( ***spoiler alert**** - the link is the finished grid.) I’ll take the Cliff Notes version of any kind of anything if I can use it to seem smarter than I am. Just yesterday I was whining about my vocation – as is my wont – and compared myself to Sisyphus, silently thanking Jeff Chen’s 10/13/13 Sunday puzzle that taught me that. I love having these PLINY THE ELDER and MOUNT VESUVIUS tidbits now in my back pocket, ready to be casually tossed out so I can sound learned. I’m very happy to learn the origin of FORTUNE FAVORS THE BOLD. “There is no interest level here.” Uh, I beg to differ. Even with my missteps - “dog tired” and “Blue Velvet,” I sorted it all out and dispatched the puzzle lickety split. I didn’t find this one hard at all, so I was surprised at the “medium challenging” rating. Some wrestling with vague clues, and a tad slow overall, but nothing noteworthily difficult here. No real hang-ups or wrong turns in this one. I had SCAM instead of SPAM at first, which seemed very plausible ( 10A: Many a phone call from one's own area code, nowadays). I feel like Kagan gets most of the ELENA glory. Cool to see ELENA clued as Ferrante this time. Only answer that was a total "?" to me was RENÉ Caovilla, but "high-end women's shoes," no surprise that's a little beyond me. Always weird when your wrong answer one place becomes your right answer somewhere else. and then bam, there's SLAV just waiting for me at 10D: Many a person once trapped behind the Iron Curtain.
I wrote in SLAV at 53A: Speaker of a language that has both Cyrillic and Latin alphabets because for the life of me I cannot keep SERB and SLAV straight. I would love a cool coffee clue, but this really ain't it.
"Jitter juice"? This dumb clue has me borderline angry. There are lots of other slang terms of real merit. JAVA is an actual coffee-producing island, you could go with that. Stop with your dumb slang from some wannabe hipster, Daddy-O. what the hell is " Jitter juice" ( JAVA)? Stop it. Literally nothing brings me greater joy that brewing that first pot of coffee just before dawn. It is the most important ritual of my day. Awkward adjectives like PUPAL and PAPUAN and then stupid archaisms like AFORE :/ and classic crosswordese like " IS IT I?" It was all a little exhausting. TUNA BURGER!? I'm sure they exist, but not anywhere I've eaten lately. This puzzle has " ERASERHEAD," so that's cool, but that's all that's cool. Things haven't even been *interestingly* bad lately. Lots of 3-, 4-, and 5-letter answers, though, so woo hoo! I feel like people are out here making puzzle just to make them, just because they seem adequate, or like something they can imagine being in a paper, instead of making puzzles that might bring *them* joy, one's they can imagine *themselves* really loving. There is no wordplay or trick or nothin'. It's some kind of ADAGE (67A: Maxim), and then a Roman dude and a volcano.
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