I have to admit, I just don't think I know that word. The cluing was hard enough in that NE corner without my having made the whole situation much worse with a wrong answer, an answer that drove through the two toughest things in the puzzle for me: PAPILLA and CYRUS. I had one serious trouble spot-a collision of baffling answers, the bafflingness of which was instigated by one long, wrong answer: EASY AS PIE ( 24A: "No problem at all" => EASY-PEASY). Not a satisfying "Solid" for me, personally, but solid nonetheless. And then the fill was pretty weak in places, starting with HEP and ALBS (you can see why that NW corner felt musty, for reasons beyond the old-fashioned slang), and then that AHME DOER AOL stack in the bottom left. But it wasn't just geography trivia, there was KROGER and BILBO and KFC and BABEL etc. Some of it I knew, some of it I didn't, but the clues on TURIN and MIAMI and PLANO and HAVANA (you see a theme developing here.), they all gave me various levels of "shrug I dunno" (though I got PLANO weirdly quickly because I just wrote back to a couple of college students (aspiring constructors!) and their address was in PLANO). Just not enough high points in the longer answers. But even without that bummer of a mental image, the grid felt more listless than a Friday should be. My brain does what it does and that's what it did / is doing. THAT'S A TALL ORDER is solid, but still no real zip, and then there's DODGED A BULLET, which is a fine metaphorical expression but (and this is admittedly a very personal and undoubtedly oversensitive reaction) this country has such a horrific (and utterly preventable) gun violence problem that the image of people "dodging bullets" just evokes school shootings for me right now ( 29A: Narrowly avoided disaster). KID GLOVES is fine but also feels like it belongs in the old-fashioned category with HAM IT UP and TOP BANANA. long (and semi-redundant, though I know that technically it's not). you know, hot, in a literal sense, but that's typically how I think of LAVA (MOLTEN, that is) so the phrase as a whole feels just. MINDBENDER is too vague a thing to be exciting (to me), MOLTEN LAVA is. they topped out at "fine," somewhere north of "just OK," but still, there was nothing eye-popping or surprising about any of them. And then once the other marquee answers started appearing. It started out feeling very musty and old-fashioned, with phrases like HAM IT UP and TOP BANANA appearing where more interesting / current slang might have gone. Had trouble getting very excited about this one.
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