Thrill seeker's appurtenance / FRI 1-19-18 / Third largest city in Switzerland / Last new Beatles track before their split in 1970 / 1966 Pulitzer-winning Edward Albee play

Constructor: David J. Kahn

Relative difficulty: Challenging

THEME: BEETHOVEN (35A + 36A) on EARPHONES (21D + 39D) — there is a note:

Word of the Day: PARADOR (8A: Spanish hotel) —

noun

1. a hotel in Spain owned and administered by the Spanish government. (google)

• • •

Why? Why would you do this? Fridays are the Best Days for puzzles. My favorite day. Themeless puzzles that are on the easier side. These are usually the most delightful puzzles of the week. So why would you run this Saturday+-difficulty Maleska-era-skewing wisp-of-a-joke puzzle today!? If you had to do it, do it Tomorrow. It was certainly hard enough (my time was 2x normal Friday and well above my normal Saturday). This was a whole lot of brutality just so I could notice the "H" at the end. I probably could've made the experience slightly easier if I had Bothered To Look At The Note At All, but I resent notes and never read them until after I'm done. I take it as a personal challenge. A dare. If I need your note, your puzzle's no good and I'm no good as a solver. If I'd read it, I *probably* would've pieced together that the central answers were involved, and that would've given me BEET (instead of ACAI, ugh), and that western section might've fallen a Lot sooner (it was a nightmare). But I'm not playing your stupid reindeer games on Friday. Just *seeing* the little yellow "Note" symbol in my software gave me ill will toward this puzzle. And then it was hard and full of weirdness and obscurity and "clever" cluing, and Then the payoff was ... what it was. If you absolutely had to make this "joke," why not do it inside a clean, modern, delightful grid, instead of this painfully BORESOME one (I hope I'm using that "word" right—I refuse to look it up).


No idea:

• GRAB BAR (1A: Help during the fall?) — ?????????????? Brutal. Do you mean "hand rail?" What the hell is a GRABBAR!? This was the beginning of the end for me in the west, as I had 5D: Smoking GUN. And thus -R--GAR at 1-Across. Forever.
• ACCORDS (1D: Grants) — Oh, it's a verb. How nice. Not how I was reading it.
• BEAR (4D: Difficult thing to do, informally) — without GRABBAR, no hope
• PARADOR (8A: Spanish hotel) — a what now?
• ABILENE (16A: Hardin-Simmons University setting) — I teach at a university and have never heard of this university, and thus could not have known where it is located
• ABASE (9D: Mortify) — Kept thinking about someone being "mortified" and just refused to accept that "abased" meant the same thing
• COY (26A: Hardly fresh) — ugh these words. What decade are these gender politics from? I had CO- and had to run the alphabet. Twice
• SLOPE (27A: It's not on the level) — SLANT
• PIERO (28D: Renaissance artist ___ della Francesca) — cannot keep all those guys straight, and without SLOPE ... nope
• BEET (35A: Healthful juice source) — ACAI, as I (a) say above

• GOPRO (37A: Thrill-seeker's appurtenance — just brutal, this clue. I forgot these exist. They don't have anything to do with the "seeking" of the thrill, just the recording of it. The word "appurtenance" is a horrifically ugly thing to have to look at. 
• MEI (47A: ___ Lan (giant panda born at the ATLANTA zoo)) — there are so many damn zoo pandas at this point, expecting people to know the particular three-letter Chinese name part at this point is ridiculous. The cross-reference adds nothing here.
• ELENA (50D: "The Vampire Diairies" protagonist") — nope, but luckily ELENA is a name that appears on crosswords a lot
• ISN'T (52A: That right introduction?) — this may be the most painful "?" clue I've ever read, whereas my wrong answer is probably the best wrong answer that ever was. I had: STET. "DELE? No, that right! STET!" Me: "I don't know why the editor is talking like that, but OK."

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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