Cock-a-hoop / SAT 6-27-26 / Kitchen project with minimal cleanup / Word repeated in a fit of disbelief / Defense council? / Hit the hay, to a toddler / Walks with a wobble / Multipurpose shortening? / Diamond pattern / Way up a mountain, perhaps

Constructor: Adrian Johnson

Relative difficulty: Very, very easy (except for the bottom stack, for me)



THEME: None

Word of the Day: TOLEDO (10D: City between Madrid and Ciudad Real) —

Toledo (UK: /tɒˈleɪdoʊ/ tol-AY-doh;^[2] Spanish: [toˈleðo] ^ⓘ) is a city and municipality in Spain. It is the capital of the province of Toledo and the de jure seat of the government and parliament of the autonomous community of Castilla–La Mancha.

• • •

Hi again friends! As promised yesterday, this is Rafa back again for some more crossword chitchat. Hope everyone is happy and healthy and able to maintain a comfortable temperature in their homes. Completely unsurprisingly, we have another themeless puzzle today. This one has some chonky quad stacks, so maybe someone heard me mention that yesterday's grid felt like it didn't have a lot of white space chunks.

A volcano SPEWing lava

What stood out most to be in this solve was the discrepancy in difficulty between the stacks. The top stack felt Monday-easy for me. HOW ABOUT NO came to be immediately, then I plonked down WHO'D, HONE, TAPERS, ABORT, RUMI, ETES ... and the rest of the corner fell within seconds. It felt like the fastest I had ever broken into a Saturday puzzle. But then the bottom stack put up a bit more resistance. GO BEDDY BYE was a totally new idiom to me (I don't have kids, and don't really spend much time around kids, so maybe that's why), and the downs in that area had tougher / vaguer clues than the ones up top. [When many rebellions emerge for the first time] was a hard clue for EARLY TEENS, too, so that whole region took some trial and error to conquer.

Feijoada is a Brazilian STEW (I know it's not clued that way but I wanted a picture of food)

The vertical stacks felt like they were somewhere in between, but still on the easy side for me. The clues felt more straightforward than usual for a Saturday, and nothing gave me much pause. That's a testament to the very smooth grid, without much crosswordese. We got a suffix -ITE and prefix AER- (Aer Lingus deserves a break!), and then mostly short fill that you see out in the world.

This is the AGRA Fort

What else? The long entries were are all super solid. I guess I wish maybe one or two had a tad more zing? LEGO BATMAN and HEY, WATCH IT! were my favorites. It's hard to allow for a "seed" entry when you're stacking four answers, though. As I mentioned before, the clues felt a bit too easy overall. Like, [Prom night rental] for TUX? That's a Monday clue. Ditto [Like a fired up sports crowd] for AROAR. I'm seeing straightforward clues everywhere I look.

[Dancer's restraint?] for REIN was clever (Dancer as in Santa's reindeer), but I can't remember other good "aha" moments. A fun solve overall, though!

Bullets:

• ANTS (47A: ___ climbing a tree (Sichuan noodle dish)) — Fun angle for this very common answer
• LYNN (58D: Super Bowl X M.V.P. ___ Swann) — I'm not a sports person so I couldn't tell you who was M.V.P. for Super Bowl LX (60), let alone X (10)!
• THROWBACKS (25D: Homages to a prior era) — Related to my post yesterday, here's another example of a lively one-word answer. 
• RYDER (35A: U-Haul competitor) — Never heard of this company, but its name made it pretty easy to infer.

Signed, Rafa

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