Natives of Scandinavia / SAT 5-10-25 / Some dragonflies / Pioneer in musical impressionism / Manufactured wooden sheet / Mediterranean plant named for its brightly colored flowers / Fine-grained rock that can be easily cut in any direction / George ___, voted "Coach of the Century" by the International Swimming Hall of Fame / Baby blue, perhaps / Where Ferrari is "RACE," in brief

Constructor: Shaun Phillips

Relative difficulty: Challenging

THEME: none 

Word of the Day: DARNERS (29A: Some dragonflies) —

Aeshnidae, also called aeshnids, hawkers, or darners, is a family of dragonflies, found nearly worldwide, with more than 50 genera and over 450 species.

The family includes some of the largest dragonflies. [...] 

There are 41 North American species in 11 genera in this family. Most European species belong to Aeshna. Their American name "darner" stems from the female abdomens looking like a sewing needle, as they cut into plant stem when they lay their eggs through the ovipositor. [...] Their abdomens are long and thin. Most are colored blue and or green, with black and occasionally yellow. Their large, hemispherical, compound eyes touch in the midline and nearly cover their heads. They have an extremely good sight, and are voracious insect predators, using their sharp, biting mouthparts. They are therefore very beneficial to mankind. (wikipedia)

• • •

Yes, that was a Saturday. At least in terms of difficulty, that is what I remember Saturdays being like in the old days. This puzzle is meant to impress (and perhaps daunt) you with its architecture—its weird, brutalist shape (so chunky—you don't see 3x3 black-square chunks too often), and particularly its wide-open white spaces ... which is to say, its very low word count (60; most themeless puzzles come in around 68 or 70). So it's imposing, for sure. And initially, it was virtually impenetrable. That NW corner wouldn't budge much at all. I had ESTER and "I MISSED" but couldn't do much else. I kinda wanted AMID and HISSES but the crosses just didn't look right (particularly that "SM" that ended up being CHARISMA). If I'd wanted to grind it out, I guess I could've hung around up there longer and maybe I could've gotten that corner to fall by going at the short answers in the lower portion (ANN and OWED seem they would've been pretty easy to pick up, for instance), but I bailed out and went where the answers were shortest—that NE corner. This was, and is, the correct instinct for anyone solving a tough puzzle—or any puzzle, frankly. Go At The Short Stuff First. They're higher-percentage shots, and they give you toeholds you often need to get anything else. I stepped into that NE corner, with its little grouping of 4s, and absolutely devoured it—which, in turn, as I'd hoped, set off a chain reaction of correct answers that extended well into the middle of the grid. Short stuff comes first, long stuff comes later. Time and again, the short stuff got me out of the ruts. Anyway, after I got going in the NE, I got stuck again, and had to turn to short answers again (this time in the SE), and then got stuck again and had to hit the short answers in the SW. By pushing inward at the grid from these pockets of short answers, I was able to bring the whole thing to heel ... eventually. Finished up where I started, back in the NW, which doesn't seem too tough in retrospect, but that's the beauty of retrospect—no more blank squares staring at you.

[17A: Pioneer in musical impressionism, despite rejecting the term]

As low word-count puzzles go, the fill on this one was fairly clean, and there were some lovely longer answers. But I still can't say I really enjoyed this. There's just a perverse lot of technically real but strangely niche longer answers. Not sure how anyone's ever going to get excited about stuff like CHIPBOARD (?) (10D: Manufactured wooden sheet) or FREESTONE (?) (25D: Fine-grained rock that can be easily cut in any direction) or SUN ROSE (?) (38A: Mediterranean plant named for its brightly colored flowers). This seems like stuff your wordlist tells you is a thing. All of those answers were compound words that I managed to solve only by inferring their parts. Yes, CHIP and BOARD and FREE and STONE and SUN and ROSE, I know those words, those look ok in the grid, fingers crossed! Sigh. The worst obscurity moment, for me, was the swimming coach (!?!?!?) crossing DARNERS, a thing I've never heard of before. Seen lots of dragonflies in my time, cannot remember ever learning the term DARNERS. I thought maybe "dragonflies" was a sewing term, or else maybe darning was some word for a distinctively dragonfly activity. So mad at HAINES / DARNERS that I did something I never do—I stopped mid-puzzle and looked up HAINES and DARNER to see if I was right. And I was. So I guess the puzzle is not, technically, unfair. But yeeeeeeesh. I mean, swimming coach? (27D: George ___, voted "Coach of the Century" by the International Swimming Hall of Fame). Come on. You could be "Coach of the Millennium," there's no way I'm knowing you.

