Eponymous Belgian resort town / FRI 11-9-18 / Bar Ireland's oldest pub dating to AD 900 / Sentry's query / JJ's sister on good times / Caesar's conquest of 58-50 BC

Constructor: Robyn Weintraub

Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium (5:02) (actually probably very easy, but my brain is not yet warmed up this morning...)


THEME: none

Word of the Day: SEAN'S Bar (28A: ___ Bar, Ireland's oldest pub, dating to A.D. 900) —

Seán's Bar is a pub in the town of Athlone that is Ireland’s oldest pub, dating back to AD 900. In 2004 Guinness World Records listed Seán's Bar as the oldest pub in Europe.^[1][2][3] Seán's Bar is located at 13 Main Street, Athlone, on the west bank of the River Shannon in central Ireland, and was originally known as "Luain's Inn". It is often colloquially referred to simply as "Seán's". (wikipedia)

I have no pep or vim or whatever this morning. I'm mostly just trying to get my eyes to focus on the screen without slowly shutting. And yet even at hunt-and-peck speed, I finished this in 5:02—nowhere near my record, but fast enough for me to think I could've smoked this thing if I'd been above 50% power. Twitter confirms alot of PBs (personal bests), so I think "Easy" is probably a fair rating. I loved this grid and if I'd been fully awake I likely would've wished that the cluing was somewhat harder. In my current condition, however, it felt just right. There were three parts that slowed me down. As usual, the beginning slowed me down (I should really just take this for granted—of course the beginning is likely to be one of the hardest moments in the puzzle: you have no information in the grid to go on). I ran the short Downs and got a few of them. Actually, of the shorter ones, I got only OER and ASAP, but I also got WHO GOES THERE? immediately, so that was nice. But NO-GOOD and CRED weren't easy for me as clued and, worse, once I got RE-R at the front end of 16A: Backward, I figured that third letter had to be an "A"—REAR-something. Then I wrote in YEAS for 2D: Agreeable answer to an invitation. Sigh. YEAS are "answers," plural, and they're more "answers" to calls for votes. So that was dumb. Then I couldn't drop REDEFINES down. I just had RED- and no idea (8D: Adjusts the parameters of). And that's the only way to get from that corner to the center and NE of the puzzle, so again, things slowed down.


Things very much slowed down around SEAN'S (???), which is bad fill (plural name) dressed up as if it were a class, cultured crossword clue. Nice save. Still, never heard of it, so I had to hack at every cross in that little section. But again I had huge luck with the longer answers. FUNNEL CAKES took no effort. TOURIST TRAP, eventually, took no effort. I had most of GLASS CEILING filled in before I saw the clue, so, easy. These long-answer victories made up for some of the shorter-answer flubs. I finished on a very murky section that had me a Little worried, because I couldn't remember CONESTOGA. I knew very well that the word was C- something -STOGA, but my problem was I never learned the wagon word until I was an adult, and growing up in California there was a bottled mineral water called CALISTOGA (there probably still is), and that is the only word my brain could think of. So between C- and -STOGA lay a void, a murky unknown, a scary dark territory that also contained an answer I had wrong (MENDS for MOLDS at 27D: Gets into shape?), and then one I wasn't entirely sure about (34A: Old Speckled Hen, for one — ALE). But I molded that section into shape block by block, and boom, done. And somehow my time was well below average. OK, then!


Five things:

• 48D: Competitor of Us Weekly (STAR)— I would not know. STAR? Oh this is one of those supermarket check-out rags? Yeah, no.
• 37D: Largest carrier in Japan (ANA) — All Nippon Airways. Crosswords taught me this. Actually, crosswords just taught me ANA. I only looked up what the letters stood for just now on the google.
• 46A: Fishing basket (CREEL) — pretty funny to have this answer in the same puzzle with 21A: "Fish are friends, not ___" (line from "Finding Nemo"). Also, I think there should be an animated "Rocky" parody starring a fish boxer named "CREEL"; Nemo can be his trainer or something.
• 40D: J.J.'s sister on "Good Times" (THELMA) — Scooby-Doo's VELMA was the only non-SELMA -ELMA I could think of at first, but then this name came back to me. Temporary layoffs!

• 48A: Eponymous Belgian resort town (SPA) — this fact is still highly weird to me. It's like discovering there's a town in England called BATH. . . wait, what?! No. Really? Let me check. . . well whaddya know... well this all just came full circle: "The city became a SPA with the Latin name Aquae Sulis ("the waters of Sulis") c. 60 AD when the Romans built baths and a temple in the valley of the River Avon, although hot springs were known even before then." (wikipedia)

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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