Constructor: Brian Thomas
Relative difficulty: Easyish (6:23)
THEME: none Word of the Day: INTER MILAN (12D: Italian soccer club with three Champions League titles) —
Football Club Internazionale Milano, commonly referred to as Internazionale(pronounced [ˌinternattsjoˈnaːle]) or simply Inter, and known as Inter Milan outside Italy, is an Italian professional football club based in Milan, Lombardy. Inter is the only Italian club never to have been relegated from the top flight of Italian football.
Founded in 1908 following a schism within the Milan Cricket and Football Club (now A.C. Milan), Inter won its first championship in 1910. Since its formation, the club has won 30 domestic trophies, including 18 league titles, 7 Coppa Italia and 5 Supercoppa Italiana. From 2006 to 2010, the club won five successive league titles, equalling the all-time record at that time. They have won the Champions League three times: two back-to-back in 1964 and 1965 and then another in 2010. Their latest win completed an unprecedented Italian seasonal treble, with Inter winning the Coppa Italia and the Scudetto the same year. The club has also won three UEFA Cups, two Intercontinental Cups and one FIFA Club World Cup. (wikipedia)
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Couple of answers I found too grim for my tastes (EBOLA SCARE, "I'M HIT!"), and there's an obsession with Scrabbliness that I find a little cutesy (especially when it results in not-so-great-results like JESU / MACJR). Not a huge fan of the extra choppy grid. But in the main, the fill is solid, and there are some nice longer answers (FOOD DESERT, HOVERCRAFT, AFROBEAT, BOO BIRDS, I'M SURE OF IT) that make the experience feel worth it. Also helps (my mood) that it's on the easy side. Most of my trouble was in the NE and SW—especially the SW, where I had trouble with OL' MAN RIVER and then wrote in OLD and screwed everything up, however briefly. Also had "NOT on good terms" and COMPELS down there for a bit, and never fully grasped RIM until I was done (even now, it seems pretty tenuous; I guess the "corona" is the RIM of whatever object is doing the eclipsing...). Also thought the [Far-off explorer] was a SPACE CADET. And there was no way I was going to get from "weaponry," CAST IRON being known to me only as a pair words that can precede "skillet." But crosswordese fluency / experience with ambiguous dental clues got me DDS, and OVID was a gimme and EROS wasn't tough, and, I don't know, I guess FATS DOMINO eventually got me out of trouble. In the NE, my problems were fewer, but wow, *INTER* MILAN? Never heard of it. I know of AC MILAN, which seems to be the (much) more successful team. INTER MILAN won three Champions League titles, OK, but two of them were in the '60s. I had to get every bit of INTER from crosses. Otherwise, no real holdups with this one. I don't want to accept WHAP as a thing (1A: Smack!). My start in the NW was a little sticky because of that, but more because of a very unfortunate mistake one-two. The "one" was RAIL and the "two" was OLIVE. I really thought RAIL spider was a slam dunk, and then when OLIVE worked in the cross, and seemed a defensible answer for 19A: Vodka go-with, I just went with it. But no, it was HOBO TONIC all along. Do you put olives in a vodka martini? I would never drink a vodka martini, so I don't know. The way I fixed that corner was weird: I worked backward from CYAN (23A: Color in a color printer) ... CYAN to RACY to TONIC to HOBO. And then off I went. And now, to bed. See you Sunday.Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld