Mascot of Winnipeg Jets / FRI 7-19-19 / Las Vegas casino with musical name / Mormon settlement of 1849 / Orange half of iconic duo / One-name singer with 1993 platinum album Debut / Spun wax say / Player of Skipper on Gilligan's Island

Constructor: Peter Wentz

Relative difficulty: Medium (Brutal SW + v. easy elsewhere = Medium) (6:06)

THEME: none

Word of the Day: Eudora WELTY (57A: Pulitzer-winning writer of "The Optimist's Daughter") —

Eudora Alice Welty (April 13, 1909 – July 23, 2001) was an American short story writer and novelist who wrote about the American South. Her novel The Optimist's Daughter won the Pulitzer Prize in 1973. Welty received numerous awards, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom and the Order of the South. She was the first living author to have her works published by the Library of America. Her house in Jackson, Mississippi, has been designated as a National Historic Landmark and is open to the public as a house museum. (wikipedia)

Ouch. Actually, ooh, nice ... then ouch. Really was enjoying this one until I hit the SW, where I couldn't make anything happen, and even after I circled the entire rest of the grid and came back to it, I couldn't make anything happen. As I was finishing off the SE, I was thinking "ugh, I gotta go back there and I'm already walled in and no help is coming so fuhhhhhhdge." So, yeah, this isn't the greatest thing, this having one corner be drastically harder than the rest of the grid (early Twitter feedback shows me very much not alone in my SW struggles). The problem is that now the SW is all I remember about this grid. Everything weirdly hard about the SW. And ATHIRST (38D: Quite eager). It's like the worst thing in the grid, why would you make the ATHIRST corner your hardest corner?? It just ensures that ATHIRST stays with you instead of drifting away as better answers come to the fore. To be clear, this is a very well-made puzzle that I mostly enjoyed, and ATHIRST is the only thing that makes me go ugh. Just ... don't put the ugh word in your hardest section. It makes everything so much ugh-ier.


Problems with the SW started with the always annoyingly ambiguous ELUDE-or-EVADE dilemma at 29A: Shake off (EVADE). ELUDE is sooooo much better as an answer for this clue. I think of EVADE as going around something and ELUDE as *specifically* escaping from something. I mean, fine, they are roughly synonyms, but ugh. And 60% of their letters are the same, double-ugh. So that went bad. And then MENACE clue was super vague (25D: Shark, to swimmers), so even with the "M," no help. Both long Downs meant nothing to me (and one was a tricky "?" clue). I really hate the cluing on ARIA and EPIC mainly because those are perfectly good ordinary words that have been given proper noun clues (ugh) and (bad luck for me) clues that are specifically from **** I care nothing about. I hate casino names like you wouldn't believe. Resent having to know them at all. Misremembered ARIA as AIDA, so that hurt. And EPIC Games??? Pffft, no way. The entire stack of four proper nouns down there, EPIC / BJÖRK / MOOSE (!!?!!) / WELTY, was utterly unknown to me at first. I own BJÖRK albums so I got her eventually, and I know *of* WELTY, at last, but oof, between all that and the ridiculous ATHIRST, I was most definitely screwed. Oh, and EGG HASH, LOL what? What is that? I'm in diners a lot and ???? Corned beef hash is a big deal. But EGG HASH?! Yikes. I didn't know what a SKIN GAME or what BLUSH PINK (?) was either, but their crosses were super-workable, so ... no complaints. Lovely puzzle overall, just wish it hadn't been so lop-sided, difficulty-wise.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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