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Constructor: Ryan McCarty

Relative difficulty: Average



THEME: None

Word of the Day: SS MINNOW (Vessel in a famous 1960s shipwreck) —

The S. S. Minnow is a fictional charter boat on the hit 1960s television sitcom Gilligan's Island.

The ship ran aground on the shore of "an uncharted desert isle" (in the south Pacific Ocean), setting the stage for this popular situation comedy. The crew of two were the skipper Jonas Grumby and his first mate Gilligan, and the five passengers were millionaire Thurston Howell III, his wife Lovey Howell, movie star Ginger Grant, professor Roy Hinkley, and farm girl Mary Ann Summers.

So sit right back and you'll hear a tale, a tale of an okay grid..

Doc Daneeka, filling in for Rex. This clocked in just under my average Saturday solve, and would have been a breeze if I hadn't hit a brick wall in the NE corner somewhere between SALADA and OCTAVO and AAONLINE. I stared blankly for an eternity and, rather than help me solve the damn puzzle, my mind playfully conjured Wile E. Coyote waving the white flag.

My biggest gripe is the center. POWER STATION and SMOKED CIGARS are not the most idiomatically exciting phrases in the English Language, and when they make up the meat of your grid, the meat of your grid looks more like what you'd find in a Lunchables tray. Maybe you're thinking NAG, NAG, NAG, but it's a themeless, and so unless the grid itself is a feat of constructing ingenuity, the fill is the main attraction.  (Rex is also probably unimpressed with most feats of constructing ingenuity.)  On a separate and undeservedly self-righteous note, when can we start referring to SAME SEX MARRIAGE as just marriage?


There are some playful moments, like DEVIL DOG and OPERA HAT and COW TOWN. And any time you can incorporate Michael SCOTT into your puzzle, you're on the right track -- although I will never be Officially Impressed until someone throws DWIGHT K SCHRUTE or DUNDER MIFLIN in the mix.  Accordingly:


Finally, if you've never waded through a pea-soup fog of cigarette smoke to watch people play PAI gow at 2 AM in an off-brand casino far away from The Strip, are you even living your best life?

Bullets:

• COLMES— I could not remember how to spell the name of the clownishly token faux Democrat that Fox News used to parade around every evening like the cheerful village idiot of the right-wing news circuit.
• OPOSSUMS— O, possums!  What fray was here?
• AMAZONIA — If you're looking for something amusing to distract you from the horror of runaway deforestation under the Bolsonaro junta, Wikipedia defines the Amazon as a "moist broadleaf forest", which is both charming and gross at the same time.
• I SAID SO— Classic parenting mistake.  "Because I said so" is a sign of weakness, and they know it early on.  Make up something complex and irrational instead -- it takes them many more years to untangle faulty logic.

Signed, Doc Daneeka, Surgeon General of CrossWorld

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