Hebrew month when Hanukkah starts / 10-1-13 / 1943 penny material / Blue-skinned race in Avatar / Caffeine-laden nuts / Pitchers hitless games in baseball slang

Constructor: Joel Fagliano

Relative difficulty: Medium-Challenging (more Medium for me, but posted times seem high...)

THEME: GEESE / MIGRATION (18A: With 50-Across, it's represented by 15 squares in an appropriate arrangement in this puzzle) — Vs make a V-formation, like that of a G[oo]SE MIGRATION

Word of the Day: KISLEV (28A: Hebrew month when Hanukkah starts) —

Kislev (Hebrew: כִּסְלֵו, Standard) Kislev Tiberian Kislēw; also Chislev is the third month of the civil year and the ninth month of the ecclesiastical year on the Hebrew calendar.

In a regular (kesidran) year Kislev has 30 days, but because of the Rosh Hashanah postponement rules, in some years it can lose a day to make the year a "short" (chaser) year. Kislev is an autumn month which occurs in November–December on the Gregorian calendar and is sometimes known as the month of dreams. The name of the month may be taken from Akkadian kislimu, which means "inspissated, thickened" due to plentiful rains. But the name may also derive from the Hebrew root K-S-L as in the words "kesel, kisla" (hope, positiveness) or "ksil" (Orion, a constellation that shines especially in this month) - because the expectation and hope for rains. (wikipedia)

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This is odd. Bunch of Vs. Hardly any theme material in the bottom of the grid. It's interesting and non-standard, I'll give it that. But the theme feels pretty thin, and the Vs don't really make much of a visual impact, so I'm lukewarm on this one. Outside of the theme, there's some nice fill here and there. I liked COP TO and LIVING WILL (which I had wondered about, puzzle-wise—sometimes the NYT likes to avoid morbidity, but apparently this answer's OK, which is good). UP TO YOU, also nice. NICE JOB, even. Real, *real* outlier here is KISLEV. Been doing puzzles a long time, can't remember ever seeing this particular Hebrew month. Needed every cross for sure on that one. Everything else was pretty familiar. After KISLEV, I struggled most in the area around LAIN / MILES, actually (LAIN, in particular, was virtually impossible for me to see—just didn't compute). Not sure why you go SHAVER / AVES when SHIVER / IVES allows you to avoid the abbrev. Both the composer and the printer IVES are pretty famous. At least as famous as NIVEN, at any rate. But AVES isn't sooo offensive (just avoidable). Like the parallel complete first-person sentences I HOPE and I WON'T. I also like baseball, which I have to get back to watching now. Even though I don't care about either of the teams playing (Tampa Bay / Texas), I'm still hooked. It's a crazy game. Watched a no-hitter two days ago that ended with the winning pitcher in the on-deck circle (32D: Pitchers' hitless games, in baseball slang=NO-NOs). That just doesn't happen. But then it did. Amazing. So I gotta go watch.



Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

P.S. I kinda feel bad for the RAVEN that got run over by the damned GEESE. The OWL had the right idea and got the hell out of the way.

P.P.S. "GOOSE MIGRATION" googles twice as well as GEESE MIGRATION, and somehow feels righter to my ear/mouth.