Spiral-horned antelope / MON 3-6-23 / Cesar who played the Cisco Kid / Kaitlin of It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia / Catholic religious order that founded Georgetown University

Constructor: Lynn Lempel

Relative difficulty: Easy (maybe the easiest Downs-only solving experience of my life)

THEME: HUMAN NATURE (55A: Set of traits we all have ... or a two-part description of the answers to the starred clues?) — features of "nature" (i.e. the natural world: landscape, weather, what not) that start with a "human" body part:

Theme answers:

• FINGER LAKES (17A: *Region of upstate New York named for its bodies of water)
• HEADWIND (25A: *Navigation hurdle for a sailboat)
• FOOTHILLS (35A: *Climbers' warm-ups before mountains)
• PALM TREE (46A: *Source of shade on a desert island, say)

Word of the Day: WINESAP (3D: Apple used in cider) —

Winesap is an old apple cultivar of unknown origin, dating at least to American colonial times. Its apples are sweet with a tangy finish. They are used for eating, cooking, and are especially prized for making cider. [...] Winesap was a popular apple in the United States until the 1950s. It stores well, and its decline in popularity has been attributed to the development and increased use of controlled atmosphere storage which allowed a wider variety of apples to be sold over the course of the year. // The Winesap fruit is small to medium with a deep, cherry red skin and a crisp, yellow flesh. It has moderate disease resistance including to mildew and blooms a few days later than other late varieties. It is all-purpose, being used for fresh eating, cider, apple butter, and pies. (wikipedia)

• • •

This is some textbook, classic, old-school Monday stuff right here. Lynn Legend rarely misses, and this is about as good an example of her particular artistry as you're gonna get. It's very hard to make easy, early-week puzzles, and no one does it better. You've got to keep it simple (stupid), but also make sizzle. How do you make Easy interesting, that is the challenge. Here, you've got a rather obvious first-words theme going—I could see the body part angle coming down Broadway)—but then you get this revealer phrase that actually reveals something—another level, a literal duality, that had been hiding inside the answers all along. Solving this one Downs-only was a delight because as the themers came into view, I locked in on the body-part thing, and then I got to the bottom of the grid, got HUMAN- from the Downs, and then stopped and went back to look at the themers so that I could try to guess the revealer phrase. I'd been looking at the first words in the theme answer, which were so obviously linked by their corporeality, but now, going back, I looked at the second words and bam, there it was: LAKES, WIND, HILLS, TREE ... gotta be HUMAN NATURE! And it was. Always fun to test out long Acrosses when you're solving Downs-only. See if you can get them to fly. Earlier, I had the FINGER and thought "What if I put LAKES in the remaining squares?," and having all those letters confirmed by the Downs, bam bam bam bam bam: very satisfying. Probably helps that I live near the FINGER LAKES—was there just yesterday, in fact, seeing the Oscar-nominated animated short films at Cinemapolis in Ithaca. But then I think "What other five-letter word could have reasonably followed FINGER?" FINGER FOODS, I guess. FINGER PAINT, sure. I guess I just got lucky with my first guess there. And with all my guesses thereafter. This really was about the easiest Downs-only solving experience of my life. I was just happy to have the pleasure of being impressed by a genuine AHA moment (32D: "That's brilliant!").

The fill doesn't have anything particularly shiny or impressive about it, but all it has to do is come in clean, and it certainly does that. Yes, there are repeaters, as there always are, but I never felt inundated by the overfamiliar. The grid definitely has an old-fashioned feel to it, but it's a highly polished kind of old-fashioned. Feels like well-crafted grids of yore, from the days when constructors didn't have software to do the heavy lifting. When your weakest entry is something innocuous like IS A (23D: "It ___ tale told by an idiot": Macbeth), you're doing it right. "UP" gets duped in UPEND and SLIP-UPS, but that's such a small thing I doubt anyone but me noticed, let alone cared. Can you guess what the hardest answer was for me, from a Downs-only perspective? Well, there were two, but the first, WINESAP, I ended up taking down relatively easy when I inferred the "-IN-" (from FR-AR and FI-GER, respectively). The tougher answer was actually CAR KEY (42D: Auto access item). Mostly, I just couldn't make sense of the clue. "Access ... item?" I had SALTINE and PASTA on either side of it, but had to run the alphabet at -ARAT (42A: Weight of a diamond) in order to get the "C"—when I was just looking at -ARAT, all I could think of was MARAT, the radical French revolutionary who was assassinated by Charlotte Corday ... which is a very weird thing to think of *before* you think of the much more basic word CARAT. But your brain does what it does, which is why sometimes you have to run the alphabet. 

[TFW the crossword is too hard ...]

Anyway, overall, this was a very enjoyable, if all-too-brief, experience. See you tomorrow.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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