While I enjoyed the marquee answers in this one, my favorite answers were actually less conspicuous. I didn't know the short actor names ( IMAN, YOBA), but what's new? Tellingly, those were my only real sticking points (along with WOZ and CHU). I was far more put off today by diet culture (" I'M ON A DIET") and the kinds of people who might say "Thanks, OBAMA" than I was by the wildly multivalent meanings of PUSSY or PONCE. Anyway, PRIDE FLAGS and PUSSY somehow primed me to see / remember the slur meaning of PONCE, a name I've seen in the grid many times before and never blinked at. Language is flexible and funny and sometimes, depending on context, words can evoke things their users never intended. But PONCE is a perfectly innocent place name, pronounced very differently from the (British) slur PONCE, which is apparently dated now anyway. I think you were probably supposed to snicker at (the other slang meaning of) PUSSY, which hasn't been in the grid in 21 years (!?) (a long dry spell). Those answers just really stood out to me, probably because of the PRIDE FLAGS. This is obviously unintentional and not really that important. Now, they weren't clued that way, of course, but PUSSY and PONCE hit weird today. The most jarring thing today, especially in a puzzle that is proudly flying PRIDE FLAGS, was encountering not one but two (!) words that can be slurs against gay and/or "effeminate" men. This let me wrangle the NE without too much sweat, and once I got the first few letters after QUIT, the roller coaster car finally dropppppppped: I figured at least one of those guesses would be wrong and I'd have to work it out with the long Acrosses, but nope, they were all right on the money. I went from floundering around in the NW to KHLOÉ BEAR URGE NES in quick succession, no hesitation, bam bam bam bam. KYLIE? They wouldn't use KYLIE, would they? Anyway, she's KYLIE Jenner, right? Oh, KHLOÉ, that's gotta be it, yes good choice." And sure enough. It pains me that the names of the Kardashians are so transcendent in our culture that even I, a person who has negative interest in the doings of that family, can run through the names like "KRIS, no, too short. The next most memorable thing about this puzzle, for me, was that-and I cannot stress enough how off-brand this is-the first answer I put in the grid was a Kardashian ( KHLOÉ). Consequently, the entire NW was a bust at first pass-in fact, it was a bust until the very end (as you can see by the cursor in the printed grid, above, that's where I finished-with one of the crown princes of Crosswordese: OLIO). So I'm out there early trying to think of what 3-letter name anyone ever called Steve Jobs. That is, I figured the Steve was the very very very famous Steve and not the merely famous Steve. The most memorable thing about this puzzle was that I, like a rube, fell for the "Apple co-founder" prank.
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