Constructor: Daniel Okulitch
Relative difficulty: Medium (started Hard, got Easy)
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THEME: none
Word of the Day: Queen ADELAIDE (5D: English queen who lent her name to a city of 1.3+ million in the British Commonwealth) —
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What is that, a phone? A grumpy face? A grumpy phone? It's an odd, blobby-looking grid, is what it is. It's unusual, I'll give it that. Daunting at first glance, but then you realize that actually there are plenty of short answers all over the place, which means lots of potential footholds, and not so much scary white space as there initially seems to be. I began by confidently attacking the short stuff in the NW corner and got precisely nowhere. I teach a class on 20c American Comics, including comics by important Black creators, and *I* couldn't come up with ORRIN, so if you knew that one, hoo boy, I am impressed (2D: ___ C. Evans, journalist who co-founded All-Negro Comics (1947)) (All-Negro Comics ran for exactly one issue). I wanted Jackie ORMES, and was very proud of knowing her name ... until I realized she was not the answer. Better ORRIN C. Evans than ORRIN Hatch, for sure, but YIPES, that's legitimately obscure. Thought Red and White might precede SEA, thought the bygone royal was a TSAR or a SHAH, wrote in FUSS for 3D: What's raised in a ruckus (CAIN) and tried to cross that with ACT AS at 16A: Be part of, as a show. I got INS in that section and that's all I got. Things then went from difficult to ugly as I crossed to the other side of the grid, where the going was easier but not exactly pretty. First answer: TASE (15D: Stun, in a way). Oof. Never happy to see this (brand-name) instrument of police brutality or the verb that derives from it. It was especially ... police-y today, appearing as it does right next to MIRANDA RIGHTS. I went TASE OOPS GEE SHMOO ... I told you, not pretty. And the unprettiest part came next: STENOG (11D: Court figure, informally) ... STENOG... STENOG. I thought the days of STENOG, with a "G," where behind us. I mean, the days of STENOG are, literally, behind us, but the "G," woof, been a long time (actually it appeared once in 2020, but before that it had been eleven years). Anyway, here was me:
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Relative difficulty: Medium (started Hard, got Easy)
Word of the Day: Queen ADELAIDE (5D: English queen who lent her name to a city of 1.3+ million in the British Commonwealth) —
Adelaide of Saxe-Meiningen (Adelaide Amelia Louise Theresa Caroline; 13 August 1792 – 2 December 1849) was Queen of the United Kingdom and Hanover from 26 June 1830 to 20 June 1837 as the wife of King William IV. Adelaide was the daughter of Georg I, Duke of Saxe-Meiningen, and Luise Eleonore of Hohenlohe-Langenburg. Adelaide, the capital city of South Australia, is named after her. (wikipedia)
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And so I got started, but the NE continued to be impenetrable because getting the back ends of the long Acrosses didn't help me get the fronts. I forgot the name of the environmental MOVEMENT. I thought the [Silence notifications?] might be LIGHTS. And [Bourgeoisie and proletariat] sounded so specifically Marxist that I figured something much more particular than SOCIAL preceded CLASS at 1A. Then I tried to dip into the middle of the grid with an entirely made-up bread product called CROSETES! (7D: "Little toasts," in Italian). Very wrong, and yet ... somehow I managed to get into the middle of the grid anyway, and finally ended up with some fill I could enjoy: a SEX SCENE (30D: When you might see a star's moon?):
Things got way easier from here on out, as, unlike up top, I was able to get those middle answers from their back ends. I was especially able to see the horrid wrongness that was CROSETES and change it to a word I actually know reasonably well, it turns out: CROSTINI. After that, whooshed back west across the middle, then whooshed down around the SW corner into the south (where all the long answers went in very, very easily). But before that I must've taken a detour back into the pesky NW via ADELAIDE, a queen I've never heard of but a city I know of, and a song I know very well.
SAKS SOX SINTAX, all the things I failed to see at first fell into place. Then it was down to the Monday-easy bottom to finish things off. Ended with SINGLET, which I didn't understand at first (45A: Attire one might grapple with). I've never worn a SINGLET. Are they so hard to put on that you have to "grapple" with them, I wondered. But sometime during this write-up, it struck me that wrestlers wear SINGLETs, and that's probably what the "grapple" business is all about. In the end, this felt like three puzzles, difficulty-wise: the NW (hard), the middle and NE (easyish), and the bottom (extremely easy). Outside of the NW (and CROSETES!), I had no errors to speak of, except TAMPA before TEMPE (42D: Home of one of the country's largest state universities), and (much less explicably) RINGLET before SINGLET. A pretty average Saturday overall, but bonus points for the creepy, rotten pumpkin-like, ghost-like, sad-telephone-esque grid.