Feline Musings

by Sally Hoelscher

• Play it ↗
• Difficulty: medium

Love cats, love this puzzle. Albeit 1A started things off with a sour note (thou shalt not clue APPS with a random sample of apps from mine phone). The rest of the crossword was pleasant and fun to solve.

The difficulty curve of this puzzle is excellent. Just going by the acrosses, the puzzle feels a little on the difficult side. At least, that is until you reach the theme revealer at 33A (CAT). After MEOW, HISS, and PURR slot into place the rest of the puzzle flows smoothly.

Surprisingly, "Dating abbreviation" in the upper-right corner stumped me for a long time. I was so far in the internet meme headspace with ASL that when I eventually revealed BCE it didn't immediately register. "BCE, what is that, zoomer lingo?" The lower-left corner also took me a little longer than the others, though I appreciate the clue "'Wasn't me', essentially" as a pithy definition for SIC.

Can I talk about the grid shape for a minute? Something about the layout of this grid scratches an aesthetic itch in the back of my brain. Maybe it's because I'm a noob constructor and inevitably lean on the pinwheel design for my own crosswords, but I really appreciate how the black squares break up the middle section of this puzzle. The centered cross of LARGHISSMIMO and STEPSISTERS is good stuff.

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