The one thing about going this low with word count is that you start to rely on certain crutches. One is arcane or otherwise out-of-the-way fill (see above). The other thing—and this is something that absolutely plagued this grid—is plurals, particularly of the "ER" variety. So. Many. -ERS. Look at that run through the middle: HUNGERS FOR, DARNERS, RECRUITERS, UTTERS, BOERS, ELDERS, DODGERS. From UTTERS to HUNGERS you've got a five-step stairway of "S"s at the ends of those answers. And the -ERS don't stop. ESTER, PEEPER, HOME OWNER, USER, ERRS, ALIEN ENCOUNTER ... I think I got 'em all now, though there are still something like a half a dozen -S plurals left to count. Maybe most people won't notice this, but I found it aesthetically off-putting, and so noticeable that it stopped me in my tracks. I took a picture of exactly when I noticed it becoming a problem:

[DODGERS—one of the few absolute gimmes in this grid]

When you see the "-ERS" in isolation like this, before the rest of the grid is filled in, they're more noticeable. Nothing wrong with answers ending in -ERS, per se. But the pile-up ... like I said, it's a crutch. You can't go low without making some compromises. Maybe they were worth it, overall, as there's nothing in the grid that made me want to hurl my computer out the window, and many answers are good: DROVE NUTS, NODDED OFF, HUNGERS FOR ... I liked these just fine.

I imagine this puzzle was much easier for people who know their Mary Poppins. I am not one of those people. I think I saw that movie once as a child, and while I know the tunes you might expect one to know (Supercalifrag-etc., Spoonful of sugar, what not), "LET'S GO FLY A KITE" is not one I could hum for you (7D: "Mary Poppins" tune that begins "With tuppence for paper and strings / You can have your own set of wings"). I don't remember it at all. So "LET'S GO F-" had me stopped cold and guessing all kinds of wrong things. "LET'S GO FOR A RIDE"!? That gave me the "O" that led me to write in OUT for 30A: "I was stuck in traffic," perhaps (LIE). And since FOISTED ON (24D: Shoved down the throat of) and FREESTONE were also mysteries (even with those "F"s in place!), I had to rely on the short answers at the bottom of that corner to help dig me out: BESTS TABS SURE etc. If nothing else, this was a proper Saturday workout.  

[Nope, not ringing a bell]

A few more things:

• 6A: Unappetizing food (GLOP) — wrote in SLOP but was very aware that it might be GLOP, so the "error" didn't really faze me.
• 20A: Baby blue, perhaps (PEEPER) — brutal. No one ever refers to a single "baby blue" when talking about someone's eyes. Or a single PEEPER, for that matter.

["I was shakin' in my shoes / Whenever she flashed those baby blues..."]

• 19D: One side in an 1899-1902 war (BOERS) — one of only a handful of merciful gimmes
• 32D: Some camping excursions (RV TRIPS) — off the "T" I wrote in OUTINGS. Seemed fine. :/
• 1D: Like American bacon, but not Canadian bacon (CRISPED) — this should say "maybe," shouldn't it? I mean, I've seen some pretty flaccid American bacon in my time, and as for Canadian bacon, if I want to crisp it, I'm gonna crisp it, by hook or by crook, and you can't stop me.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on BlueSky and Facebook]