Japanese game using pentagonal pieces / SAT 11-30-24 / Holiday honoring Lakshmi, the Hindu goddess of fortune / End result of a starter / One of 11 for Big Ben / Fired (up), in old slang / Nova preceder / The so-called "heart of the scorpion" in the night sky / Painting technique in which the artist applies new paint atop a just-painted layer / Color akin to amarillo / Cart for the Budweiser Clydesdales, e.g. / Jack ___, Best Supporting Actor nominee for 1940's "The Great Dictator"

Constructor: Oliver Goodridge and Juan Garavito

Relative difficulty: Very Easy (though I finished with an error 😕)

THEME: none 

Word of the Day: DIWALI (14D: Holiday honoring Lakshmi, the Hindu goddess of fortune) —

Diwali (English: /dɪˈwɑːliː/), also called Deepavali (IAST: Dīpāvalī) or Deepawali (IAST: Dīpāwalī), is the Hindu festival of lights, with variations celebrated in other Indian religions such as Jainism and Sikhism. It symbolises the spiritual victory of Dharma over Adharma, light over darkness, good over evil, and knowledge over ignorance. Diwali is celebrated during the Hindu lunisolar months of Ashvin (according to the amanta tradition) and Kartika—between around mid-September and mid-November. The celebrations generally last five or six days.

Diwali is connected to various religious events, deities and personalities, such as being the day Rama returned to his kingdom in Ayodhya with his wife Sita and his brother Lakshmana after defeating the demon king Ravana. It is also widely associated with Lakshmi, the goddess of prosperity, and Ganesha, the god of wisdom and the remover of obstacles. Other regional traditions connect the holiday to Vishnu, Krishna, Durga, Shiva, Kali, Hanuman, Kubera, Yama, Yami, Dhanvantari, or Vishvakarman. [...] 

Diwali is also a major cultural event for the Hindu, Sikh, and Jain diaspora. The main day of the festival of Diwali (the day of Lakshmi Puja) is an official holiday in Fiji, Guyana, India, Malaysia, Mauritius, Myanmar, Nepal, Pakistan, Singapore, Sri Lanka, Suriname, Trinidad and Tobago and in some US states. (wikipedia)

• • •

Don't know when I've done a Saturday puzzle so fast. Should've been a Friday (way way easier than yesterday's puzzle), but even on Friday, this thing would've played easy. Do you have any idea how fast ...

... I rounded ...

... the bases ...

... on this one?

Those long answers around the perimeter of the puzzle, while truly gorgeous, also made the puzzle ridiculously easy. You could pick most of them up from just a few letters, and once you picked one pair up, you had access to a whole other quadrant on the other side of the grid. And so on. And so on. I got the long Downs on the west side of the puzzle Without Ever Looking At Either Clue—I was basically trying to slow myself down by working short crosses rather than just looking at the longer clues, but the short crosses ended up being so easy that by the time I looked at either of them, I had "HEY BATTER BA-" and "HOMEMADE BR- already in place. Would've loved this on a Friday. And it's still good today. Just ... they really flipped the Friday/Saturday this week, and the misplacement was jarring, both times.

["She had a blind DATE WITH DESTINY"]

But wait! I left out one problem. Largely because I never saw the problem until I was finished. "Finished." Do you see the problem? I've got a wrong square in the last three grid screenshots (above). When I "finished" and didn't get the "Congratulations" message, I audibly "ugh"'d and then went searching. And searching. I went over the whole grid and then went straight to the answers I was least sure about, like SHOGI (a game I'd forgotten existed) (42A: Japanese game using pentagonal pieces) and ANTARES (a star of whose spelling I was uncertain) (12D: The so-called "heart of the scorpion" in the night sky). Never heard of WET ON WET, but all the crosses seemed to check (33A: Painting technique in which the artist applies new paint atop a just-painted layer). And finally I went back to DINALI. Maybe I'd misspelled the holiday. [Checks crosses ... checks crosses ... ] "Oh F--- Me, it's that stupid stupid quote clue, isn't it! [infinite swearing]." Man I hate fill-in-the-blank quotation clues. On any day, in any circumstance. Despise them. I'm always like "how the hell should I know what this stupid quote is?!" I hate quotations because there's a smug self-importance about them, a sense that they're supposed to be WEIGHTY, but they're always stuff you'd see in a Hallmark card or else stuck to a refrigerator door or office cubicle—something faux-inspirational and corny. Which this Emerson quote certainly is. "Nature always WEARS the colors of the spirit"??! Uh, no. It absolutely does not. I think they have an actual term for how wrong that is. It's called the "pathetic fallacy." Annnnnnyway, not DINALI but DIWALI. After I changed it and got the "Congratulations" message, I was so mad at myself. Why did DINALI sound so right? Isn't DINALI ... something? After a few seconds of musing, I had a sad, belated "aha"—DENALI. That's what I'd been thinking of—the mountain formerly known as Mt. McKinley. Oof. So disappointing to end things this way. Half mad at my own clumsy memory, and half mad at all quotation clues, everywhere, through all time. Why wouldn't Nature NEAR the colors of the spirit? Or TEAR them? Or BEAR them? Or FEAR them? Or HEAR them? Or even REAR or SEAR them, for ****'s sake?  

