Sandwich made with a telera roll / SAT 12-23-23 / Home of the Kingdom of Dahomey, today / Modern-day scrapbooks, of a sort / Piña colada topper / Literary domain of Peter the Magnificent and Susan the Gentle / One whose distance may be measured by the yard? / Capital on the Gulf of Finland

Constructor: Will Nediger

Relative difficulty: Easy-Medium

THEME: none 

Word of the Day: The Kingdom of Dahomey (18A: Home of the Kingdom of Dahomey, today => BENIN) —

[The Kingdom of Dahomey, 1894]

The Kingdom of Dahomey (/dəˈhoʊmi/) was a West African kingdom located within present-day Benin that existed from approximately 1600 until 1904. Dahomey developed on the Abomey Plateau amongst the Fon people in the early 17th century and became a regional power in the 18th century by expanding south to conquer key cities like Whydah belonging to the Kingdom of Whydah on the Atlantic coast which granted it unhindered access to the tricontinental triangular trade.

For much of the middle 19th century, the Kingdom of Dahomey became a key regional state, after eventually ending tributary status to the Oyo Empire. European visitors extensively documented the kingdom, and it became one of the most familiar African nations known to Europeans. The Kingdom of Dahomey was an important regional power that had an organized domestic economy built on conquest and slave labor, significant international trade and diplomatic relations with Europeans, a centralized administration, taxation systems, and an organized military. Notable in the kingdom were significant artwork, an all-female military unit called the Dahomey Amazons by European observers, and the elaborate religious practices of Vodun.

The growth of Dahomey coincided with the growth of the Atlantic slave trade, and it became known to Europeans as a major supplier of slaves. Dahomey was a highly militaristic society constantly organised for warfare; it engaged in wars and raids against neighboring nations and sold captives into the Atlantic slave trade in exchange for European goods such as rifles, gunpowder, fabrics, cowrie shells, tobacco, pipes, and alcohol. Other captives became slaves in Dahomey, where they worked on royal plantations or were killed in human sacrifices during the festival celebrations known as the Annual Customs of Dahomey. The Annual Customs of Dahomey involved significant collection and distribution of gifts and tribute, religious Vodun ceremonies, military parades, and discussions by dignitaries about the future for the kingdom.

In the 1840s, Dahomey began to face decline with British pressure to abolish the slave trade, which included the British Royal Navy imposing a naval blockade against the kingdom and enforcing anti-slavery patrols near its coast. Dahomey was also weakened after failing to invade and capture slaves in Abeokuta, a Yoruba city-state which was founded by the Oyo Empire refugees migrating southwards.Dahomey later began experiencing territorial disputes with France which led to the First Franco-Dahomean War in 1890, resulting in French victory. The kingdom finally fell in 1894 when the last king, Béhanzin, was defeated by France in the Second Franco-Dahomean War, leading to the country being annexed into French West Africa as the colony of French Dahomey, later gaining independence in 1960 as the Republic of Dahomey, which would later rename itself Benin in 1975.

• • •

As expected, this was way easier than yesterday's allegedly "Friday" offering. Triple stacks of 15s look impressive, and I'm sure they are hard to make out come out smoothly, but the answers they contain are generally LESS THAN STELLAR, topping out around "pretty good" (as some of these are) and they are typically very easy to solve because they are inevitably crossed by yards and yards of short stuff, at least some of which will be easy to get. Once you've got a few of the short crosses in place, you can frequently decode even the most recalcitrant long Acrosses, and once you get one of those, the entire bank of 15s will tend to fall pretty fast. Unsurprisingly, it was in the space between the top and bottom of this puzzle that I had my only trouble, the trouble in both cases involving proper nouns that I couldn't *quite* manage to put together. I was wholly convinced it was McCoy TYNAR (26A: Five-time Grammy-winning jazz pianist McCoy ___), which gave me SCHEMAS for 8D: Rhyming arrangements, e.g., which ... yeah, why not? I mean, I teach this stuff every semester, and the term is in fact "rhyme SCHEME(S)," but this seemed like precisely the kind of thing that the NYTXW would botch—using the defensible SCHEMAS instead of the more apt SCHEMES. So I weirdly argued my way into an error, in the one answer in the puzzle that is smack dab in the middle of my area of expertise. Fun! The other proper noun I kinda/sorta knew but flubbed (with much less disastrous results), was TALLINN, which I knew started with "T" and ended with "N" and had an "L" or two in the middle somewhere, but ... yeah, I was spelling it all kinds of ways as I went along, just hoping the crosses would sort me out (which they did) (35D: Capital on the Gulf of Finland). It's the capital of Latvia, right? No, that's Riga. Ooh, it's Estonia! That's it, isn't it??? Yes! Hurray for my C+ knowledge of world geography!

