Rarest naturally occurring element in earth's crust / SAT 12-7-19 / Nigerian novelist Tutola / Reduplicative girl's name / 2000s rock singer with hit albums Hell-On Middle Cyclone / Yoga pose similar to Upward-Facing Dog / Opera heroine who slays witch / Japanese city on Tokyo Bay / Old-fashioned attire for motorist

Constructor: Kevin G. Der and Erik Agard

Relative difficulty: Challenging (11:56)

THEME: none

Word of the Day: AMOS Tutuola (10D: Nigerian novelist Tutuola)—

Amos Tutuola (20 June 1920 – 8 June 1997) was a Nigerian writer who wrote books based in part on Yoruba folk-tales. [...] Tutuola's most famous novel, The Palm-Wine Drinkard and his Dead Palm-Wine Tapster in the Deads' Town, was written in 1946, first published in 1952 in London by Faber and Faber, then translated and published in Paris as L'Ivrogne dans la brousse by Raymond Queneau in 1953. Poet Dylan Thomas brought it to wide attention, calling it "brief, thronged, grisly and bewitching". Although the book was praised in England and the United States, it faced severe criticism in Tutuola's native Nigeria. Part of this criticism was due to his use of "broken English" and primitive style, which supposedly promoted the Western stereotype of "African backwardness". This line of criticism has, however, lost steam. (wikipedia)

Saw the constructor names and thought "O dang, this is gonna be hard." Then I got a little bit of the way in and ... the NW pretty much just fell. I mean, not Super easy, but very doable. So I thought, "Hey, maybe this isn't gonna be so bad." And I made my way down the west coast, and then ... nothing. Stuck. Tried to move into the NE—nope. Lucked into a good first guess at 34D: "Go ahead, ask" (FIRE AWAY) and got the far SE done, but even then, even with chunks filled in here and there, all over the grid, I was flailing for much of this. I just sort of ... oozed my way to the end. I'd say HEADBANDS, on the one hand, and CLOMP, on the other, were the twin epicenters of my trouble. Had HEADBA--S but couldn't see how clue could work with "S" at end (which, honestly, should've been and probably was ultimately the thing that made me realize [Do loops?] was a noun and not a verb phrase. As for CLOMP, my goodness (28D: Really hit one's stride?) ... I had ELOPE in there at one point, with ERIE (wrong) OGLE (right) and LOW FAT (right) "confirming" it. I didn't understand how that clue could point to ELOPE, but I figured, it's Saturday, I'm sure it's just one of those tricky clues that I'll grasp later. Hoo-whee, wrong. Pretty clear now, in retrospect, that finally figuring out the symmetrical answers HEADBANDS and WRAP PARTY (which ELOPE was blocking) was what turned me from dead-stuck to slowly moving. After WRAP PARTY, the SW wasn't too hard. NE proved much tougher, though it somehow took me a long time to even look at 4A: The "dark" in a Dark and Stormy, perhaps (JAMAICAN RUM), which really would've helped me, as I could've at least guessed the RUM part. Anyway, finally got the Puzzle Solved! signal at the "M" in AMOS (who, along with sounds-like-a-"Star Wars"-villain ASTATINE and not-"SHERRI"-or-"DIANNE"-but "RONNIE," I'd never heard of). (10D: Nigerian novelist Tutuola + 35D: Rarest naturally occurring element in the earth's crust + 12D: Name that's the title of a 1964 4 Seasons hit)


Here's just a list of all the ways things went bad:

The Things:

• 1A: Shaken thumb, in American Sign Language (TEN) — no idea
• 18A: How a security guard might say goodbye? (GOTTA BOUNCE) — this is actually terrible corny wordplay, not a proper "?" clue. 42A: Setting for a plastered cast? (WRAP PARTY)—*That* is a proper "?" clue.
• 24A: Mascot of the W.N.B.A.'s Mystics (PANDA) — wanted the name of some ... wizard or magician or famous ... mystic? But it's just ... PANDA? Does she even have a name?
• 25A: Most actors don't hold real ones, informally (CIGS) — a. hard!, b. really?? I've seen so many actors smoke on screen I just don't know where the "most" is coming from here.
• 28A: Language from which "Saskatchewan" comes (CREE) — As I mentioned above, I had ERIE here
• 33A: Light on packaging (LOW-FAT) — The lack of quotation marks around "Light" feels like a crime
• 39A: League leader, informally (COMMISH) — ohhhhh, the person in charge of the league. Not the team in first place. Sigh. Gotcha.
• 40A: E.U. alliance (G-SIX) — me: ".... UNIX? Like ... les états ... unix?"
• 48A: Opposite of calm (PANIC) — any other MANICs out there? ... anyone? ...
• 54A: Patchwork? (BETA RELEASE) — I don't even get this one. I thought betas were pre-releases? So what's being ... patched? Exactly? Also, ask me how excited I am by STEM-related jargon ...
• 44D: Japanese city on Tokyo Bay (CHIBA) — I know a martial arts actor named CHIBA, but Japanese city ... no, can't say it rings a bell. I was like "is there really a city named CHINA ... in Japan?")

• 4D: The tunes "The Blarney Pilgrim" and "The Lark in the Morning," e.g. (JIGS) — I mean ... if you say so ...
• 9D: Yoga pose similar to Upward-Facing Dog (COBRA) — baffled by this (at first), which is highly amusing for many reasons, not least of which is the fact that I was in both updog and COBRA as recently as Tuesday night. Sigh. 
• 36D: Energy regulators in the body (THYROIDS) — my dumb ass seriously wrote in ADYNOIDS at one point, wow

All that, on top of the previously mentioned trouble with HEADBANDS, CLOMP, AMOS, "RONNIE," ASTATINE, etc. I'm probably most mad at the fact that I got NEKO CASE almost entirely from crosses without ever having looked at the clue—that would've been a gimme for me!! Would've felt great to just throw it down with no help from crosses, bam. But that's one of the weird things about solving—no telling where your eyes are gonna go first. I've got a bad habit of really really holding off on even looking at the longer clues until I've dealt with their shorter crosses. Mostly this works, but sometimes, esp. if I get frustrated with the shorter stuff, I *forget* to just at least *check* the clues on the longer answers. I assume I'll *need* the shorter crosses to make sense of the long stuff. But not always. Anyway, a worthy, hard puzzle that made me feel bad about myself! Which is my problem, not (mostly) the puzzle's.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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