Roman consul who captured Syracuse in A.D. 211 / SAT 1-2-16 / Mass master in brief / Alternative to Goobers / Jamaican jerk chicken seasoning

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Another wickedly easy themeless to help us ring in the new year with a sense of power and accomplishment. Found this one both rougher and more interesting than yesterday's, but only slightly tougher. Saturday really should fight back more. I unlocked this one with YALE (wink!). I didn't go to YALE, but my cousins did, and my ex-girlfriend did, and the editor of the BuzzFeed crossword did, and on and on and on, and YALE is easily the most crossworded-about U. there is, so I know far more than I should about cheers and mascots and what not related to that place. "Light and truth"? Lux et veritas? Just hand me the answer, why don't you? Once I had YALE, KOALA was a cinch (15A: One with a pouch), as was I WILL. And so SKIN TIGHT went boom and then TBS and GRECO-, which made POWER GRAB go boom, and that NW corner was done inside 90 seconds or so. The only thing that gave me pause (and the pause was Considerable) was NESSES. Yeesh. That and ARIE were like shin-kicks of terribleness, especially brutal because the rest of the grid was really quite smooth. Anyway at the 2 min. mark I was here:

The potential Wow effect of HATERS GONNA HATE (37A: Message to critics) was significantly blunted by that same answer's having appeared in a NYT grid just six weeks or so ago. The answers I really noticed were ones that made me stumble a bit. I have never heard someone call a LEFT TURN a "Louie" (9D). I was thinking army ranks, Canadian coins (that's a 'loonie' actually) ... not turns. Not knowing that and not knowing ARIE made the NE by far the hardest section to get into and bring down. But even that wasn't too hard. I balked (and remain balking) at ADEN, YEMEN (62A: Where the U.S.S. Cole was attacked in 2000). I don't think you can just put any city, country pairing in a grid, or city, state, for that matter (I'm looking at you ERIE, PA ... what the hell other ERIE is there!?). But I recently put LUCKNOW, INDIA in a puzzle, so I probably shouldn't judge (in my defense, my answer was thematic, and thus had what I like to call "Thematic Dispensation").


Took me a while to figure out -EST and how it made sense, given the clue (21A: What most adjectives end in?). The "?" tells you some wordplay is afoot, so ... "most" here indicates superlative adjectives, e.g. "most" fat = fattEST, "most" tall = tallEST, etc.). Superlative adjectives end in -EST. I hope your New Year has been superlative. I will see you tomorrow.