Hello! It’s Clare back for the last Tuesday in January. Hope you’ve all been staying as safe and as entertained as possible. I’m over here starting to feel like I may be losing my mind — I’ve finally reached the stage of quarantine where I’m making a sourdough starter and have spent way too much time on TikTok and Twitter and have dyed my blonde hair red and am contemplating surrounding myself with 800 plants (but I’m worried that they’d just judge me for my random BTS dance parties).
Anywho, let’s get on with the puzzle before I expose any more of my oddities...
Constructor:Peter Gordon
Relative difficulty:Difficult
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THEME: SCRABBLE (60A: Game in which the answers to the starred clues are legal plays but cannot be formed even if you have both blanks) — words that can’t be played in Scrabble because of a limited number of certain tiles
Relative difficulty:Difficult
THEME: SCRABBLE (60A: Game in which the answers to the starred clues are legal plays but cannot be formed even if you have both blanks) — words that can’t be played in Scrabble because of a limited number of certain tiles
Theme answers:
- PIZZAZZY (17A: Having panache)
- KNICKNACK (25A: Trinket)
- STRESSLESSNESS (35A: State that many people want to get to on vacation)
- RAZZMATAZZ (50A: Gaudy display)
Word of the Day: NARWHAL (45A: Tusked marine creature of the Arctic)— ![]()
The narwhal is a medium-sized toothed whale that possesses a large "tusk" from a protruding canine tooth. It lives year-round in the Arctic waters around Greenland, Canada, and Russia. It is one of two living species of whale in the family Monodontidae, along with the beluga whale. The narwhal males are distinguished by a long, straight, helical tusk, which is an elongated upper left canine.
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Wow, I really did not like this puzzle. I know Rex is usually the one who rails against Scrabble-ish puzzles, but I’ll give it a shot today! My uncle is a former Scrabble national champion, so I should probably know a lot about the game, but, alas, I did not pick it up. To be honest, I didn’t even understand the point of the theme until afterward with some quick Googling — there’s only one Z-tile, one K-tile and four S-tiles, so even with the two blank tiles you can’t play words with four Z’s, four K’s or seven S’s. And once I understood the point.... I still didn’t like the theme. First of all, in terms of construction, to work down through the puzzle and go from Z’s to K’s to S’s and then back to Z’s seems off. I hated STRESSLESSNESS with a passion and don’t think it should be a thing at all. Who goes on a vacation and says, “Ah, yes, when I come back I shall have achieved some STRESSLESSNESS”? Same with PIZZAZZY. Pizzazz is a great word. I love that word. But get that Y out of there. I liked TANZANIA (36D) as a long down, but the others in the NE and SW corners made the puzzle a bit harder than usual. POTTAGES (11D: Thick soups) and TREACLES (12D: Thick syrups) are cool words, but both made me reach into the far corners of my brain to figure them out. And I’m not especially familiar with the Glass-STEAGALL Act (35D), so that made me stare at the puzzle as I tried to work it out.
Sorry, I’m on a roll — and my brain feels fried from classes — so I think I just have to keep ranting now… THE CIA (59D and 61D: org. once headed by George W. Bush) was really quite dumb. I spent way too long trying to puzzle this out. Just… maybe don’t use “THE” in a puzzle? Who is Horatio SANZ (38D)? (It’s awesome that he was the show’s first Hispanic cast member, but he made me long for the days of Cheri Oteri as a name I’d know) Lava may be legit as a type of SOAP (15A), but it is verrry old-fashioned. Its logo alone looks like it belongs in the ‘70s. Please leave it there. There were two characters from St. Elmo’s Fire in the puzzle (54A and 2D), which is odd to me. Having SEAEAGLE (31A) and then STEAGALL (35D) in the same puzzle also feels like a lot of overlap.
I don’t know if I just wasn’t on the puzzle’s wavelength or if it was a bit old for me or if I’m just way too exhausted to be thinking straight, but getting through the puzzle was a struggle. Sorry to be such a Debbie Downer today! (By the way, Debbie Downer is an SNL character played by Rachel Dratch, in case any future crossword constructors are looking for names people might know.)
Misc.:
Misc.:
- I had “icicle” rather than ICE DAM (29D: Cold weather roofing problem) for a while in the puzzle, which messed me up in that whole lower left area.
- I think HOBBES should be in every puzzle — I grew up reading Calvin and Hobbes, and it’s just objectively the best.
- It’s like the puzzle constructor was speaking directly to me because I am most definitely feeling SLEEPY (20A: Feeling ready for bed)…
- When I hear RAZZMATAZZ, I can only think of it as the Jamba Juice flavor I used to get every single time.
- Here’s a Scrabble story for those of you who have gotten this far: When my dad congratulated his older brother on winning the Scrabble title, my incredibly and wildly rational mathematician uncle replied, “I was lucky.” Oh? How so? “I came up through the loser's bracket to the final and had to beat the best player in the world by more than 150 points. I drew both blanks and all four S's, and beat him by 185. I was lucky.”