Freshly pressed grapes before fermentation / SAT 10-26-24 / Vessel that hasn't crossed the Canadian border since 1993 / The so-called "Rocket City" of the South / Oslo Accords signatory, for short / Name on the playbill for the 1936 Salzburg Festival / When doubled, a pop nickname / Fish whose egg casings are called "mermaid's purses" / Medical breakthrough of 1954 that yielded a Nobel Prize

Constructor: Peter A. Collins

Relative difficulty: Easy

THEME: none 

Word of the Day: MUST (10A: Freshly pressed grapes before fermentation) —

Must (from the Latin vinum mustum; lit. 'young wine') is freshly crushed fruit juice (usually grape juice) that contains the skins, seeds, and stems of the fruit. The solid portion of the must is called pomace and typically makes up 7–23% of the total weight of the must. Making must is the first step in winemaking. Because of its high glucose content, typically between 10 and 15%, must is also used as a sweetener in a variety of cuisines. Unlike commercially sold grape juice, which is filtered and pasteurized, must is thick with particulate matter, opaque, and comes in various shades of brown and purple. (wikipedia)

• • •

[18A: Meaning of a finger wag]
(graphic: PBS News)

The more I look this puzzle over, the easier it looks. All the difficulty for me today came because I got suckered into starting the puzzle from below. Shoulda just stuck to the routine: NW to start (if possible), and then generally top to bottom, L to R. This ensures that the answers that I get tend to make up the *front* ends of other answers, especially longer answers. Much easier, for instance, to get VOCAL CORD from VOC- than to get RAVISHING from -ING. But today, as I say, I got drawn into the SE by my own hubris. First answer into the grid was an out-and-out gimme ... and a cross-reference:

[5D: With 43-Down, fictional coach of AFC Richmond]

Now, there's no reason I should've felt the need to check the crosses on LASSO because LASSO was indisputably correct. But some solver instinct made me check the crosses and then *stay* down in the SW—possibly because there were simply more letters in place down there, and I generally build off of the place where I have the most information to go on. Sigh. Should've stuck to the plan! Should've trusted the process! But no, I start working this thing bassackwards, which accounts for almost all the difficulty that I experienced today. I'm never making the LOUISVILLE-for-HUNTSVILLE error (28D: The so-called "Rocket City" of the South) if I come at this thing from the top. I'm never imagining that the -TY at the end of 22D: Something to wallow in (SELF-PITY) is a "STY." That central triple stack was fairly easy for me, but I bet it would've been even easier if I'd come at those long answers from their first letters instead of their last. When I play Quordle, I have a routine. Same first two guesses every time, and after that, if one of the answers isn't readily apparent, my first burner word is CHIMP (or CHOMP or CHUMP, depending on what vowels I might need to move). But sommmmmetimes I try to get cute and guess a different word based on some hunch I have about what one of the words *might* be, and I cannot tell you how many times that decision has bitten me in the ass. "GAWKY!? What was I thinking!?," I mutter as I enter the final correct answer on my ninth (and final) guess. Anyway, I do things a certain way for a reason—because it's effective. Luckily, today, my getting cute didn't cost me much because the puzzle is so easy overall. Lesson learned (and, undoubtedly, soon forgotten).

The triple stack is mostly solid, but it's also the only thing the puzzle has going for it. There are other longer answers, obviously, but they’re largely ho-hum, and then there's all this short stuff—what seemed like an awful lot of short stuff for a Saturday. Alllll the corners, all the nooks and crannies on the edges of the grid, are choked with 3s 4s and 5s. This is probably what made the puzzle feel so easy (lots of little opportunities for traction), but also what made it feel a little lackluster. As for that stack—my main issue with it is that the phrase is "DON'T WAIT UP!" That's what you'd say. The "FOR US" feels totally tacked on (even if it makes a perfectly reasonable complete phrase). The "FOR US" takes a lot of the pop out of the colloquial energy of the phrase. De-zings the expression. Also, I like ORGAN TRANSPLANT as an answer, but I don't like its clue very much (34A: Medical breakthrough of 1954 that yielded a Nobel Prize), mainly because it's so specific that I couldn't help but wonder "Which organ?" (It’s a kidney). Really wanted an actual organ there, making ORGAN a weird sort of letdown. If I hadn't had the "O" from "DO I!" (29D: Emphatic agreement)—which I'd gotten earlier from IDENTITY THIEVES—I might have guessed HEART, even though I was pretty sure the first HEART TRANSPLANT was many years later (actually, only a little over a decade later: 1967). IDENTITY THIEVES is the real winner of the triple stack today—a nice answer with a clever clue (35A: Masters of bad impersonation?). But (with slight side-eye at FOR US), the stack is totally acceptable, and—more impressively—its crosses are all admirably clean (you tend to get a lot of compromised fill in the answers holding stacks together).

