Constructor: Marshal Herrmann
Relative difficulty: Hard
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THEME: ONE L— Every answer in the grid has the letter L appear in it exactly one time.
Word of the Day: SEA GLASS (28A: Material for some jewelry at a surf shop) —
Theme answers:
One other reason this puzzle was satisfying is the crosswordese-to-revealer pipeline. As a frequent solver, it's unusual to see a glue-y answer like ONE L carry such weight like this. Like, wow, someone finally can appreciate ONE L beyond giving it a small eye roll (does anyone outside of crosswords actually spell out "one L" instead of 1L?) and moving on. ERA puzzle when? ORE puzzle when? OREO puzzle when??
Relative difficulty: Hard
THEME: ONE L— Every answer in the grid has the letter L appear in it exactly one time.
Word of the Day: SEA GLASS (28A: Material for some jewelry at a surf shop) —
Sea glass are naturally weathered pieces of glass, which often have the appearance of tumbled stones. Sea glass is physically and chemically weathered glass found on beaches along bodies of salt water. These weathering processes produce natural frosted glass.[1] Sea glass is used for decoration, most commonly in jewellery. "Beach glass" comes from fresh water and is often less frosted in appearance than sea glass. Sea glass takes 20–40 years, and sometimes as much as 100–200 years, to acquire its characteristic texture and shape.[2] It is also colloquially referred to as drift glass from the longshore drift process that forms the smooth edges. In practice, the two terms are used interchangeably.
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Theme answers:
- ONE L (62A: First-year law student ... or what every answer in this puzzle has exactly)
Onto the puzzle! I expect this one to be pretty polarizing. I've seen a lot of "stunt" puzzles before ... only using one vowel, being limited to only some letters of the alphabet, every clue starts with some letter, etc., etc. The issue is that while these can be hard to construct, they are often not very fun to solve! And why do we make crosswords if not for them to be fun to solve? This one wasn't particularly egregious to me, but I did notice something was amiss in the fill before getting to the revealer. OLAF / LOEW / LEO I in one corner is a pileup of hard-ish propers for a Tuesday, as well as things like TFAL (especially crossing LIFE as clued!), BALT, ELEV strewn around. Nothing terrible, individually ... but it adds up.
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| Some sneaky avocado in these BLTS! |
It was cool to hit the revealer, though, and finally see it. I was pretty impressed by the construction. Did it make me enjoy the solve overall in hindsight? I think so! But I'm genuinely not sure. It would have been amazing if the clues had also had one L each. That would have blown my mind.
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| Pretty OPAL |
Because of the constraints of this theme, the grid has a lot of 4s and 5s and not too many long answers. But a lot of the 8s were really great. I really like RED FLAGS (as fill, and, I guess, in people I date, given my track record), GOLF CART, CULT HERO, FIELD DAY, BOOTLEGS. I'd never heard of SELF FIVE but that's a funny concept and answer.
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| Look at that suburban SPRAWL. Bad! |
Bullets:
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- BLOG (1A: Publication that usually has only one contributor)— Funny that the puzzle opened with this clue on a day I was guest blogging!
- ELEV (56A: About 5,280 ft., for Denver)— I wonder how they measure elevation for a city. Is it an average of the elevation over every point within city limits? Is it the elevation at the geographic center of the city? Is there some special location where the official elevation is measured? I could certainly look this up very easily, but it's more fun to just ask on here!
- GOLF CART (4D: Green vehicle?) — Fun clue! Good misdirect to green-as-in-eco instead of green-as-in-golf.
- OLAF (46D: German chancellor Scholz) — Who will be the first to put French prime minister ATTAL in a grid?
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