Constructor: Brad Wiegmann

Relative difficulty: Medium

• BARELY MANAGING (24A: Leadership style of the nudist club president?)
• MANY MOONS AGO (41A: When the nudist club was founded?)
• RAW RECRUITS (56A: New members of the nudist club?)
• COMIC STRIPS (78A: What happens in the stand-up show at the nudist club?)
• EXPOSURE TIME (92A: Hours spent by the pool at the nudist club?)
• FULLY RECOVERED (108A: How people returned from a week at the nudist club?)
• BOTTOMLESS PIT (4D: Where the nudist club orchestra plays its concerts?)
• WINNING STREAK (59D: Victory in the annual nudist club 1K?)

Cetus (/ˈsiːtəs/) is a constellation. The Cetus was a sea monster in Greek mythology as both Perseus and Heracles needed to slay, sometimes in English called 'the whale'. Cetus is in the region of the sky that contains other water-related constellations: Aquarius, Pisces and Eridanus. (wikipedia)

Constructor: Yacob Yonas

Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium to Medium (again, the proper nouns—and there are a lot of them—are gonna cause experiences to vary wildly)

A maser (/ˈmeɪzər/, an acronym for microwave amplification by stimulated emission of radiation) is a device that produces coherent electromagnetic waves through amplification by stimulated emission. The first maser was built by Charles H. Townes, James P. Gordon, and Herbert J. Zeiger at Columbia University in 1953. Townes, Nikolay Basov and Alexander Prokhorov were awarded the 1964 Nobel Prize in Physics for theoretical work leading to the maser. Masers are used as the timekeeping device in atomic clocks, and as extremely low-noise microwave amplifiers in radio telescopes and deep space spacecraft communication ground stations. (wikipedia)

Constructor: Chuck Deodene

Relative difficulty: Medium-Challenging (???!) (no idea, solved it on ZOOM whilst chatting)

Superleggera chair

Giovanni "Gio" Ponti (18 November 1891 – 16 September 1979) was an Italian architect, industrial designer, furniture designer, artist, teacher, writer and publisher.

During his career, which spanned six decades, Ponti built more than a hundred buildings in Italy and in the rest of the world. He designed a considerable number of decorative art and design objects as well as furniture. Thanks to the magazine Domus, which he founded in 1928 and directed almost all his life, and thanks to his active participation in exhibitions such as the Milan Triennial, he was also an enthusiastic advocate of an Italian-style art of living and a major player in the renewal of Italian design after the Second World War. From 1936 to 1961, he taught at the Milan Polytechnic School and trained several generations of designers. Ponti also contributed to the creation in 1954 of one of the most important design awards: the Compasso d'Oro prize. Ponti died on 16 September 1979.

His most famous works are the Pirelli Tower, built from 1956 to 1960 in Milan in collaboration with the engineer Pier Luigi Nervi, the Villa Planchart in Caracas and the Superleggera chair, produced by Cassina in 1957. (wikipedia)

Constructor: Dylan Schiff

Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium

• HANGING INDENT (3D: Feature of some bibliographic citations)
• COVER VERSION (36D: Whitney Houston's "I Will Always Love You," for example)
• HEART MURMUR (6D: Stethoscope detection)
• BARBARA BUSH (41D: Former first and second lady)
• STEAK TARTARE (10D: Dish often topped with raw egg yolk)

William Charles Ayers (/ɛərz/; born December 26, 1944) is an American elementary education theorist. During the 1960s, Ayers was a leader of the Weather Underground that opposed US involvement in the Vietnam War. He is known for his 1960s radical activism and his later work in education reform, curriculum and instruction.

In 1969, Ayers co-founded the Weather Underground, a self-described communist revolutionary group that sought to overthrow imperialism. The Weather Underground conducted a campaign of bombing public buildings (including police stations, the United States Capitol, and the Pentagon) during the 1960s and 1970s in response to U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War.

Ayers is a retired professor in the College of Education at the University of Illinois at Chicago, formerly holding the titles of Distinguished Professor of Education and Senior University Scholar.^[ During the 2008 U.S. presidential campaign, a controversy arose over his contacts with then-candidate Barack Obama. He is married to lawyer and Clinical Law Professor Bernardine Dohrn, who was also a leader in the Weather Underground.

