Okonkwo's people in Things Fall Apart / SAT 10-9-21 / Much-covered New Orleans standard based on Mardi Gras chants / Arc-shaped musical notation / Part of a Navy officer's rotation / Painter whose cataract surgery allowed him to see and paint in ultraviolet / Arm muscle slangily

Constructor: August Lee-Kovach

Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium

THEME: none 

Word of the Day: IBOS (45D: Okonkwo's people in "Things Fall Apart") —

The Igbo people (English: /ˈiːboʊ/ EE-boh, also US: /ˈɪɡboʊ/; also spelled Ibo and formerly also Iboe, Ebo, Eboe, Eboans, Heebo; natively Ṇ́dị́ Ìgbò In Nigeria, Igbos are indigenous to various states. Igbos are majorly found in Abia, Anambra, Ebonyi, Enugu and Imo States. A good population of Igbos are found in Delta and Rivers States while Igbos are a minority in Akwa ibom, Benue, Cross River, Edo and Kogi states. Large ethnic Igbo populations are found in Cameroon, Gabon, and Equatorial Guinea, as well as outside Africa. There has been much speculation about the origins of the Igbo people, as it is unknown how exactly the group came to form. Geographically, the Igbo homeland is divided into two unequal sections by the Niger River – an eastern (which is the larger of the two) and a western section. The Igbo people are one of the largest ethnic groups in Africa.

• • •

The weirdest thing about this grid is how smooth the middle came out relative to the NW and SE corners. That stagger-stack of 9s at the heart of the grid is really pretty impressive. All solid, vivid, common words and expressions, and if you don't know what SPLITTERS are, well, you're gonna have to forgive the puzzle, it's baseball playoff season (no NATS this year). A couple of song titles (i.e. proper nouns) might also have posed a challenge for some solvers, familiarity-wise (I somehow had Zarathurstra SPRUCH-ing, though I'll be damned if I didn't get "IKO IKO" off the "I"!), but otherwise that wide-open middle gets all its difficulty from clues, not weird fill, which is admirable. You end up with a creamy center that is delightful to make your way through. So if this big, wide-open space at the center of the grid is so beautifully filled, why are the much easier-to-fill, less wide-open corners so much worse? Well, the NW isn't bad, but SEA DUTY??? (3D: Part of a Navy officer's rotation). There are times when I want to shout "Don't listen to your software! Fight back!" If the answer doesn't really mean anything to you, if you wouldn't even really know it if it hadn't been suggested to you by your wordlist, it's at least worth considering not using it. If you can build the center of this grid as well as you did, you can put three good 7s alongside a 6 in the NW. 

[29D: Much-covered New Orleans standard based on Mardi Gras chants]

The SE is much worse, based almost solely on the ridiculous alleged word, OVOIDAL (42A: Egglike). If you solve crosswords, you've definitely learned your egg-words. Those words are OVATE and OVOID. You know the Latin phrase "ab OVO," sure, and OVUM and OVA (singular, plural), but where actual English words are concerned, you have OVATE and OVOID near at hand. Perhaps, like me, you don't really know why we need two words for "egg-shaped," but it's crosswords, sometimes you need vowel-heavy 5s to make your grid come out, and OVATE and OVOID are two that you know. But let me tell you, when I got here.

... I wanted to quit. I do actually quit puzzles that aren't the NYTXW. I quit one earlier this week because it tried to foist BOUTOUTCOME on me. Nuh uh. No. That's quite enough. And here, once I had OVO, I knew I was going nowhere good, as there were way too many spaces for OVOID, which itself isn't even the better of the five-letter options for "egglike" (#teamovate). So it was with mild horror that I watched the absurd OVOIDAL come into view, and crossing HELLENE, which is also, er, uh, not the most familiar of words (38D: Spartan, e.g.). I use "Hellenic" all the time, but that's because I sometimes teach ancient literature—I have never not once used HELLENE; it's a thing, for sure, but pretty obscure, and again, I come back to the center of this grid, and wonder why it flows so nicely, while this SE corner seems to clunk and sputter to the finish line. I can tolerate HELLENE on its own, in an otherwise sparkling corner, but, yeah, it's a shame about OVOIDAL. Just because a dictionary somewhere tells you something *is* a word doesn't mean you should use it. Trust your gut; also, lean toward the words / phrases that you actually know, that seem familiar, or at least familiar-ish. Otherwise you end with OVOIDAL, which isn't a word so much as a really mean thing to call Al.

I was struggling in the NW, not thinking of a VISA as an "item" (i.e. an object) (1A: Travel item), and having no idea who CEDRIC Richmond is, but then [fanfare!], Ron ELY to the rescue. OOF, revisiting this SEA DUTY corner is making me a little seasick. Anyway, once I got going, everything was pretty easy, including the center. Had TEN before SSN (56A: Fig. often written with X's), but no other missteps, minor or major. I remembered IBOS today! (45D: Okonkwo's people in "Things Fall Apart"). Like "IKO IKO," I got it off the "I." Sometimes you learn things from crosswords of yore (like Ron ELY!), and even though they don't seem like the freshest of fill, they can really save your bacon from time to time. This is where I'm a crosswordese hypocrite—I don't necessarily love it to look at, but it bails me out of many a tough spot, for sure. Nothing else in this puzzle seems particularly tricky or obscure. Mostly a fun time; there's just some fill here and there, particularly in the SE, that should've been o-voided.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]