R&B/jazz artist Booze who sang See See Rider Blues / FRI 4-30-21 / Uses a crystal ball / Farm animal in farm-speak / BuzzFeed fodder

Constructor: Kate Hawkins

Relative difficulty: Easy

THEME: none 

Word of the Day: ESSIE Davis (7D: Davis of "Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries") —

Esther Davis (born 19 January 1970) is an Australian actress and singer, best known for her roles as Phryne Fisher in Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries and its film adaptation, Miss Fisher & the Crypt of Tears, along with Amelia Vanek in The Babadook. Other major works include a recurring role as Lady Crane in season six of the television series Game of Thrones, Sister Iphigenia in Lambs of God, and the role of Ellen Kelly in Justin Kurzel's True History of the Kelly Gang. (wikipedia)

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I haven't been solving at night so much lately, but I had a bit of a nap today, so I'm awake and solving at what is probably a normal waking hour for many of you, but for me feels like the middle of the night (11pm). One of my cats is very confused. Heard me on the stairs and came out of our bedroom like it was time for breakfast. Then looked at me like "no, I know this isn't right ... why are you up?" So I toted her around the house on my shoulder for a bit while she purred contentedly then let her go back to bed. The puzzle was easy and refreshing. Something brisk and cleansing about it. Just what I needed after ... yesterday (about which, the less the better). It was so easy and smooth that I noticed every little bump in the road, both the difficulty bumps and the "yuck" bumps (really only one or two of these, I think). I count four places where I had to exert any effort at all to get an answer: 

• VASE (1A: Mason jar, in a pinch)
• SITE VISIT (8D: Part of an OSHA inspection)
• LANE CLOSED (61A: Sign before merging)
• ERRANT (50D: Off the mark)

The least consequential of these problems was ERRANT—I just put in ASTRAY at first, and so had to dig myself out (HERMAN helped) (53A: Appropriate name for that woman's husband?). LANE CLOSED also didn't hold me up that long. It was really the LANE part that I had to work for, with most of CLOSED being solidly in place before I ever looked at any of the Across clues down there. VASE was tough mostly because it was virtually the only clue I looked at where I didn't have at least one of the letters in place already (that is, it was the first clue I looked at). The really crucial difficult bit was SITE VISIT, because as you can see, it was my only avenue up into the NE from the center. I was here:

... and couldn't come up with a word ending -SIT that made sense. My brain kept saying "TRANSIT" but that was nonsense. So instead of just jumping into the NE corner, I followed letters I already had and tumbled down into the SE, then swung back up the east coast and came at the NE that way. I very nearly got stymied again trying to get up into that corner because the back ends of so many of the Downs were useless to me. But once I got EVENT (25A: Dot on a timeline), I had VISIT at the end of that OSHA clue, so I hazarded a guess on the first four letters: was it SITE? 

It was. Here we get to the only parts of the puzzle that made me wince a little. The first was SCRIES, which I got almost immediately, but is a word I have always given helping heapings of side-eye, as I have only ever seen it in crosswords (it's somehow weirder and worse when it's just SCRY). Then, with "oof, it's not SCRIES, is it?" fresh in my head, I checked the "I" cross and got ... LIE-IN. All of the -IN answers (BE-IN, SIT-IN, LOVE-IN) are vaguely suspect to me in their ancientness, but LIE-IN ... I have seen people do some version of a LIE-IN in recent years, but I think it's more commonly known now as a DIE-IN. Anyway, SCRIES LIE-IN was a rocky 1-2, but everything evened out from there. In fact, my favorite parts of the solve came in that NE section. First, though it isn't my favorite answer, ESSIE delighted me because I tweeted just last week about the astonishing cast you could put together just from five-letter actors whose last name was Davis: I had VIOLA, OSSIE, GEENA. Someone reminded me "hey, you forgot BETTE." And then later on, another person chimed in, "Don't forget ESSIE!" Actually, now that I look, that "other person" was none other than 8-time American Crossword Puzzle Tournament champion Dan Feyer.

So because of this little thought experiment, I actually remembered ESSIE's name today. In fact, as I read the clue, my brain went "It's ESSIE! Wait, who's ESSIE!? Why do we know this?" And now you know why we knew. I don't think ESSIE is necessarily great fill, but I liked ESSIE insofar as my remembering the name at all proves that my brain is still admitting new information, however grudgingly. Finally (!), I liked that I ended my solve at END (22A: Redundant word before "result"). Felt good and fitting, and also very unlikely, in that I do not normally END my solves way up at the top of the grid like that. It was as if END was calling me, drawing me in like a beacon: "END here. . . END here . . ." And so I did.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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