Resort in Salt Lake County / THU 11-20-18 / Title character of Dora Explorer spinoff / Website for tech whizzes / Overprotective government so to speak

Constructor: Robyn Weintraub

Relative difficulty: Easyish (5:02)

THEME: none

Word of the Day: RAISA Smetanina, first woman to win 10 Winter Olympic medals (45A) —

Raisa Petrovna Smetanina (Russian: Раиса Петровна Сметанина; born 29 February 1952) is a former Soviet/Russian cross-country skiing champion. Smetanina is an ethnic Komi. She is the first woman in history to win ten Winter Olympic medals (Stefania Belmondo being the second, Marit Bjørgen the third, and Ireen Wüst the fourth). Smetanina took part in five Olympics, representing the USSR team four times and the Unified Team once. In particular, Smetanina won two gold and one silver medals at the 1976 Winter Olympics, becoming the most successful athlete there, along with Rosi Mittermaier of West Germany. (wikipedia)

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OK it's hard not to love an easy Friday but even as lovable easy Fridays go, this one is particularly lovable. Jim CROCE was a staple of my childhood, so right away we're off to a good start, and once I cracked open "HOLD MY BEER," I was *in*. EPIC POETRY is my jam—if you think you care about the Aeneid more than I do, well ... I challenge. In fact, here, HOLD MY BEER... I did not blow through this in record time, the way I thought I might when I started. This was largely because I needed many passes to get LETO (apparently my love of EPIC POETRY is not strong enough to make me commit that name to memory—LEDA, sure; LETO, unless you're Jared, no. And then I wrote YOUTH (!?) for YOUNG at 14D: Fawns, e.g., and therefore couldn't drop down into the west the way I wanted. Instead I took this weird winding and ultimately choppy route through the grid, down via TERRAPINS and then down again via ABBEY ROAD, then back up to the NE via NANNY STATE (so many good answers in this grid!), and then finally a leap back to the west and SW, where I managed to sort out the YOUTH thing, which made SYNS and DEFANG finally come into view, and then whoosh, down EMPTY NESTERS, down SAVE THE DATE, and finished at OHMS. This was a pleasure to solve from start to finish. Delightful. Friday is the day I most look forward precisely because that is when *this* kind of solving experience is most likely to happen.


Trouble spots for me, aside from the aforementioned, occurred in only a few places. RAISA was probably the toughest answer in the puzzle—the one people are least likely to know. Obscure proper nouns can really trip you up. Clearly a decision was made by someone somewhere along the line to make this a non-Gorbachev RAISA, which takes it from near-universally gettable to almost completely ungettable without many crosses. There are no mid-range RAISAs, I don't think. There's Gorbachev ... and the rest! But in a super-easy puzzle, she was a speed bump at best. I can't keep track of which schools are in which athletic conf. anymore, so faced with __U at 51D: Big 12 sch. (TCU), I initially wrote in _SU, and thought maybe that first letter would be "K". Not getting the "C" held back CANINE UNIT for a bit (again, I say: so many great answers in this grid!). ACOLYTE is a fancyish word for [Follower], so I had a little trouble there, as well as with STYE. Nice clue, but a makeup clue, so I was without ideas, figuring the answer was ... makeupish. But as I say, none of these trouble spots were really much trouble.


Crosswordese it helped to know:

• 6A: Resort in Salt Lake County (ALTA) — if it's a resort in Utah and it's four letters: ALTA
• 35A: County in a Pulitzer-winning play title (OSAGE) — had the "O" and the "G" and wanted OSAGE before ever looking at the clue. That is the thing that constant solving teaches your brain to do: see patterns and anticipate possible answers. Quickly. Basically your brain just gets better at scrolling through all the possibilities really quickly.
• 31D: Bigwigs may have big ones (EGOS) — off just the "S"; very obvious; very common
• 26D: Fashion designer ___ Saab (ELIE) — *finally* I remember this designer's dang name! This was a milestone. I've been running into this non-Wiesel ELIE for years now, but I know him exclusively from crosswords and (normally) can never remember anything about his name except that it's crosswordesey, like AYLA or AUEL or ARIE or something...

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld (Twitter @rexparker / #NYTXW)

P.S. OK ARY is not a good answer, but really, that is the only negative thing I can say about this beautiful grid

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