Landlocked land along the Silk Road / SAT 8-1-20 / Worshiper of goddess Mama Quilla mother moon / Natural feature near Queensland / Former name of subsaharan Africa's largest country / Like the last complete symphony of Gustav Mahler

Constructor: Adam Aaronson and Paolo Pasco

Relative difficulty: Medium

THEME: hard-to-spell proper nouns — not really a "theme," but ... a design element, for sure (see 1A, 68A)

Word of the Day: KYRGYZSTAN (68A: Landlocked land along the Silk Road) —

Kyrgyzstan (/ˈkɪərɡiːˌstɑːnˌ -ˌstæn/ Kyrgyz: Кыргызстан Qırğızstan [qɯrʁɯsˈstɑn]), officially the Kyrgyz Republic (Кыргыз Республикасы; Russian: Кыргызская Республика, tr.Kyrgyzskaya Respublika) and also known as Kirghizia (Киргизия [kʲɪrˈɡʲizʲɪjə]), is a country in Central Asia. Kyrgyzstan is a landlocked country with mountainous terrain. It is bordered by Kazakhstan to the north, Uzbekistan to the west and southwest, Tajikistan to the southwest and China to the east. Its capital and largest city is Bishkek.

Kyrgyzstan's recorded history spans over 2,000 years, encompassing a variety of cultures and empires. Although geographically isolated by its highly mountainous terrain, which has helped preserve its ancient culture, Kyrgyzstan has been at the crossroads of several great civilizations as part of the Silk Road and other commercial and cultural routes. Though long inhabited by a succession of independent tribes and clans, Kyrgyzstan has periodically fallen under foreign domination and attained sovereignty as a nation-state only after the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1991. (wikipedia)

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This puzzle was not all-over hard but it was cluster-hard, for sure. There's a knot of answers right around and including FEED, and virtually all of my problems were there and radiating out from there. Everything circled in green in this shot, basically:

That little gimmick with the "K" proper nouns in the first and last Across answers, yes, that slowed me down, but not because I didn't know the answers, only because I wasn't sure how to spell them (which was surely the point ... though I don't know why that is "fun," truly; I mean, I see what you're doing, but ... yeah, that sort of "cute" just isn't my thing). Everything pictured in the green knot above, however, did legit slow me down. I am very mad at myself about "I RESIGN," which I honestly should've seen much more quickly (27A: Words from a quitter). I had the -ESI- but all I could think of was "I DESIST," and I was like "wow, that's terrible." Yes. Terrible and wrong. I was also mad that I just couldn't come up with the ROLL of EEL ROLL (47A: Sushi with unagi). I know very well that unagi is eel and I got the EEL part no problem, but ... I just kept picturing the eel sitting on sushi rice and thinking "what ... do you call that? EEL RICE?" When I think "sushi" I think raw fish (or, if eel, cooked fish) on rice. The whole ROLL possibility ... I just blanked on. Found the cue on FEED hard and the clues on DUEL (35D: Go one on one) and AGES (25D: So long) vague and thought 'SCUSE ME was a single word ending in "-EME" (39A: "Comin' through!"), and then there was NECROMANCY, which had a very hard "?" clue (29D: Dead reckoning?), but one I could normally battle through pretty easily if the adjacent answers were normally cooperative. Alas, they were not. The rest of the puzzle—a snap (again, except the spelling bee at the first and last Acrosses).


It's a nice grid overall, for sure. The two *long* Acrosses are the real stand-outs, but won't get the attention they deserve because of the look-at-me-ness of the K-words. Big PLAY WITHIN A PLAY fan ("The Murder of Gonzago" is in "Hamlet"). Nothing else really Sizzle-sizzles, but the big chunks are all smooth and none of the short crosses are horrid, and "I'M HONORED" at least feels original / creative, so, yeah, looks good, more of this would be fine, thank you.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]

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