Indiana/Illinois separator / MON 1-2-17 / Invaded in large numbers / "I understand," facetiously / Classic Eric Clapton song about unrequited love / To be, to Tacitus

Hi Puzzlers!!! It may be a new year but it's the same old Annabel you get on the first Monday of every mouth! My new year's resolution is to not accidentally type "mouth" instead of "month" like I just did there. 

Constructor: Chuck Deodene

Relative difficulty: Hard!



THEME: PARTY DOWN — Circles hidden within Down clues spelled out synonyms for "party." Different ways to celebrate NYE, I guess!

Theme answers:

• LI(FEST)YLE CHOICE (3D: Vegetarianism or bohemianism)
• RADIO (GALA)XY (5D: Source of faraway X-rays)
• WA(BASH) RIVER (25D: Indiana/Illinois separator)
• SCHOOL CA(FETE)RIA (11D: Spot for a food fight)
• PARTY DOWN (21D: Really revel...or a hint to the words formed by the circled letters)

Word of the Day: RADIO GALAXY (5D: Source of faraway X-rays) —

Radio galaxies and their relatives, radio-loud quasars and blazars, are types of active galaxy that are very luminous at radio wavelengths, with luminosities up to 10³⁹ W between 10 MHz and 100 GHz.^[1] The radio emission is due to the synchrotron process. The observed structure in radio emission is determined by the interaction between twin jets and the external medium, modified by the effects of relativistic beaming. The host galaxies are almost exclusively large elliptical galaxies. Radio-loud active galaxies can be detected at large distances, making them valuable tools for observational cosmology. Recently, much work has been done on the effects of these objects on the intergalactic medium, particularly in galaxy groups and clusters.

HOLY moly, this puzzle gave me so much trouble!! I was stuck in the center (around 29) and the bottom right corner for about a million years. I've never been good with US geography, and how am I supposed to know anything about DVD brands when they haven't been relevant since I was about eight years old?!? Oh well, maybe I'm just DENSE. I did like the double meaning of "web," and all the vaguely scientific words like GENE, ATOMS, IONS and of course RADIO GALAXY. It reminded me of the five seconds around the beginning of freshman year when I wanted to be a bio major. (Sorry, bio, but four years of reading eighteenth-century poetry mixed with emotional feminist texts won out.)

By the way, what was up with TOBACCOS? Is that really the plural of TOBACCO?

The theme was cool - I'm always happy when the theme includes Downs so the down-only solvers get to take part in the fun! Once I got LIFESTYLE CHOICE my sister and I were convinced the theme answers would be FEST / IVAL / OF LI / GHTS as a late Chanukah celebration. Oh well. What kind of FESTs, GALAs, BASHes and FÊTEs did you all have the other night? All I did was go to a friend's house to watch the ball drop, but it was probably the best party I'd been to in years because she had two big, droopy mastiffs which were absolutely adorable. Watching the ball drop paled in comparison to watching the big cute dogs play.

Bullets:

• HAITIAN (14A: Port-au-Prince resident) — Tragically, I am no longer able to mentally pronounce this word correctly because of Clueless. However, I would like to remind everyone that it does not say R.S.V.P. on the Statue of Liberty! :p 
• CICADAS (65D: 17-year insects) — I still think cicadas are about the coolest bugs ever. First of all, they have TWO separate Pokèmon lines based on them, so you know they have to be good...second of all, the latest cicada summer happened when I was a kid so I have all these memories of trees absolutely covered in cicada shells. I think we used to play with them like they were dolls. Kinda morbid, when you think about it now, but oh well.
• NECK (56D: Part bitten by a vampire) — Am I the only one who thought this meant "partly bitten by a vampire"? Like a half-vampire or something? I was so confused and I spent about ten minutes racking my brain for all the vampire lore I knew, all the while wondering how being partly bitten by a vampire would even work. The vampire just bites you with one fang? You can turn into a bat but only on Wednesdays? You don't drink blood, you just eat really rare steaks?
• LAYLA (39D: Classic Eric Clapton song about unrequited love) — Believe it or not (okay, you probably believe it, because I didn't even know the DVD thing) I actually didn't know this song. So here's some Eric Clapton to brighten up your day.

Signed, Annabel Thompson, tired college student.

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