Eight Elvises Sixteen Jackies / SAT 10-20-18 / Ice planet in Empire Strikes Back / Astronomer with geocentric model of universe / Texter's valediction

Constructor: Ben Gross and James Somers

Relative difficulty: Medium (probably easier, but it's 5:15am on a Saturday and my unwarm brain came in with a Medium time) (7:45)

THEME: none

Word of the Day: PTOLEMY (4D: Astronomer with a geocentric model of the universe) —

Alexandrian astronomer (of the 2nd century) who proposed a geocentric system of astronomy that was undisputed until the late Renaissance (vocabulary.com)

This one started pretty dull, but got better (and harder) toward the bottom. There's slightly too much neon junk here, like AREI and especially ILLE (ugh), and to a lesser extent APLAN ICAMEAREEL. ILLE always used to get the dumb clue ["Winnie ___ Pu"], which is some Latin version of Milne, I guess. Turns out no clue is really gonna save ILLE. The longer stuff in this grid could've been more interesting too. ANTOINETTE was a giveaway, and TETE-A-TETES and RAT-A-TAT just seem like filler. I see that NETFLIX AND CHILL *wants* to be the marquee answer here, but that phrase has already appeared in the NYT crossword and (worse) already feels soooooo dated. Like, in the future, decades from now, someone will throw an "Early '10s Party" and a couple will come as both NETFLIX and CHILL and people will go "Greeg! (or whatever the new "OMG" is), your costumes are so 2014! Hey, remember memes!? [Sigh] Things sure were better back then." This is another puzzle that really wants you to feel its colloquial nowness. The upside is that this striving gets us the two best answers in the grid: BUTT-DIALED and FLIPPHONES, which are *almost* a perfect crossing; you know, if you could butt-dial a flip phone. BUTT-DIALED is even kind of sitting on FLIPPHONES. Not bad. The rest of the grid was just OK. Workmanlike. Not bad, by any means. But kind of blah.

Fact that both good answers were "?"d made them Much harder to get, and since both good answers are long answers, not getting them meant not being able to move easily between sections. In fact, the SE corner was by far the hardest part of the grid for me, as both those answers meet down there, and AHOY, MATEY seemed way more possible than the vaguer, breezier AHOY THERE (43A: Ship-to-ship communication). And then the clue on TYPES was impossible for me, even with the "Y" in place. And clues on LAC (31A: Switzerland's ___ de Neuchâtel) and WILL (35A: Something that's "free" (although that's debatable)) meant nothing to me, and I had no idea about the WARHOLS or Hannah Montana, and the FBI is a "Spy grp."? I think of CIA as spies and FBI as, you know, cops, feds, G-MEN. Had the "-BI" and honestly didn't want to put in the "F" because the clue seemed so weird. I had no interesting wrong answers today, though I did want my NEUROTIC to be a PSYCHOTIC at first (40A: Head case, so to speak) (I'm seeing "Psycho" tonight with live orchestra, so maybe that got in my head!). Oh, right, and AHOY, MATEY, botched that one. Oh, and also, the worst one was a wee one back at the very beginning. 14A: Advanced (LENT), for which I had WENT. This led to me imagining a high-schooler asking, in a bewildered voice, "Why are we weading da CWASSICS!? I wanna wead Ward of da Wings!" (1D: Makeup of a high school reading list)

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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