Concert pianist Rubinstein / TUE 7-10-18 / Old print tint / Sight at golf course grocery

Constructor: Alex Eaton-Salners

Relative difficulty: Easy (3:08)

THEME: FULL HOUSE (57A: Hit 1980s-'90s sitcom ... or what the circled letters in 16-, 26- and 43-Across represent?) — five-letter strings that feature three-of-a-kind followed by a pair (in poker terminology, a FULL HOUSE)

Theme answers:

• GRASS SEED (16A: Groundskeeper's supply)
• WELL LOOKY THERE (26A: "Do my eyes deceive me?!")
• THREE-EGG OMELET (43A: Hearty breakfast order)

Word of the Day: SERAPHIC (9D: Blissfully serene) —

adjective

1. characteristic of or resembling a seraph or seraphim.

   
   

   "a seraphic smile"

   
   

   synonyms:

   blissful, beatific, sublime, rapturous, ecstatic, joyful, rapt; (google)

Entirely adequate! Concept is interesting. If the three-of-a-kind and the pair had been in different parts of the answer, I would've side-eyed this puzzle until my eyes fell out, but keeping them all together gives the impression of an actual poker hand, so, cool. Still not a fan of these theme answers where the circled squares don't touch all the words in the answers (i.e. THERE in 26A and OMELET in 43A are just hanging out there, not in on the poker action at all), but I know the editor doesn't care about such things, and getting this theme to work out entirely in two-word phrases would probably have been pretty rough, so fine, whatever. My biggest harrumph involved WELL, LOOKY THERE! because it's LOOKY HERE. One does not LOOKY THERE. One LOOKYs (lookies?) HERE. Google only partially backs me up here (80k HERE to 27 THERE—I want that gap to be much, much bigger). If you are saying LOOKY, my sense is that you and your interlocutor are both in relatively proximity to the thing you are lookying at, and even if that thing were relatively far off, like a tall building, I still say you go for HERE. I can barely make my mouth say LOOKY THERE, so wrong does it feel.


Today's solve was 23 seconds faster than yesterday's. I've been keeping track of my times for about three months now, and roughly a quarter of the time, I'm faster on Tuesday than on Monday. I'm also faster on Friday than I am on Thursday more than half the time. It's actually kiiiind of interesting to see all the columns of data. I have lots of annotations too, like * for an AM solve and ∆ for an alcohol-affected solve (there are only a couple of these, don't worry). Bizarrely, however, today, despite flying through the grid, one of my only hiccups was OOLONG. And I had O-L--- in place before I even saw the clue (23D: Tea choice). That should've been automatic, but my brain just went "OIL ... something?" Weird tricks my brain will play on me when I'm trying to engage in pattern recognition at high speeds. Otherwise, I had some trouble with SERAPHIC (a word I know of but never use, or see), and then futzed around a bit at the very end, in the south, trying to get EFFS (51D: Lots of fluff?) and FRIA (61A: Arizona's Agua ___ National Monument) into place. The word "fluff" is mostly EFFS, in case you are wondering what the hell that clue is about. And [Longtime members of the bar?] are SOTS because alcoholism is hilarious in crosswordville. Lovable, kooky drunks who exist for our amusement. It's fun. The short fill on this one was kinda weak, and the choppy grid a little irksome (ultra narrow passageways all over the place), but I found it tolerable, and it's Tuesday—they one non-Sunday day where tolerable is really a win.

Signed, Rex Parker, King of CrossWorld

[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]