Rachel

Why was six afraid of seven? Because seven was a registered six offender. And speaking as a Gen X woman, that's not what HOO-HA means. This one involved a lot of Googling, but cheers to all the sports / car / geography people out there. I can tell you had fun.

Digital dependency? Of course. I need my fingers to fill in crossword puzzles.

Pretty grid, but if Diana RIGG was in *two* episodes of a show five years ago then that's a pretty uncool clueing. I looked up a ton of answers here -- no shame -- learning things. I laughed out loud at HYENA and SIXTH SENSE though. And I haven't seen love yet for "cylindrical grain holders" being COBS. A really great misdirection.

Smooth, my first with no lookups. As a MINOR quibble for the editors, bodybuilders are *never* after TONE, which is just a level of activation of a muscle if it means anything at all; bodybuilders are explicitly seeking hypertrophy (or the lack thereof). If they weren't trying to change the shape of their body, they wouldn't be bodybuilding! TONE is, however, something classically sought after by aerobics class devotees who are "trying not to bulk up".

Oh wow. I got slowed down by a PuRITY / PARITY problem, but this is brilliant grid art. Love the way there are no Os anywhere else in the puzzle besides the die faces.

SERGE turns out to be a specific kind of twill weave, not really a material in itself. One of several reasons I failed for ages to get into the NW corner, along with having RATS where I needed NUTS, but the only one I can actually complain about.

I threw myself off for way too long by trying ONCE UPON A TIME for scene-setting words, but was delighted to be reminded of one of my favorite Salinger stories: "To ESME, with Love and Squalor." P.S. My other favorite MONGOOSE is from an obscure book by Alexander Key called Flight to the Lonesome Place. Anyone here read it?

I really thought that "Did as expected on the links", at 47D, was going to be CLICKED. So clever, so wrong.

AYO EDEBIRI for a 10-letter extender of the theme. I did object to the sports slugger Natick, but the crosses were gentle enough that I could avoid lookups. And it was weirdly nice to see ACTV for once, instead of the endless ACTI and ACTII entries.

Wow. I thought "portals" as soon as I saw the grid, but still ultimately lost a lot of time flyspecking -- my error turned out to be a typo (IINCH) inside one of the rebuses where it could barely be seen, which was painful but entirely on me. I hear people talking about POY -- puzzle of the year? How do we vote? This is my first year really in the game, thanks to retirement...

[Monotheists believe in this] = ONE GOD

Aw, I appreciated the callout to Lars and the Real Girl. That movie is bizarre but shows so many acts of kindness that it ends up being heartwarming.

The last mistake to fall for me was INVEST / VTOS ... unfortunately there *is* something about VTO cars on the internet, so I figured INVEST could be related to a "Down" payment in some way I wasn't getting. But no. Time to saquirrel away GTO in the same corner of my brain I keep REO, for those auto fill moments.

Dang, very unfortunate for me that there is in fact a "noon SHOW". I thought it couldn't be LATE SHOW because LATE isn't really a time of day. Ultimately, got thoroughly stuck at DISc/DISk parallel to SLY_OOTS with the still-baffling attention magnet crossing both. Giving up on cleverness today as we are indeed in a HEATWAVE here in the east. Going to go SPLOOT.

A new Saturday PB for me -- I was right on the wavelength, and getting 1A and 16D out of the gate with absolute certainty was enough to change my usual solve pattern so I could build off those. More from Jesse, please!

This HUFFS and it PUFFS and oh sigh, it BUFFS,and I guess you could say I am some fan of it. Nice tight theme.

BREAD, of course, is another food that means money. I wish I hadn't been so slow to solve this one when I need to be packing for my own upcoming DOPAMINE RUSH at amusement park... better if I had SPED through. Alas!

EL_AY crossing AL_EST was a complete natick for me. If we can avoid them for proper names, can we please start avoiding them with sports trivia? Actually, one could argue that AL WEST *is* a proper name, as ELWAY very certainly is. So maybe it was a true natick that should have been avoided from the start.

Especially lovely and generous notes from the constructor on this one. My only real objection is to SKI CAP, a type of field cap used by several German-speaking or German-influenced armed forces since the late 19th century. I have never seen a runner wearing one, nor do runners (at least in the Northeast US) tend to wear the thick knitted beanies sometimes sold as ski CAPs.