Siamese fighting fish / SAT 7-28-19 / Tragedy first performed in 431 BC / Roman god invoked by Iago / Believers who practice ahimsa / Manner of speaking in eastern Virginia

Constructor: Byron Walden

Relative difficulty: Medium? Maybe Medium-Challenging? (solved it on clipboard, in comfy chair, untimed)

THEME: none

Word of the Day:"TARAS Bulba" (18D: Gogol's "___ Bulba") —

Taras Bulba (Russian: «Тарас Бульба»; Tarás Búl'ba) is a romanticized historical novella by Nikolai Gogol. It describes the life of an old Zaporozhian Cossack, Taras Bulba, and his two sons, Andriy and Ostap. The sons study at the Kiev Academy and then return home, whereupon the three men set out on a journey to the Zaporizhian Sich (the Zaporizhian Cossack headquarters, located in southern Ukraine), where they join other Cossacks and go to war against Poland. [...] The original 1835 edition reflects the Ukrainian context of the story. In response to critics who called his The Government Inspector "anti-Russian", and under pressure from the Russian government that considered Taras Bulba too Ukrainian, Gogol decided to revise the book. The 1842 edition was expanded by three chapters and rewritten to include Russian nationalist themes in keeping with the official tsarist ideology at the time, as well as the author's changing political and aesthetic views (later manifested in Dead Souls and Selected Passages from Correspondence with his Friends). The changes included three new chapters and a new ending (in the 1835 edition, the protagonist is not burned at the stake by the Poles). The little-known original edition was only translated into Ukrainian and made available to the Ukrainian audience in 2005.

I generally love Byron Walden's puzzle. I *liked* this one—it's tough, fairly smooth, and has a lot of original / unusual entries (all pluses), but for some reason the marquee stuff just didn't grab me. It felt technical. I didn't even know TIDEWATER ACCENT was a thing, so I can't really appreciate it, and LOAN TRANSLATION is fine but dull. In getting both ACCENT and TRANSLATION, I had this feeling of let down, like ... that's it? Part of a professional argot, not springy, bouncy, mainstream stuff. Fine, not at all *bad*, but kind of a waste of prime real estate, imho. As for the rest of it, most of it was a challenging, good time. Only times I really screwed up my face in distaste were 1. FARMPLOW (??). This felt awfully redundant. Where else are we using plows, now? I guess there are snow plows, OK, but I feel like we all agreed to call FARMPLOW just "plow" and I liked it that way. TEEN PEOPLE was basically TEEN + [throw a magazine title in here and pray!]. Actually PEOPLE came to mind reasonably quickly, but since it was in that big open area in the SE, it was tough to confirm. Wait ... Oh, right, sorry, I was listing the times I made faces. So 1. was FARMPLOW and 2. was TARAS (18D: Gogol's "___ Bulba"). Gogol is a reasonably famous writer and so fair game, but my god TARAS feels like hardcore crosswordese. In my entire life, that title has only ever come up in crosswords. I learned it from there, and there it was stayed. So it feels emblematic of the worst kind of crosswordese: old-school gate-keeping. If you've been solving *forever*, it's probably a gimme, but if you've been solving even a Long Time in this century, there's a good chance you've Never seen it, and since it is nowhere near inferrable: tough luck. This is just the third appearance of this clue since I started blogging ('06), and only the second of this decade. By contrast, here's the frequency of "TARAS Bulba" clues in the '70s:

from xwordinfo

Having HIRES and SAPPHIRES in the same grid, so close to each other (practically on top of each other) was a little unfortunate. Repeated letter strings of that length aren't totally taboo, but you'd usually try to keep them apart so as not to draw attention to them. Binge-eating is certainly a real phenomenon, but something about BINGE EATER (22D: Certain obsessive-compulsive) feels bad to me. Cruel somehow. I don't like being excited / entertained by guessing someone's malady. Again, *not* offended. I'm just explaining why I didn't completely love the vibe of this puzzle. Also cruel: the clue on ASHLEE (44A: Simpson who infamously lip-synched a song on "S.N.L."). Not inaccurate. But mean. She has become overdefined by that moment of public humiliation. Again, it feels not great to have my puzzle pleasure REST ON someone else's suffering. I'm probably overfocusing on the negative today; Byron's just so good that my expectations are unreasonably high. Things started out with a fantastic BOING (1A: Spring report), and continued on in a largely impressive, engaging way. There were just fewer wow moments than I would've liked. Probably more SENARY (?) (34D: In base 6) and BETTAS (??) (1D: Siamese fighting fish) moments than I would've liked as well.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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