Predecessor of a copter / FRI 4-7-23 / Whack biblically / City known as the cradle of Italian liberty / Locale depicted in three paintings by Pieter Bruegel the Elder / Bag End resident / Title city in a 2017 #1 hit by Camila Cabello / What gets hit by a football in "Man Getting Hit by Football" in a classic episode of "The Simpsons"

Constructor: Lindsey Hobbs

Relative difficulty: Medium-Challenging

THEME: none 

Word of the Day: PAPILLA (17D: It's on the tip of your tongue) —

: a small projecting body part similar to a nipple in form:

a

: a vascular process of connective tissue extending into and nourishing the root of a hair, feather, or developing tooth  see hair illustration

b

: any of the vascular protuberances of the dermal layer of the skin extending into the epidermal layer and often containing tactile corpuscles

c

: any of the small protuberances on the upper surface of the tongue often containing taste buds (merriam-webster.com)

• • •

Had trouble getting very excited about this one. It started out feeling very musty and old-fashioned, with phrases like HAM IT UP and TOP BANANA appearing where more interesting / current slang might have gone. And then once the other marquee answers started appearing ... they topped out at "fine," somewhere north of "just OK," but still, there was nothing eye-popping or surprising about any of them. MINDBENDER is too vague a thing to be exciting (to me), MOLTEN LAVA is ... you know, hot, in a literal sense, but that's typically how I think of LAVA (MOLTEN, that is) so the phrase as a whole feels just ... long (and semi-redundant, though I know that technically it's not). KID GLOVES is fine but also feels like it belongs in the old-fashioned category with HAM IT UP and TOP BANANA. SWEET TALK I like (36A: Charm). Then there are the central crosses. THAT'S A TALL ORDER is solid, but still no real zip, and then there's DODGED A BULLET, which is a fine metaphorical expression but (and this is admittedly a very personal and undoubtedly oversensitive reaction) this country has such a horrific (and utterly preventable) gun violence problem that the image of people "dodging bullets" just evokes school shootings for me right now (29A: Narrowly avoided disaster). I know it shouldn't. But it does. BULLET TRAIN wouldn't bug me one bit. It's the dodging part. My brain does what it does and that's what it did / is doing. But even without that bummer of a mental image, the grid felt more listless than a Friday should be. Just not enough high points in the longer answers. As for the rest of it... well, there are some problems there too. There was a lot of trivia. A lot. Some of it I knew, some of it I didn't, but the clues on TURIN and MIAMI and PLANO and HAVANA (you see a theme developing here...), they all gave me various levels of "shrug I dunno" (though I got PLANO weirdly quickly because I just wrote back to a couple of college students (aspiring constructors!) and their address was in PLANO). But it wasn't just geography trivia, there was KROGER and BILBO and KFC and BABEL etc. Felt like a lot. And then the fill was pretty weak in places, starting with HEP and ALBS (you can see why that NW corner felt musty, for reasons beyond the old-fashioned slang), and then that AHME DOER AOL stack in the bottom left. Definitely a rough spot. Overall the fill is solid, though. Solid. That's the word for today. Not a satisfying "Solid" for me, personally, but solid nonetheless. 

I had one serious trouble spot—a collision of baffling answers, the bafflingness of which was instigated by one long, wrong answer: EASY AS PIE (24A: "No problem at all" => EASY-PEASY). The cluing was hard enough in that NE corner without my having made the whole situation much worse with a wrong answer, an answer that drove through the two toughest things in the puzzle for me: PAPILLA and CYRUS. As for PAPILLA ... I have to admit, I just don't think I know that word. I'm looking at it and it seems slightly familiar, but no, I don't think I could've defined it for you (before I made it today's "Word of the Day"). I wanted something meaning "taste bud," but couldn't find the word. I also wanted ... well, every different kind of "tongue" I could think of, which mostly resulted in my thinking of shoes (to no avail). So I needed almost every cross to make a reasoned guess about PAPILLA. I should add that I was in no way sure about TURIN, which also ran through this PAPILLA CYRUS pairing, and that made everything in the section feel even dicier. 

As for CYRUS, wow ... by far the most baffling clue in the puzzle. And I have to tip my hat to the clue. It's perfectly accurate. But there was no way on god's green earth I was ever gonna pull Hannah Montana from my mental list of "Montana"s. I was thinking there must be a team in Montana (University of?) and I was supposed to be looking for their mascot (they're the "Grizzlies," btw). Then I was thinking of Joe Montana. And yeah, that pretty much did it for me, Montana-wise. I was finished with the puzzle, with CYRUS written in its proper place, and I still had absolutely no idea how it could be right. Was King Cyrus ("The Great") somehow involved? CYRUS Vance? Totally lost. And then somehow, finally, Miley CYRUS's name occurred to me and I had a giant "D'oh!" reaction. Miley CYRUS did indeed "play" Hannah Montana. You got me there. You really did. Wish that answer hadn't come at what was already the toughest part of the grid, but these things come when they come. 

[Rubens, "Head of King Cyrus Brought to Queen Tomyris"; I saw this painting
once, in Toledo (Ohio!), and it was awe-inspiring (~2 meters x 3.6 meters)]

I know I gave the puzzle a hard time for its overreliance on trivia, but I did appreciate the "Simpsons"-ness of this one, and liked getting not one but two fairly detailed "Simpsons" clues, first for "WOO-HOO" (37D: Exclamation that might be followed by "D'oh!" on "The Simpsons") and then again for GROIN—a deeper cut, for sure (46A: What gets hit by a football in "Man Getting Hit by Football" in a classic episode of "The Simpsons"). I would've preferred THE GROIN here, since it's more accurate, but GROIN will do :)

See you tomorrow.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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