Also

William Oscar Ayers (September 27, 1919 – September 24, 1980) was an American Major League Baseball pitcher from Newnan, Georgia. He played for the New York Giants during the 1947 season. (wikipedia)

Note: I took the photo *before* filling in OCTANT (more unloveliness). ATHOS is an age-old repeater, but if your fill around it is fresh and clean, an age-old repeater can be highly tolerable. And yet ... today ... we got from ATHOS straight into a truly ugly abbr. (ATTS) (I like this better clued as a QB stat, but I like it best when it's not in my grid at all), and then TROU, ugh, a "word" that baffles so many solvers (esp. younger solvers) every time it appears because no one says it except maybe in some olde-tymey jokey way; I have never heard it except in the phrase "drop trou" (i.e. "pull your pants down"), which I have heard only in movies??? Not sure. And yet I see it in crosswords All The Time (or ... far too regularly for my taste). So, ATHOS ATTS TROU. That's your opening gambit. And then TONTO!? LOL, nice save there, I guess, with the clue, but the thing about TONTO, however you clue it, is that people still see the Lone Ranger's sidekick, which evokes all the racial unpleasantness your new clue is trying to avoid. And then there's OCTANT! ATHOS ATTS TROU TONTO OCTANT. Quite a series. At that point, I truly wanted out. And things don't get much better: REWON and REUSE. The vintage crosswordese horror that is ONERS. Some relatively harmless classics like AGORA, ALERO, and the OGEES. Pretty crusty all over. Some obvious Scrabble-f***ing in the NE and SW corners, but those corners are so cut off that there's no way the Q and J and K can really compromise anything. They're actually handled fairly neatly.

The names might prove slightly troubling today, esp. since ALLIE (a toughie) and DALEY cross. DALEY is such a major name in politics that I assume he'll take care of any problems with ALLIE, but still, any letter can cause trouble when you're dealing with an uncommon name like ALLIE, which I couldn't remember at all (Holden, Phoebe ... that's it, that's all I got in the Catcher memory bank). I know AYERS only from all the Obama-era "controversy." AYERS has more commonly been clued as AYERS Rock (Australia), but that's a colonialist term no longer in use. It's officially ULURU now. Put that in your grid and smoke it (seriously, ULURU deserves grid time). 

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld 

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

Hello, all! It’s Clare — coming to you this time for the last Wednesday in February rather than Tuesday. This month has mostly flown by for me. People told me that I’d be bored in my final year of law school, but how can I be bored when they’re keeping me so busy with work? I’ve got multiple actual clients and papers to write and exams to study for and jobs to apply for and just… it’s a lot! Anywho, on to the puzzle!

Constructor: Kate Hawkins

Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium

THEME: POTTY MOUTH (57A: One using crude language ... or one saying the last parts of the answers to the  starred clues?) — last words in theme answers are (like "potty") euphemisms for "toilet":

Theme answers:

• IRON THRONE (18A: *Seat for the ruler of the Seven Kingdoms of Westeros)
• DEADHEAD (24A: *Devotee of Jerry Garcia's band)
• ELTON JOHN (36A: *"Can You Feel the Love Tonight" singer/composer)
• WATERLOO (52A: *Decisive defeat)

Word of the Day: TIN ROOF (49A: "Hot" place for a cat in theater) —

This sundae features a scoop of vanilla ice cream with chocolate sauce and a scoop of chocolate ice cream with creamy white marshmallow sauce, topped with Spanish peanuts. The Tin Roof Sundae was created in 1916, at the Potter Drug Co., in Potter, Nebraska, owned by pharmacist James Earl Thayer. His son, Harold Dean “Pinky” Thayer, worked in the soda fountain as a teenager and is credited for inventing the ice cream treat. According to Dr. J.E. Thayer of Sidney, there are two stories of how the sundae got its name. The first is that it was inspired by the tin ceiling in the business; the other is that the stable across the street had a tin roof and that he named it after that. The Tin Roof Sundae can still be enjoyed in Potter, Nebraska, where the Potter Drug Co., now called the Potter Sundry, is still in operation. (wikipedia)

