Green carving stone / TUES 5-7-19 / Snowfall unit / Hawkeye's home / Thunder sounds

Hi, everyone! It's Clare, and I'm back for another Tuesday — albeit a different Tuesday than usual because, well, law school finals suck! But, thankfully, they're all over now, and my summer has officially started! Perfect time to do some crosswords...

Constructor: Ross Trudeau

Relative difficulty:Fairly difficult
THEME: FINISHING TOUCH(49A: Icing on the cake... or a hint to 20-, 24-, 35- and 43-Across) — Each of the theme answers ends with a "touch"

Theme answers:

• BUYAPIGINAPOKE (20A: Purchase something sight unseen)
• EXOTICPET (24A Chinchilla or macaw, e.g.)
• THISISSPINALTAP(35A: 1984 mockumentary with a lot of ad-libbed dialogue)
• SUNSTROKE (43A: Danger of laboring outdoors in the summer)

Word of the Day: NERO (52D: Master detective Wolfe) —

Nero Wolfe is a fictional character, a brilliant, oversized, eccentric armchair detective created in 1934 by American mystery writer Rex Stout. Wolfe was born in Montenegro and keeps his past murky. He lives in a luxurious brownstone on West 35th Street in New York City, and he is loath to leave his home for business or anything that would keep him from reading his books, tending his orchids, or eating the gourmet meals prepared by his chef. (Wikipedia)

I wasn't a big fan of this puzzle overall. None of the fill inspired me, and some of the longer answers felt clunky. The theme was clever enough, but it took me way too long to even get what the theme was. I sat staring at the finished puzzle for a while before it clicked for me. I found the puzzle particularly difficult because I just had never heard of two of the long theme answers — the mockumentary THIS IS SPINAL TAP (35A) and the expression BUY A PIG IN A POKE (20A). Those words, along with some other terms in the puzzle, just aren't on my wavelength, probably because I'm younger than the average crossword solver. So, trying to fill in some of the downs around those long answers wasn't easy for me.

Also, the clue for the revealer felt a bit off. "Icing on the cake" usually means something that's an extra good that makes a situation even better. (For example, the Warriors win the NBA finals AND Steph is finals MVP.) The icing on the cake is technically the FINISHING TOUCH (49A) on a cake usually, but the wording here still felt amiss. BROCA'S AREA (56A: Brain region linked to speech) also borders on hard for a Tuesday, but I got it relatively easily, and, for that, I have to thank Grey's Anatomy. I also had a challenging time in the bottom of the puzzle with IROC (51D: Classic Camaro) and NERO (52D: Master detective Wolfe). Then, I couldn't remember the pest control brand DCON (62D).

I had a nit with 3D: Refute. The definition of "refute" is to prove something wrong, while DENY means simply to say something isn't true. Yes, DENY is now the third definition of "refute" in the dictionary, but why not just use "rebut" as the clue and remove any confusion?

There was a lot of foreign language in this puzzle, which I found fun but which might throw some. There was Spanish with ESTADO (4D), lots of French with PERE (12D), PATOIS (21D), ELAN (46A), and MONT (17A), and Italian with UOMO (53D). Also, Arabic with EMIR (60A) and, technically, Portuguese with ACAI (42A). Then there was ITZA (32D), which is Mayan.

Bullets:

• I'm sorry, but the only way to eat a CREPE (9A) is topped with nutella and strawberries.
• A friend of mine growing up had several chinchillas as pets, so I don't think of them as particularly exotic (even if they are!).
• While my age may have hurt me in some places, it surely helped me get XTINA (25D: Singer Aguilera's nickname).
• 55D: The constructor couldn't think of a better clue for HERS than "the wife's"?? Come on. Why not just, "the woman's" or the "the girl's"?
• ANNOTATORS (18A) brings me back to English class in my freshman year of high school, where basically all we did was read books or passages and annotate them. I probably know the book "The Secret Life of Bees" better than anyone because of how thoroughly we annotated that entire book. (I stole my sister's copy of the book to use to annotate for class, and she still maintains I owe her a new copy.)
• For 36D, I couldn't get the idea of "arts and crafts" out of my head, so it took me way too long to figure out that the end was supposed to be SCIENCES.

Signed, Clare Carroll, officially a second-year law student

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