Constructor: Trenton Charlson
Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium
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THEME: none
Word of the Day: Saint CYRIL (20A: Saint associated with the Russian alphabet) —
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A lot of nonsense up front, and then an easy and dullish exercise the rest of the way. Putting seventy-five or however many "X"s in one corner is not the HOOT you think it is, from a solving perspective. It's not that getting those "X"s was difficult. It wasn't. It just seems like a waste of good space, space that could've been used for legitimately interesting fill instead of a totally arbitrary number of "XO"s and a YOOHOO / YOHOHO pseudo-echo. And then to come crashing out of that corner with XYLOPHONE (promising ...) MALLET (thud) (17A: What can strike up a tune?). When I got MALLET, after working the crosses, I thought "really, we did all that for just ... the one ... MALLET?" And that ended up being the most original thing in the grid. After that, there are a couple good longer answers—TEXTBOOK EXAMPLE is solid, and I like FALL EQUINOX and ARMY-NAVY as well—but there's mostly 3s, 4s, and 5s, not much to write home about. The center is thick with blandness: PETSTORE, ARETOO, TARTARE, ÉCOLES—a lot of common letters but not a lot of zing. The fill is smooth throughout, it's just that IBAR IPSO AOL OCALA etc. has a way of piling up and deadening the Friday thrill. Detracting from the Zoom—even though I did lowercase "z" zoom through the puzzle, for the most part. It was easy but not exciting. It's possible that the NW corner was your idea of fun. It's clearly somebody's idea of fun. It was not mine.
Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium
Word of the Day: Saint CYRIL (20A: Saint associated with the Russian alphabet) —
Cyril (born Constantine, 826–869) and Methodius (815–885) were two brothers and Byzantine Christian theologians and missionaries. For their work evangelizing the Slavs, they are known as the "Apostles to the Slavs".
They are credited with devising the Glagolitic alphabet, the first alphabet used to transcribe Old Church Slavonic. After their deaths, their pupils continued their missionary work among other Slavs. Both brothers are venerated in the Eastern Orthodox Church as saints with the title of "equal-to-apostles". In 1880, Pope Leo XIII introduced their feast into the calendar of the Roman Catholic Church. In 1980, Pope John Paul II declared them co-patron saints of Europe, together with Benedict of Nursia. [...]
The Glagolitic and Cyrillic alphabets are the oldest known Slavic alphabets, and were created by the two brothers and their students, to translate the Gospels and liturgical books into the Slavic languages. The early Glagolitic alphabet was used in Great Moravia between 863 (the arrival of Cyril and Methodius) and 885 (the expulsion of their students) for government and religious documents and books, and at the Great Moravian Academy (Veľkomoravské učilište) founded by Cyril, where followers of Cyril and Methodius were educated, by Methodius himself among others. The alphabet has been traditionally attributed to Cyril. (wikipedia)
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I might've tolerated the NW corner a little better if, in addition to drowning me in corny "X"s, it had not decided to cram not one not two but three "?" clues into a very, very small space. You see the numbers 1, 3, and 17 in today's grid? They're all within one square of one another, and they are all "?" clues. That's just a gruesome pile-up. A desperate attempt (maybe?) to force the solver to slow down so they will "appreciate" your "X" games. It all just seems like it's trying too hard to impress. It's show-offy without actually being enjoyable. And it's just bad, unbalanced form to cram that many "?" clues into that small a space. There are only two such clues in the entire rest of the grid. The NW corner just makes the whole puzzle feel wildly imbalanced, in multiple ways.
I started with HOT (wrong) ROY (correct) and SON (correct), which is the only one of the three I was certain of (8D: Chaz, to Cher). Somehow, from the "O"s, I was able to see the XOXOXOXO gimmick. Maybe I got YOHOHO first, I don't remember (6D: Accompaniment for a bottle of rum). I'm sort of surprised that YOHOHO clue didn't (also!) have a "?" on it, but I guess the line is "YOHOHO and a bottle of rum," so it's pretty literal. I'm not actually sure where that line comes from, though it's very, very familiar. I want to say it's from the "Pirates of the Caribbean" ride at Disneyland, but that can't be right. I think that one is "Yo-ho, yo-ho, a pirate's life for me." Ah, I see the "bottle of rum" line is originally just a snippet of song in Treasure Island. The chorus then got expanded to a longer poem in the late 19th century, and the poem/song's pop cultural presence just proliferated from there. Anyway, after the "XO" line went in, everything was easy thereafter. I wrote in SOLAR PANELS instead of SOLAR PLEXUS because I just got cocky (had SOLARP, took one look at the first word of the clue, "Network," and proudly wrote in SOLAR PANELS! I mean, what else was it going to be ...?) (23D: Network of nerves in the abdomen). Cockiness paid off later when I no-looked OLIVE OYL off the OYL. Confirmed OLIVE with crosses, never saw the clue. Had a bit of a struggle at the end with SURVIVE (27D: Keep on keeping on) and its various crosses. Definitely didn't see the bird angle at 26A: Rail construction (NEST). And then LIVE was weirdly hard (39A: As it happens). I thought "as it happens" was the segue phrase, akin to "it just so happens..." So the only thing I could think to write in there was LIKE (???). Anyway, I SURVIVEd this puzzle. I wish it had been more [Beautiful and rare].