that feeling when a cat ruins your favorite sundae

• • •

Very competent but very staid, very quarter-century-ago feeling, and very not for me. This feels like a puzzle from a bygone time, a time when ... people were ashamed to refer to the toilet and therefore invented a whole bunch of silly euphemisms. Actually, "head" is nautical and "loo" is British, but "john"'s period of peak popularity is before my time (on this earth) and I've only heard people use "throne"-as-toilet in the dumbest of unfunny jokey ways. And the revealer is baby-talk, or, rather, adult baby-talk used to refer to someone who is swearing (you know, like a grown-up, or a precocious kid). There's nothing charming about any of this. Toilet euphemisms, no, the very concept of "POTTY MOUTH," no. Truly, it's such an off-putting expression, combining baby-talking with an astonishingly filthy literal image. And the priggishness implied by the term ... I just can't find any of this fun. It's not offensive, it's just tiresome. Just use profanity, just say "toilet," just grow up and get on with your life. Further, toilets—not my favorite thing to have to meditate on at 5 in the a.m. Again, this theme is right over the plate, conceptually. Utterly conventional. A last-words-type puzzle just like they made in the last century. Unfortunately, the corny chuckle-"humor" comes from the last century as well. When I read the revealer clue, I really thought that [One using crude language...] was going to involve some kind of clever oil business pun (on "crude"). This made discovering the whole "potty" angle that much more disappointing. Worse than the theme subject (which you can like or not like, whatever) is the stale fill. The grid is just drenched in repeaters (of the ASAP EMIR HOC CSI ERE SSR ERIE UKE type). Just ... awash. FLOODed. This repeater onslaught probably has more to do with my failure to warm up to this puzzle than the theme (which is pretty much neutral at a purely technical level, in terms of concept and execution). When you don't have snazzy or eye-catching or even interesting longer answers, all the short stuff really starts to feel like a swarm of gnats. And today's longer answers were perfectly adequate, but that's about all they were. Thus, gnats. Better than BEES, I guess, but only just (32A: Honeybunch?).

Constructor: Barbara Lin

Relative difficulty: Normal Monday except for KYIV, what the hell was that!?

• GIMME A BREAK (20A: "Jeez, lighten up, will ya!")
• ON CUE (38A: As expected)
• OUT OF POCKET (55A: Like medical expenses you pay for yourself)
• TOWEL RACK (11D: Bar from the bathroom?)
• ON THE BALL (34D: Alert)

Niobium, also known as columbium, is a chemical element with the symbol Nb (formerly Cb) and atomic number 41. Niobium is a light grey, crystalline, and ductile transition metal. Pure niobium has a Mohs hardness rating similar to that of pure titanium, and it has similar ductility to iron. Niobium oxidizes in the earth's atmosphere very slowly, hence its application in jewelry as a hypoallergenic alternative to nickel. Niobium is often found in the minerals pyrochlore and columbite, hence the former name "columbium". Its name comes from Greek mythology, specifically Niobe, who was the daughter of Tantalus, the namesake of tantalum. The name reflects the great similarity between the two elements in their physical and chemical properties, making them difficult to distinguish. (wikipedia)

Constructor: Matthew Stock

Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium (much harder if your knowledge of pop music is bad)

• "FLY ME TO THE MOON" (Space bars? [Frank Sinatra]) (a song about (outer) space)
• "SINGIN' IN THE RAIN" (47A: Wet bars? [Gene Kelly]) (a song about getting wet)
• "JAILHOUSE ROCK" (69A: Prison bars? [ Elvis Presley]) (a song about prison)
• "MONEY, MONEY, MONEY" (92A: Cash bars? [Abba]) (a song about cash) 
• "DANCING ON MY OWN" (116A: Singles bars? [Robyn]) (a song for people with no partners)
• "POUR SOME SUGAR ON ME" (3D: Candy bars? [Def Leppard]) (a song seemingly related to candy?)
• "WE ARE THE CHAMPIONS" (33D: Gold bars? [Queen]) (a song about winning a "gold" medal)

Pakistan International Airlines (Urdu: پاکستان بین الاقوامی ہواپیمائی‎; abbreviated PIA, Urdu: پی‌آئی‌اے‎) is a Pakistani-International Airline and the national flag carrier of Pakistan under the administrative control of the Secretary to the Government of Pakistan for Aviation. Its central hub is Karachi's Jinnah International Airport, while Allama Iqbal International Airport in Lahore, and Islamabad International Airport serve as secondary hubs. (wikipedia)