Contralto singer known as the "First Lady of Radio" / SAT 1-11-25 / River featured in the Rig Veda / First of four emperors in the "Year of the Four Emperors" / Note extender, in sheet music / Common format for an essay, informally / Professional squatters? / Taiwanese electronics brand / Pride parade participant? / Simple house style with gables / Some sweet pick-me-ups / Jester named in a Shakespeare soliloquy

Constructor: Ryan McCarty

Relative difficulty: Medium to Medium-Challenging

THEME: none 

Word of the Day: Rig Veda (23A: River featured in the Rig Veda = INDUS) —

The Rigveda or Rig Veda (Sanskrit: ऋग्वेद, IAST: ṛgveda, from ऋच्, "praise" and वेद, "knowledge") is an ancient Indian collection of Vedic Sanskrit hymns (sūktas). It is one of the four sacred canonical Hindu texts (śruti) known as the Vedas. Only one Shakha of the many survive today, namely the Śakalya Shakha. Much of the contents contained in the remaining Shakhas are now lost or are not available in the public forum.

The Rigveda is the oldest known Vedic Sanskrit text. Its early layers are among the oldest extant texts in any Indo-European language. The sounds and texts of the Rigveda have been orally transmitted since the 2nd millennium BCE. Philological and linguistic evidence indicates that the bulk of the Rigveda Samhita was composed in the northwestern region of the Indian subcontinent (see Rigvedic rivers), most likely between c. 1500 and 1000 BCE, although a wider approximation of c. 1900–1200 BCE has also been given. (wikipedia)

***ATTENTION: READERS AND FELLOW SOLVERS*** : It's early January, which means it's time once again for my annual week-long pitch for financial contributions to the blog. Every year I ask readers to consider what the blog is worth to them on an annual basis and give accordingly. Writing this blog is a joy, but it is also a job—an everyday, up-by-4am job. My morning schedule is regular as hell. So regular that my cats know my routine and will start walking all over me if I even *stir* after 3am. You ever lie there in the early morning, dying to simply roll over or stretch, but knowing that the second you do, the second you so much as budge, the cats will take it as a signal that you're through with sleep and ready to serve them? So you just lie perfectly still, trying to get every ounce of bedrest you can before the cats ruin it all? That's me, every morning. I guess you could say they "help" get me up on time to write, but come on, I have an alarm for that. The cats are adorable, but frankly they're no help at all. After I feed them, I go upstairs to write, and what do they do? They go straight back to sleep. Here I'll show you. This was two days ago, when I came downstairs after writing:I didn't even bother to start looking at the giant answers in the middle because traction is always Much more likely to come from shorter answers, so ... on to another corner. I tried the SW, which at first looked unpromising ("Year of Four Emperors" you say? Oh, of course, I am a learned person, that must be ... uh ... &^$$#!). I figured Robin Hood's bow was made of YEW, but that got me nowhere. What I am about to tell you feels more like a confession than a boast, believe me: the answer that got me started down there, which ended up being the key to the whole puzzle (I never lost momentum again) was: NUMETAL (31D: Music genre for Linkin Park and Limp Bizkit). Just looking at that "word" makes me embarrassed. If my musical tastes were the solar system (with me as the sun), you'd have Stevie Wonder and Lucinda Williams somewhere around Mercury and Elvis Costello and Big Thief in roughly the Venus position and then, let's see, NU-METAL, that would be ... well, the joke here would be "Uranus" but in reality we're talking Altair or possibly Zogbron (an ice planet in the Flibular Galaxy, of course it's real, shh). I am aware that Limp Bizkit (it hurts to write it) and Linkin Park (must they all do this with their names?) exist. They were pop culture phenomena. But I have never listened to a single one of their songs all the way through. And yet ... I somehow paid enough attention to know that whatever music they were making had, at some point, been given the name "NU METAL" (I don't even know if it's one word or two words or hyphenated, and I don't really care). So ... NU METAL to the rescue. I plugged that sucker in and the puzzle Lit. Up. Well, it still took a little push, a little patience, to get into the center, but I don't get anywhere in this puzzle without NU METAL.