So that square killed me, obviously. Which was a real surprise kill, since, as I say, I finished quickly and triumphantly. Deadly assassin, that square. As for the rest of the grid, resistance was minimal. Spelling ANTAR-S and remembering SHOGI at all, piecing together WET ON WET, those took a little thought, as I said above. I know the phrase "petite AMIE" ("girlfriend"), but still needed many crosses to see it. The hardest bit to work out (not actually hard) was probably the OAKIE / STOREY bit. I misremembered the actor as Jack OATES (probably thinking of Warren OATES). This left me wondering what Big Ben could possibly have 11 of. Something ending in -RSY. Bah. Eventually, though, I remembered that the actor was OAKEY ... only I spelled it like that at first, which didn't help with the Big Ben clue at all. Tried a new spelling (the correct spelling, OAKIE), and saw STOREY immediately. I don't think of clock towers as having STOREYs. Ya got me there. Elsewhere, no. You did not get me. Piece of cake. Until the fatal DINALI finale. 

So far, I've focused on my own successes and stumblings, but I want to make sure I emphasize how truly beautiful the long perimeter answers are on this thing. The top two marquee answers are about as good a side-by-side pair as I've seen. "HERE'S A THOUGHT ... DO YOU KNOW WHO I AM!?" Those two set a fun tone that would continue all the way around the grid. I love that "DO YOU KNOW WHO I AM!?" is followed (directly underneath) by "I'M BAD." Love the comical vanity. Love the DATE WITH DESTINY that ironically collides smack into "THIS ISN'T WORKING." Love the jaded, world-weary voice in the NE going "SO WHAT?" and "WOW ME!" Well, the puzzle did wow me. Before it humiliated me with the damn "W" square, it wowed me. Are there some infelicities? Perhaps. HUHS in the plural is unfortunate. That ÉTÉS / ABBRS / IDEATES section is less than lovely. The only place I've ever seen anyone IDEATE is in crosswords. Seriously, a word that would not exist without the generous support of Big Crossword. And running Jack OAKIE into a British spelling of "story" is maybe not the puzzle's finest hour. But still, when your marquees are this good, little blemishes here and there really don't mean a thing.

Bullets:

• 18A: Export from Jamaica (SKA) — my condolences to everyone who confidently wrote in RUM
• 35A: Longtime candy company based in San Francisco (SEE'S) — since I was born in San Francisco and grew up in Fresno, this company is very, very familiar to me. I know they're in the Denver airport. Not sure if they're farther east than that. I very much associate the candy with my childhood, with home, with California. Haven't seen them much (if at all) since I moved to Michigan and then New York.
• 36A: Color akin to amarillo (ORO) — "amarillo" is Sp. for "yellow." ORO, of course, is "gold."

• 41A: Fired (up), in old slang (HET) — LOL yes, I know this expression, how do I know this expression? Is HET an abbr. form of "heated"? Yes, merriam webster dot com says "dialect past of heat." Looks like this "old slang" is still in use (examples at the merriam-webster website include quotations from CNN and New York Times, both from the 2020s)
• 48A: Nearly every third baseman and shortstop in M.L.B. history (RIGHTY) — since most infield throws are to first, and it's easier / more natural to throw across your body, particularly if your momentum is taking you away from first, as it often is for a shortstop.
• 5D: Attacked, as a castle (STORMED) — have fun storming the castle!

• 11D: End result of a starter (HOMEMADE BREAD) — if you got into breadmaking during COVID (or any time), then you probably made your own sourdough starter, a "live fermented culture of fresh flour and water," which combines with the natural yeasts in the environment to form a leavening agent.
• 39D: Nova preceder (BOSSA) — So, not the exploding star, but just the word "nova," preceded by BOSSA in the musical term "BOSSA nova."

See you next time.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

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