The only other difficulty I had with this puzzle came, familiarly, right up front (when I have the least amount of letters in the grid to work off of). First step was a big miss: KENNEL for PET BED (1D: Place to let sleeping dogs lie). I then "confirmed" that with E-IN Morgenstern (couldn't remember if she was an ERIN or maybe an ELIN???) (21A: ___ Morgenstern, author of "The Night Circus"). And then promptly put the Kingdom of Dahomey in modern-day ... NEPAL. Did I mention my C+ knowledge of world geography!? Eventually saw that KENNEL had to be PET BED, and things flowed eastward pretty smoothly from there. Got Fire-engine RED and TREVOR Noah and Amanda BYNES no sweat, and then in went PINTEREST BOARDS, and the entire top, and east, was done in a flash. Took me a few beats to remember AC DELCO—puzzle would've been a lot harder if I hadn't had that answer in me (30A: Auto parts brand owned by GM). Also would've been a lot harder if I hadn't known that HINDS were female deer, i.e. does (28A: Does). "Whoso list to hunt, I know where is an hind..." is the opening line of a Wyatt sonnet I teach every term, and part of the thing I teach is "Look Up The Damn Word, How In The Hell Can You Know What The Poem Is About If You Don't Know The Words That Are In It!?" See also the title to Donne's "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning." Anyway, yeah, HINDS, a big poetic win for me (as opposed to the earlier poetic loss with SCHEMAS).

Didn't like the "BAA BAA" clue until I did, which is to say I went from "how the *&$% am I supposed to know that, I barely know what the clue is asking for, on a basic grammatical level!?" to "Oh, hey yeah, that part of "BAA BAA, Black Sheep" does rhyme with the 'twinkle' in 'Twinkle Twinkle, Little Star,' cool" (37D: Words sung on the same notes as "twinkle," in a different nursery rhyme). Had HOOT before HONK at 33D: Loud bird sound. Had no idea what a "telera roll" was, but with "-TA" at the end and "Sandwich" in the clue, I just guessed TORTA and was rewarded! Had BIRCH before BEECH (42D: Wood for smoking andouille sausage). And of course (golf) HOLE before MOLE, which barely makes sense for the clue, even with that "?" (64D: One whose distance may be measured by the yard?). I guess the MOLE is making a path in ("by"??) your (back) yard. I assume it's the rodent type of mole and not some black-OPS type deal. 

Explainers:

• 1A: Modern-day scrapbooks, of a sort (PINTEREST BOARDS) — Pinterest is a website / app where you can "pin" things you like. I think. I have never used it.
• 7D: Hearing monitor, for short (ENT) — needed every cross. Was looking for some org. that monitors trials (?), or an actual device that monitors your hearing. But no, it's just your regular-old neighborhood ENT, grid denizen extraordinaire.
• 47A: Academic who works with many different schools, maybe (MARINE BIOLOGIST) — the "schools" are fish; you probably knew that.
• 26D: Piña colada topper (TILDE) — the mark "topping" the "n" in "Piña"; for once, I saw right through this little trick. OK, my brain did initially flash on "cocktail umbrella," but then: TILDE!

More Holiday Pet Pics now! Yesterday we had five cats and a dog. Today, five dogs and a cat! And a hat! Here's Darleen, who seems to be establishing an entire cat colony in this tree

[Thanks, Bill & Margo]

And now, holiday pups!

[Here's Bailey, ready to star in the Christmas ballet, his forelegs already in First Paws-ition! (thanks, Barbara)]

[Buddha happily observes the holidays of all religions! (thanks, Robin)]

[Stop this cruelty at once! Secret Agent Hurley Booboo Bear does not deserve this! (thanks, Pamela)]

[Again, some of you are just ignoring the "holiday" part of the brief, but we'll just say that Luca here has angel ears; that'll do (thanks, Dan)]

["It's my Menorah Moose. No, you may not. Wait, do you have treats? Let's negotiate"; smart girl, Olive! (thanks, Mark)]

See you tomorrow, I hope!

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]