Elephant rider's seat / SAT 12-20-17 / Pioneering hip-hop trio / Bayou genre / Subject of Durocher's nice guys finish last sentiment / Matchmaking site available in Hebrew

Constructor: Damon Gulczynski

Relative difficulty: Challenging

THEME:none 

Word of the Day: Leon CZOLGOSZ (34D: McKinley's assassin)—

Leon Frank Czolgosz (Polish: Czołgosz[ˈt͡ʂɔwɡɔʂ]; May 5, 1873 – October 29, 1901) was an American anarchist and former steel worker who assassinatedU.S. PresidentWilliam McKinley in September 1901. Czolgosz was executed just over seven weeks later.

If you knew CZOLGOSZwithout ever having seen the musical "Assassins," congratulations. To me, that name is just someone slamming their face into the keyboard, so that corner was horrendously tough, in a puzzle that was already pretty tough. Pop culture was all beyond me. AL PACINO was in "Merchant of Venice"? OK. Someone named INI Kamoze exists? If you say so. Didn't know Durocher was talking about OTT. Barely knew that Hemingway's old man was SANTIAGO (needed a bunch of crosses for that to come back to me). No idea what ALNICO is (except basically AL PACINO minus the PA). Would not have spelled FOGY without an "E". Point SUR? Nope. An URN is a "base"? Nope. EMU oil? Really? Wow. Poor EMU. Didn't know ANN meant "grace" (???). And on and on. RUN-DMC and KING JAMES were about the only proper nouns on my wavelength today. Oh, and MC ESCHER wasn't too hard. And J-DATE. But overall this was the bad kind of hard—hard because of proper nouns and tenuous clues.


ALTAR BOYS ring bells??

NOT VALID could've gone so many ways but it goes this dumb math way. NOT VALID is something you say about a license or a coupon. [Cracks] [Range] [Snag] are successive Across clues. This is sadistic. Write a clue. Piling up vague one-word clues is not good cluing. Top-level trivia buffs probably destroyed this, as so much of it is, well, trivial. I want something more from puzzles than just "do you know these names?" On the plus side, because I was so slow overall, I had only one real mistake. Wrote in LEANS / NOLO instead of TENDS / DARE (11D: Inclines / 22A: Option for people who can't handle the truth?).

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

PS [Pioneering rap trio with mathematically inspired works?] = RUN-DMC ESCHER

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