clown name (BOBO)— I just don't believe that there are "common" clown names. If you are a named clown, then your name should be unique. I mean, how many clowns can you even name? Bozo, Krusty ... Ronald McDonald? Pagliacci? How many BOBOs are there, exactly? And how many would you need in order for the name to be clown-common? Two? 

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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