1. An upwardleapmade by a trainedhorsewithoutgoingforwardandwith a backwardkick of thehindlegs at theheight of theleap.
2. A playfulleap or jump; a caper. (thefreedictionary.com)
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This is all very competent and also dull. AZALEA TREE METAL STAMP ADJECTIVE NOUN. There are several longish answers that feel very improvised and iffy: SAY YES TO, ONE IN FORTY, IN THIS WAY. There's virtually nothing current here—not the proper nouns, not the slang. Not many GROANERs, I'll grant you that, but mostly this feels like a very professionally made placeholder of a puzzle, one that could just as easily have been published 10, 15, 20 years ago. The cluing is appropriately tricky—puzzle was on the easy side, but not by much. But ... I just can't get excited over SMOKY TOPAZ. Again, adj / noun, stone I've never heard of, shrug. ART BOARD! (20A: Backing for a cartoonist) It's a thing, but .. not an exciting one. Maybe my failure to be terribly entertained is AGE-RELATED. Maybe if I'd lived in the era of RUMBLE SEATs, with ANSON Williams and Ron Howard and the gang at Arnold's, I might feel differently. (Note: I probably meant Potsie and Richie, not ANSON Williams and Ron Howard) (Note further: RUMBLE SEATs were already dated by Potsie and Richie's time)
Some of the clues are pretty clever (1A: Like a Navy seal => WATER TIGHT), and some seem to be trying a little too hard (30A: Girl's name in which the last three letters are equivalent to the first? => IONE). Some were way too easy (25D: Four-for-four Super Bowl-winning QB) (43D: Edmond ___, the Count of Monte Cristo), but mostly things were just ... OK. Here's how you blow a Saturday corner wide open without even trying: get a high-value letter at the beginning of a long answer (today, "J" from JOTS), and then use that letter to plunk that long answer right down into the middle of the formerly empty quadrant (JOE MONTANA).
From there I got RAHS (wrong, it was YAYS), TMI, STONE AGE, INFANT. Usually it just takes one long answer in a quadrant falling for that area to turn from tough to easy. As you can see from that last screen shot, I had ISSUED for 39A: Came (from), which was easily the thorniest thing in the whole grid. With --SUED in place, ENSUED didn't even occur to me. Those initial two letters were the last things I filled in / changed.
Word of the Day:Walter ALSTON(21A: Walter ___, Dodgers manager before Tommy Lasorda) —
Walter Emmons Alston (December 1, 1911 – October 1, 1984), nicknamed "Smokey", was an American baseball player and manager in Major League Baseball (MLB). He is best known for managing the Brooklyn/Los Angeles Dodgers between 1954 and 1976. Alston signed 23 one-year contracts with the Dodgers. He had a calm, reticent demeanor, for which he was sometimes also known as "The Quiet Man". (wikipedia)
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Always happy to see this kid's name on the byline. I know the puzzle is going to be reasonably current, reasonably snappy, reasonably clean. Again I will call attention to my 1-Across/Gimme principle, which says that if 1-A is a gimme, the puzzle is going Down. And 1-Across was in fact a gimme (1A: "Come again?" ("WHAT'S THAT?")), and down it went, this puzzle, though I did get an unexpected fight from the NE corner thanks largely to Walter ALSTON, whose name means nothing to me despite my being a baseball fan and, in my youth, a Dodger fan. Problem: I started paying attention to baseball / collecting baseball cards in 1978, which means baseball consciousness began with the 1977 season, which means I missed the ALSTON era entirely. Why does no one every mention his name ever? He's in the Hall of Fame, but not so's you'd know. 23 years is a Long time to manage a major team and leave, like, no impression. Blame Lasorda, I guess (who was a bona fide media star, and who won more than one World Series). ALSTON won a World Series in Brooklyn, but it was waaaay in the beginning of his managerial career. Anyway, ALSTON grid-blocked me, man. Not cool. Also had some issues with USO TOUR (12D: Entertainment for general audiences?) and HILLY (10D: Good for sledding, say). For the latter, I really wanted something snow ... y.
Very cool how he stacked BRING IT ON and IT'S GO TIME (58A and 61A: "Let's do this!"). Much much much more impressive to stack long answers with identical clues than to do the more typical stupid thing of having successive Across (or Down) answers have the same clues, as if anyone just goes through the clues in order. I was a victim of my own big vocabulary (or my own dimwittedness, take your pick) when I got to 43D: Model and had EPI- and went with EPIGONE! Who does that? No one. I am the sole human on the planet who did that. Congratulate me. [Rush, e.g.] for REED was tough, despite the fact that I recently swam in a large pond that was bordered by rushes and I even referred to them as rushes so that meaning should've been near the surface of my mind. But wasn't. [Batman?] for CASEY was also tough (the reference point there is the poem "CASEY at the Bat," in case you somehow didn't know). But everything in between was cake. Fun cake. Yummy cake. Good puzzle.
A long time ago, I was solving this puzzle and got stuck at an unguessable (to me) crossing: N. C. WYETH crossing NATICK at the "N"—I knew WYETH but forgot his initials, and NATICK ... is a suburb of Boston that I had no hope of knowing. It was clued as someplace the Boston Marathon runs through (???). Anyway, NATICK— the more obscure name in that crossing—became shorthand for an unguessable cross, esp. where the cross involves two proper nouns, neither of which is exceedingly well known. NATICK took hold as crossword slang, and the term can now be both noun ("I had a NATICK in the SW corner...") or verb ("I got NATICKED by 50A / 34D!")
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