The only time I got stuck, like ... stuck stuck ... was here, trying to get into the SW corner to finish up the puzzle:

I would've called a "spade" a GARDEN TOOL. Something about the phrase LAWN TOOL just wasn't clicking at all. Just getting that answer to LAWNT- took some doing, as "Spade" has so many meanings (a card suit, a famous detective, etc.). LAWNT- looked so weird to me that I genuinely wondered if I had an error. But no. How 'bout the other Down that could've led me into the SW? (27D: Vessel that hasn't crossed the Canadian border since 1993). In a word: NOPE. Couldn't make sense of it. That clue was bonkers for several reasons: first, the ambiguity of the word "vessel"; second, the oddness of the word "crossed" (trophies don't have mobility or agency); and third, the unclear implications of "1993," which had me wondering whether the clue wasn't dealing with some obscure transportation provision in NAFTA (turns out that NAFTA was signed in 1992 and took effect in 1994, so my historical memory there was somehow both perfect and wrong). Now, when I say I was "stuck" here at LAWNT- and STAN-, it's not a real stuck. It's a stubborn stuck. It's an "I should be able to get this without looking at any other clues" stuck. Because eventually I got from --OS to LOOS (36A: Pub fixtures), and there was LAWN TOOL, and there was STANLEY ... and there was STANLEY CUP. D'oh! "Vessel"! I get it now. Also, if I'd just bothered to dip into the SW corner and see what was there, I woulda gotten both MERYL and GRETA instantly, so ... in reality, I was only "stuck" because I chose to be. Because I refused to move on (for a bit). I was never properly stuck.

Puzzle notes:

• 1A: Hotel room staple (TV SET) — tough one to parse right out of the gate. Its symmetrical counterpart—also hard to parse. Sincerely thought 55A: Quite the party (BIG DO) might be a BASHO. A BASH-O. As in, "That was some swingin' BASHO!," opined the hepcat.
• 1D: Name on the playbill for the 1936 Salzburg Festival (TRAPP) — I'm guessing this is some Sound of Music s**t but "1936 Salzburg Festival" is utterly meaningless to me (yes, here we go: "In 1936, the festival featured a performance by the Trapp Family Singers, whose story was later depicted in the musical The Sound of Music (featuring a scene of the Trapp Family singing at the Felsenreitschule, but inaccurately set in 1938)" (wikipedia). I saw "1936" and "playbill" and five letters and thought GRETA (as in Garbo), making GRETA one of the unlikeliest malapops of my solving career) (a "malapop" is an answer that turns out to be wrong ... only to appear as a correct answer elsewhere in the grid) (see, today, GRETA Van Susteren of TV news).
• 30D: When doubled, a pop nickname (TAY) — your favorite ubiquitous pop star, TAY-TAY, aka Taylor Swift. One of the weirdest things about TAY, as a crossword answer, is its mysterious 11-year disappearance. The TAY is a Scottish river, and it appeared in Farrar, Weng, and Maleska puzzles with reasonable regularity, but once Shortz took over, it just ... vanished. Then suddenly, eleven years later, in 2004, it came back online, and has since appeared eighteen (18) times as the Scottish river; the first appearance of this more current pop star clue was just this year (back in June), so the TAY-TAY frame of reference is solely a Fagliano Era phenomenon. 
• 22A: Fish whose egg casings are called "mermaid's purses" (SKATE) — OK, you got me. I'm curious enough to want to see what these things look like.... whoa. Cool.

In case you didn't know, a SKATE is a kind of ray. Here's a picture of one terrorizing some poor man (from the Macclesfield Psalter (14c. England)):

[LOL the Latin text: propterea non timebimus dum turbabitur terra ("therefore we will not fear, though the earth be troubled")]

Have a monster SKATE-free day. Early voting starts today in NY, so that's what I'll be up to today (in addition to the usual Saturday lazing). See you next time.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorldld

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