Constructor: John Ewbank
Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium
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THEME: none
Word of the Day: ACHILLES (24A: Styx figure) —
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This one was pretty FEISTY, with lots of lively fill and some sharp clues. Started in a dismal place with that 1-Across answer, oof (1A: Police officers, in British slang). I guess that's "original" fill but it was the only thing in the grid that was totally unknown to me, and my general reaction to cop content is "less, please" (instead we get more at the bottom of the grid, with the NYPD next to a militarized ARMORED CAR). Sounds like PLODS is derogatory. Hard to imagine how such an ugly-sounding lump of a word could be anything but. Definition I'm reading now says yes, it is derogatory, implying "dull" and "slow." Apparently the term DERIVEs from "PC (Police Constable) Plod," a character in Enid Blyton's"Noddy" stories. I'm gonna step away from this rabbit hole before I fall in... whatever its implications, wherever it comes from, PLODS is not exactly the tone-setter you want at 1-Across. Well, certainly not the tone-setter *I* wanted. I'm here for a good time and you're giving me sneering foreign slang for cops? Harrumph. But as I say, this was actually the puzzle nadir. It all went up from here (in a good way) until it all went down (also in a good way) at EVEREST BASE CAMP (7D: It's an uphill climb from here). Ironically, this answer didn't climb; instead, thrillingly, it plummeted:
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I was already whipping around from all the SPACE OPERA TIME TRAVEL, and then whoosh, down down down. I love that this answer goes from peak to base. It seems to be ... enacting itself, somehow. I was not at all certain that EVEREST BASE CAMP was right when I first plunked it down. I felt like the answer was doing recon, stretching out into the vast unknown of the empty grid, trying to detect ... other signs of life? Fellow answers? And sure enough, the Everest answer picked up PANEL NEATO ATLAS in quick succession, though AT BAY was the answer that really locked me in, confirming the "B" in the part I was least sure about (BASE CAMP). The puzzle unfolded from there, with EVEREST BASE CAMP acting as a kind of ... base camp? ... from which I went out and to which I returned. A bunch.
Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium
Word of the Day: ACHILLES (24A: Styx figure) —
In Greek mythology, Achilles (/əˈkɪliːz/ ə-KIL-eez) or Achilleus (Greek: Ἀχιλλεύς) was a hero of the Trojan War, the greatest of all the Greek warriors, and the central character of Homer's Iliad. He was the son of the Nereid Thetis and Peleus, king of Phthia.
Achilles' most notable feat during the Trojan War was the slaying of the Trojan prince Hector outside the gates of Troy. Although the death of Achilles is not presented in the Iliad, other sources concur that he was killed near the end of the Trojan War by Paris, who shot him with an arrow. Later legends (beginning with Statius' unfinished epic Achilleid, written in the 1st century AD) state that Achilles was invulnerable in all of his body except for one heel, because when his mother Thetis dipped him in the river Styx as an infant, she held him by one of his heels. Alluding to these legends, the term "Achilles' heel" has come to mean a point of weakness, especially in someone or something with an otherwise strong constitution. The Achilles tendon is also named after him due to these legends. (wikipedia) (my emph.)
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Not sure why, but the NW and SE corners played way easier than their counterparts. I mean, the NE and SW weren't terribly hard either, but they definitely took a bit of effort to break into. I got PISTON to go into the NE corner (28A: Any of the "Bad Boys" in the 1980s-'90s N.B.A.) (the Detroit Pistons were a late-80s powerhouse), but I couldn't get STARTERS to come in from below and had no idea what was going on with that STALK clue (23A: Something out standing in its field?) (me: "... hay STACK?"), so I had to break flow and jump into the unknown, hitting those short four-letter crosses in hopes that they would give me traction. Luckily, CHAR and ETNA were accurate and gave me needed traction. Then I looked at the long Downs up there and realized I didn't need that traction after all, in that SPARK NOTES was a total gimme that I could've gotten with no help at all—an extremely easy answer for an English teacher (12D: Website with a No Fear Shakespeare section). Poor SPARK NOTES. I'm guessing ChatGPT is gonna really eat into your "how do we do our homework without doing the actual reading?" business. (I think SPARK NOTES and the like can be valuable, but only for those who actually bothered to read in the first place).
The SE corner was harder, mainly because I totally forgot about the connection between ACHILLES and the Styx. I talk about ACHILLES all the time, every semester when I teach Virgil's Aeneid (ACHILLES isn't really in it, though his horrible son has a memorable, violent scene). But with -LLES in place I couldn't think of anything, LOL. Seems preposterous in retrospect, but I had nothing. My brain was like "look, if it's not ... I don't know, the SEYCHELLES? ... I can't help you." I was having trouble getting into that corner via FEISTY as well—hard to see from just the back end. Again, I had to jump in and hack at short crosses, and again, my first two guesses came up gold (CREE, SELL), but the thing that really locked me in down there was "Post hoc, ERGO propter hoc" (causal fallacy). Abandoned by ACHILLES but saved by ERGO, that was my SW experience. The classical vibe keeps going down there with CUP BEARERS, a term I've heard only in relation to Zeus / Jove / Jupiter (25D: Attendants at a saturnalia). Specifically, it's the term used for Ganymede, the boy whom Zeus abducted to serve as his "cup bearer" (as well as lover) in Olympus (Zeus, notoriously shaky on things like sexual propriety and consent). I didn't know "saturnalia" had CUP BEARERS. Turns out I'm confusing "saturnalia" and orgies. They're both classical in origin and involve ... reveling, of sorts, so I forgive myself the confusion. Anyway, CUP BEARERS is a pretty tough answer, I think, but the puzzle as a whole, not that tough. Very doable. And fun. See you tomorrow.