Infamous bushranger Kelly / SAT 12-28-24 / Beverage that begins with a bee? / Fans flip for it / What's left of F1 / Feature of English, but not Chinese / Sesquipedalia / Classic rubber dog toy / Singer in the family? / First trimester woe, informally / Jenkins known as "The First Lady of Children's Music"

Constructor: Sam Berriman

Relative difficulty: Easy

THEME: not really, no — there's some Arthur Conan Doyle stuff, but I wouldn't call it a "theme"

Word of the Day: NED Kelly (17A: Infamous bushranger Kelly) —

Edward Kelly (December 1854 – 11 November 1880) was an Australian bushranger, outlaw, gang leader and convicted police-murderer. One of the last bushrangers, he is known for wearing a suit of bulletproof armour during his final shootout with the police. [...] Historian Geoffrey Serle called Kelly and his gang "the last expression of the lawless frontier in what was becoming a highly organised and educated society, the last protest of the mighty bush now tethered with iron rails to Melbourne and the world". In the century after his death, Kelly became a cultural icon, inspiring numerous works in the arts and popular culture, and is the subject of more biographies than any other Australian. Kelly continues to cause division in his homeland: he is variously considered a Robin Hood-like folk hero and crusader against oppression, and a murderous villain and terrorist. Journalist Martin Flanagan wrote: "What makes Ned a legend is not that everyone sees him the same—it's that everyone sees him. Like a bushfire on the horizon casting its red glow into the night." (wikipedia)

Couple problems here. One is this no-man's land theme/non-theme. When a puzzle cross-references, and crosses, two marquee answers like SHERLOCK HOLMES (1D: Guinness's second-most-portrayed literary character in film, after Dracula) and DEERSTALKER CAP (13A: Iconic accessory worn by 1-Down), you expect it to ... go somewhere. I was like "oh we're doing a theme on a Saturday, are we? That sucks." And then it turns out we were not, in fact, doing a theme on Saturday, and that also, somehow sucked. There's just not enough marquee material in this thing to start with—I figured what little there is would end up being all SHERLOCK HOLMES-related. Maybe one long Across or Down on each side of the puzzle. But no, just the two. Just the two sides. Went to the other sides hoping to find some rationale for the Holmes crossing, but all I found was a Michael Jackson song ("MAN IN THE MIRROR") (12D: One asked to "change his ways," per a 1988 hit), and a bunch of TEN-DOLLAR WORDS (45A: Sesquipedalia). Ten dollars!? Wow, inflation has really done a number on the price of those words—my high school English teacher used to say "don't use a twenty-five cent word when a nickel word will do." And now the half-dollar word is worth ten dollars. Crazy. (Apparently "twenty-five cent word" is also an acceptable term—wiktionary has several denominations listed, including "two-dollar" and "five-dollar," with the antonym to all those being "ten-cent" ... even the cheap words have doubled in price since I was in high school)