Score marking to play higher or lower than written / SAT 9-12-20 / Slangy sedative / Mesoamerican language family with about half a million speakers / Onetime airer of Music City Tonight / Dolohov one of Death Eaters in Harry Potter books / Early movie mogul Marcus

Constructor: Ryan McCarty

Relative difficulty: Easy(3/4)-Challenging (1/4) (7:34)

THEME: none 

Word of the Day: OTTAVA (43A: Score marking to play higher or lower than written) —

: at an octave higher or lower than written  —used as a direction in music (merriam-webster.com)

• • •

Not bad, but almost completely devoid of the things that made me love yesterday's puzzle. First off, the grid, which is highly segmented—those NW and SE corners are pretty cut off from the rest of the grid, which means they're apt to play as puzzles within the puzzle, and lord help you if you get bogged down, because there's no escape. I find cut-off corners claustrophobic and annoying, and today, mainly because they can make the solve feel so uneven. Today, the NW corner was a total nightmare, difficulty-wise, whereas the entire rest of the puzzle provided only Wednesday-like resistance. That unevenness was unpleasant. And then unlike yesterday's puzzle, today's is awash in *names* (and also niche vocabulary). I laughed when I got REDBONE (one of the only things I actually *knew* in the NW) because I thought "hollllly moly is anyone under 50 (my age) gonna know that? Most people who know that *song* don't know that" (1D: Band with the 1974 hit "Come and Get Your Love"). Can you name a second REDBONE song? You cannot, thanks for playing. And then BILGERATS? (19A: Lowly sorts, in pirate lingo). Whatever, no idea, matey. Just none. I was kind of able to infer BILGE somehow at the very end, but yikes. AIMEE Bender? (5D: Novelist Bender). Dunno. ZAPOTECAN? (26A: Mesoamerican language family with about half a million speakers). Ultimately inferable for me, but still, not exactly common knowledge. OTTAVA I had to piece together letter by letter, with that first "A" being guessable only because of SIBILATE (which, again, who uses that word? No one) (30D: Hiss). I don't mind the names and obscurities when I can fight through them, and I fought through these, but ... this is an old-school way to achieve "difficulty." I'll take clever cluing of (somewhat more) common knowledge for my "difficulty" any day. Again, did not dislike this, just found it somewhat more of a drag than yesterday's (which, admittedly, is an unfair comparison, as yesterday's puzzle was Fire).

Struggled mightily in the NW to start, then switched to the NE and it was like a completely different, much more remedial puzzle. TCM and "The Simpsons" right off the bat? That is definitely my alley. Ants on a log: easy. BYES: easy. Dumb plural EL GRECOS: ultimately easy because everything else up there was easy and that corner was done in maybe 30 seconds. And then I went PER PERSON, PAVES OVER, JELLO, JOWL, 1 2 3 4, without hesitation, and they were all right. East coast to southwest coast in maybe 10 seconds. This is what I mean about how separated and stand-alone the NW corner felt. Now I had to work a little to fill in the SW and the middle, but because I had the *front* ends of the Acrosses in the SE, as opposed to the *back* ends in the NW, the SE was *much* easier to open up. That left me back in the NW at the end, where every answer was surprising. When I abandoned it, all I had was REDBONE, ENEMIES, WEIR, OSAGE, and ERS. That would normally be enough to make a corner fall, but not today. I think I eventually guessed RIPSAW and (more tentatively) BILGE, and that got me over. The end. Not many outright mistakes today, except: SMUDGY (?) for SMOGGY (4D: Polluted, in a way), and DYNAMICS (!?!) for DC COMICS (16A: Flash setting) (you may know him as *The* Flash). Not much more to say ... except SNOW CONE does not have a "W," thank you for coming to my carnival food lecture (45A: Summer carnival treat). Good day.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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