Roger who played part on Cheers / TUE 4-18-17 / Roger formerly of Fox News

Constructor:Bruce Haight

Relative difficulty:Don't know ... don't care

THEME: grid uses only letters R, E, T, L, S, I, and A 

Word of the Day:no, none of these are good enough—

***

Well here's where I would've stopped if I didn't have a crossword blog:


Hard to overstate how bad this concept is. How joyless and STALE and etc. What's worse, it's not even original *to the constructor*. He (and the editor, who somehow accepts this stuff) foisted a similar disaster on us a couple years back, where just eight letters were used in the construction of the grid. Here, see (Apr. 14, 2015):


Fun, right? And now, just seven. I can't wait for 6, 5, etc. I'm sure things will improve with fewer letters. I'm sure of it.


Here's a tweet re: *Sunday's* puzzle, before this thing ever came out:

I think we can roll it over and apply it to today as well. Moreso. Here are some more tweets, just because I don't have anything to say about this puzzle that isn't obvious.




Oh, here's an actual puzzle-related problem someone had:



Let's all pretend today's puzzle never happened. Yes, that's nice.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

P.S. SISSIES is a bullshit pejorative (15D: Fraidy-cats). Let's retire it. It's mostly just "S"s anyway, no one would miss it.

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