Constructor: Evan Mahnken
Relative difficulty: Easy (5:10) (one-handed) (eating late-night pb sandwich)
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THEME: none
Word of the Day: WILHELM SCREAM (35A: Classic sound effect in an action film when someone is badly injured) —
WILHELM SCREAM is, admittedly, a flashy answer, so it's in the right place (dead center), but there's not much else that's exciting here. The other longer Acrosses are OK, but nothing else really snaps, crackles, or pops, and there's a lot of regrettable short fill and forgettable mid-range stuff. The puzzle lost me at BABAS / RETIP / SAPOR :( and never quite got me back. I honestly can't stand SAPOR, which is one of those words that exists in crosswords and nowhere else. If you see it ... it bodes ill. Defensible, sure, and you could use it in a pinch to hold some very challenging-to-fill part of a grid together, but just sitting there is a non-challenging area of a Friday themeless? Bah. GAO also yuck. KPS?? I've heard of being ON KP, but plural KPS is bizarre. That little area could be easily refilled in a much cleaner and less weird way. The "K" is not that valuable. KPS = not worth it. ISNO and ACTV aren't helping. ONE ON and AWS, same. Other stuff is passable, but Fridays should bounce and hum and sing and this one just screamed once and then died.
I'm very tired after my first day of teaching in the new semester. I'm painfully out of practice. Didn't eat, didn't hydrate, didn't *quite* get one of my syllabuses finished, couldn't solve my tech problem in one of my classrooms. Took a long walk after work to a bar downtown and then had a drink and took the same long walk home, so this sentence is probably going to be my last. Luckily there's just not that much to write about. OK, this sentence will be my last. Bye! (damn it!). This one is the last!
P.S. the clue on WENCESLAS (11D: Carol king) is very good and deserves polite applause, at least.
[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]
Relative difficulty: Easy (5:10) (one-handed) (eating late-night pb sandwich)
Word of the Day: WILHELM SCREAM (35A: Classic sound effect in an action film when someone is badly injured) —
The Wilhelm scream is a stock sound effect that has been used in at least 416 films and TV series (as of July 2015) beginning in 1951 for the film Distant Drums. The scream is often used when someone is shot, falls from a great height, or is thrown from an explosion.Voiced by actor and singer Sheb Wooley, the sound is named after Private Wilhelm, a character in The Charge at Feather River, a 1953 Western in which the character gets shot in the thigh with an arrow. This was its first use from the Warner Bros. stock sound library, although The Charge at Feather River is believed to have been the third film to use the effect.[4]The effect gained new popularity (its use often becoming an in-joke) after it was used in the Star Wars series, the Indiana Jones series, animated Disney and Pixar films, and many other blockbuster films as well as in many television programs, cartoons, and video games.
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| THREE POINTERS |
I'm very tired after my first day of teaching in the new semester. I'm painfully out of practice. Didn't eat, didn't hydrate, didn't *quite* get one of my syllabuses finished, couldn't solve my tech problem in one of my classrooms. Took a long walk after work to a bar downtown and then had a drink and took the same long walk home, so this sentence is probably going to be my last. Luckily there's just not that much to write about. OK, this sentence will be my last. Bye! (damn it!). This one is the last!
P.S. the clue on WENCESLAS (11D: Carol king) is very good and deserves polite applause, at least.
[Follow Rex Parker on Twitter and Facebook]