Portmanteau unit of computing information / FRI 7-8-22 / Dog that's a cross of two French-named breeds / Insect with a delicate nest / River for which a European capital is named / Pocket-size medical tools / pre-marriage name of 1940s-50s first lady / Point oceanic spot farthest from land / Lyre-playing great-granddaughter of 8-Down / Something a provocateur opposes

Constructor: Kyle Dolan

Relative difficulty: Medium-Challenging 

THEME: none 

Word of the Day: BITON (50D: Dog that's a cross of two French-named breeds) —

The Biton is a hybrid designer dog created in the United States. Bred as a family companion from crossing a Bichon Frise with a Coton de Tulear, the Biton retains the small size and adorable fluffy or long and curly coat of its parents. (wagwalking.com)

Found this one pretty dull and dreary. It's built like a Saturday puzzle, with four thick, distinct, relatively isolated corners that you have to work your way through methodically, and that you can very very easily get stuck in if anything goes wrong. In short—not great flow. Further, when. you decided to basically make it a four-corner puzzle, you don't get interesting answers so much as acceptable answers. You're not gonna object to most of the longer fill, but you aren't going to be surprised or delighted by it much either. I don't understand what answers in this puzzle were supposed to be seed entries, i.e. the fill you really think is new and fresh and fun and interesting. You get a bunch of 9s, but since they're stacked, the best you can hope for is "clean," not "eye-popping." It's very tough to make stacked longer answers come out clean, so unless you seed one of those corners with a real winner and build on top of it, what you're most likely to get, best case scenario, is mostly what you get here—the corners hold up, and that's it. You get a "Q" here and and "X" there, but also a bunch of just-OK stuff like ART EDITOR and REDTIDES and IRON RULE and OUTRACED. Nothing wrong with those, just ... nothing memorable, either. PAPER WASP, which is freed from the limitations that come with long-answer stacking, is easily the most interesting thing in the grid, but even that is interesting only in the sense of being unusual (I didn't know such a thing existed) (32D: Insect with a delicate nest). It's a curiosity, not a surprising turn of phrase or a familiar expression or a famous name you've never seen in a grid or some as-yet ungridded modern phenomenon. PAPER WASP got a "huh, cool name" out of me ... which is good, but it's the most that any of the answers in this puzzle got out of me—at least in terms of positive mental commentary. This felt like a solid, workmanlike, 20th-century Saturday puzzle. Very competent, not a ton of fun.