Constructor: Peter A. Collins
Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium
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THEME: none
Word of the Day: ALMA-ATA (36D: Former name of Kazakhstan's largest city) —
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Pretty easy stuff, with only the SW and NE proving in any way KNOTTY. The high point was probably just remembering B.B. King's version of "THE THRILL IS GONE"; the stack of longer answers in the middle is solid, but KICKS IT UP A NOTCH feels like an Emeril slogan at this point, and I guess if you like remembering Emeril, hurray, but if you like remembering Emeril, you and I are very different. The SW was tough because LOL what in the world is ALMA-ATA? That answer is a real blot on this otherwise not-full-of-arcane-trivia puzzle. Truth is, I couldn't have told you the *current* name of Kazakhstan's largest city, so "former name" ... well, I guess a "former name" always has the chance of being better known, but in this case, uh, no. Just a bunch of letters, mostly "A"s. That's what makes that answer bad to me. I know for sure that the constructor didn't think it was a cool thing to put in the grid. No one puts that in the grid unless they are Desperate for a bunch of low-value Scrabble TILEs to make the corner work out. It screams "crutch." No one but no one is dipping into the "bygone Kazakh place names" jar if it's not an absolute emergency. A-TEN adds to the unpleasantness down there; leagues change shape and size seemingly every year and I can no longer really keep track. Plus, ATEN ... again, no one's going to accuse that of being good fill. No constructor leaps at a chance to put ATEN in there (The "A" stands for "Atlantic" btw). But the struggle down there didn't last long, as the crosses were easy enough to get.
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Bullets:
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Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium
Word of the Day: ALMA-ATA (36D: Former name of Kazakhstan's largest city) —
Almaty (/ˈælməti/; Kazakh pronunciation: [ɑlmɑˈtə]; Cyrillic: Алматы), formerly known as Alma-Ata and Verny (Russian: Верный), is the largest city in Kazakhstan, with a population of about 2,000,000 people, about 11% of the country's total population, and more than 2.7 million in its built-up area that encompasses Talgar, Boraldai, Otegen Batyr and many other suburbs. It served as capital of the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic and later independent Kazakhstan from 1929 to 1997. In 1997, the government relocated the capital to Akmola (renamed Astana in 1998, later renamed Nur-Sultan in 2019) in the north of the country.
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Bigger struggle for me was the NE, where the core of the struggle was just getting into that corner at all. I tore through the NW with no problem, and was able to drop down the west side very easily via the adjacent long Downs:
Finished the northern section pretty easily, but could not leap out of it into the NE. The problem starts with having SPOOL instead of SPOIL (9D: Turn), though even when I changed it to the correct answers, I kept wanting its cross, 22A: Squat (THICK-SET) to start THIGH-, like ... a THIGH DIP or something (I was obviously thinking of "squat" as a gym exercise). And LUSTRE ... well, I had that, only I had the correct spelling, LUSTER. Cheap to signal British spelling simply by mentioning Crown Jewels. In fact, I'd say not just inaccurate, but cheap. The jewels cannot spell. I do not spell LUSTER differently simply because I am describing something British. Just awful logic there. But the misspelling wasn't the issue. Even with LUSTER in place, which is mostly right, I got nowhere. Just couldn't remember CURIOUSER. Bizarre. Curious, even. So I just went down the west coast, across the south, and then circled back up via Emeril (again, yuck), finishing up in the NE with the APOSTLES.
Bullets:
- 48D: Jump over (OMIT)— "Jump" is terrible here, you'd say "skip." I know you want to mislead people, but keep the clues at least plausible.
- 28A: Buenos Aires-to-Brasília dir. (NNE) — no one likes dir. answers, but I was thrilled to guess this one correctly on the first go. I am usually Terrible at mentally calibrating these things.
- 1A: Kind of poet (BEAT) — opened the puzzle, saw this clue, and thought, "SLAM!" As I got up to close my office door before solving, I thought "BEAT!" And then as I was sitting back down, I thought "LAKE!" Any other four-letter poet plausibilities. Anyway, it was nice to start solving with a small army of possibilities in my head for 1-Across. EARLAP confirmed that BEAT was the right choice pretty quickly.
- 34D: Massenet's "Le ___" (CID)— can't remember seeing this clue for CID (bad partial crosswordese that used to be way more common). Wondered if maybe Massenet wrote an opera about Le C.I.A.
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