Sci-fi character depicted as glowing red dot / SUN 12-1-19 / Flanged structural support / Onetime home of Vikings Twins / Umami enhancer for short / Salt's hip-hop counterpart / Hindu tradition that's two men's names in reverse / Eponym of London insurer

Constructor: Patrick Merrell

Relative difficulty: Easy (8:50)

THEME:"Actually ..."— themers are terms that are misleading on a literal level:

Theme answers:

• 25A: ... it abuts water on only one of its four sides (RHODE ISLAND) (not an island)
• 32A: ... it's an ellipse (ST. PETER'S SQUARE) (not a square)
• 59A: ... it was predominantly German (HOLY ROMAN EMPIRE) (not really Roman)
• 83A: ... it's an American name for a German game (CHINESE CHECKERS) (not Chinese)
• 108A: ... They're of Indian origin (ARABIC NUMERALS) (not Arabic)
• 118A: ... It's a woodwind from Central Europe (ENGLISH HORN) (not English)
• 4D: ... It's a rodent native to the Andes (GUINEA PIG) (not ... Guinean?)
• 16D: ... It's a legume (PEANUT) (not a nut)
• 85D: ... They're lousy places to sleep (RESTROOMS) (says you!)
• 100D: ... It usually comes from sheep (CAT GUT) (not made from cat guts)

Word of the Day: Maxim GORKI (sp!?!) (4A: Russian novelist Maxim) —

Alexei Maximovich Peshkov (Russian: Алексе́й Макси́мович Пешко́в or Пе́шков;^[1] 28 March [O.S. 16 March] 1868 – 18 June 1936), primarily known as Maxim Gorky (Russian: Макси́м Го́рький), was a Russian and Soviet writer, a founder of the socialist realism literary method, and a political activist. He was also a five-time nominee for the Nobel Prize in Literature.^[3] Around fifteen years before success as a writer, he frequently changed jobs and roamed across the Russian Empire; these experiences would later influence his writing. Gorky's most famous works were The Lower Depths (1902),  Twenty-six Men and a Girl (1899), The Song of the Stormy Petrel(1901), My Childhood (1913–1914), Mother (1906), Summerfolk (1904) and Children of the Sun(1905). He had an association with fellow Russian writers Leo Tolstoy and Anton Chekhov; Gorky would later mention them in his memoirs.

Gorky was active with the emerging Marxist social-democratic movement. He publicly opposed the Tsarist regime, and for a time closely associated himself with Vladimir Lenin and Alexander Bogdanov's Bolshevik wing of the party. For a significant part of his life, he was exiled from Russia and later the Soviet Union. In 1932, he returned to the USSR on Joseph Stalin's personal invitation and lived there until his death in June 1936. (wikipedia)

GORKI is just wrong. Please don't try to lawyer this one, please don't wave some dumbass reference book at me, just know that no one knows him as GORKI. That spelling isn't even mentioned in his wikipedia write-up. It's GORKY. Just as the novel / movie is "GORKY Park." It appears that maybe the Germans stylize him as GORKI. But playing fast and loose with conventional spellings like this is awful. It will make you no friends. It is the worst of olde-timey crossword gimmicks come to life. Eschew avoid and elude this sort of nonsense, please. Bad enough I gotta remember that ENESCO can alos be ENESCU and vice versa. Stop the madness. As for the theme, it's fine. Mansplaining is bleeping annoying irl, and trivia like this just doesn't interest me much, and some of these aren't very "you don't say"-ish. I mean, I am surprised to learn that the ENGLISH HORN is not English, but I'm not sooooo surprised to learn that RESTROOMS are lousy places to sleep. Unless the constructor or Will has tried to sleep in a restroom, I don't count this clue as valid at all. Pictures or it didn't happen. Still, it's an interesting premise for a theme, and some of the revelations were real revelations, so no problems there. Fill-wise, things could've been much better. ASON ASLAP SSTARS and ENDE are really not good. Maybe you can have two of those, if you're desperate, but four is an awful lot. That's in addition to the GORKI baloni, remember. Still, I'm inclined to give this the mildest of thumbs-up(s). It went by quickly and the theme concept kept my interest.


I had my fastest time in something like five months, which is odd, because I feel like I really flailed around a lot, especially at the end. Hard enough to suss out the awful ENDE and RES, whose clue I don't even really understand (57D: Pixelatedness, for short). I guess if it's Hi-RES it has a hi(gh) number of pixels? OK. Still, though, with junk fill like RES, why do you want to draw attention to it. Really hate EXIT SIGNS, since actually (actually!) I don't see actual EXIT SIGNS at the clover leaf near my house (66A: Things around a cloverleaf). I do, however, see a ton (well, four) of EXIT RAMPS, which fits, and is the superior answer. Got through there only to get totally baffled by BOOT (82D: A rancher might pull one over a calf). Totally bit on the misdirect there. Wrong calf, for sure. But still I soldiered onward down that treacherous-feeling east coast until my worst moment—the SSE, where three abutting Downs (ITCH, DYNAMIC, USEBY) all eluded me, as did the ROOMS in RESTROOMS could've been so many things (I like my first answer REST AREAS, much better, because at least I can imagine someone actually *attempting* to sleep there, unlike a restroom, dear lord). This meant that ARABIC NUMERALS was hard to see. I thought maybe ARABIAN ... something. Couldn't get to STAID from 93A: Serious either. At all. Don't think I've ever used STAID to mean "Serious." So, as I say, flailing. And yet I finished under 9. Might've been something close to a record if not for the flailing. Rest of the puzzle I don't really rememeber, which is better than remembering it for the wrong reasons. Low pass. Good day!

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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