From the desk of...
by Stella Zawistowski
- Play it ↗
- Difficulty: easy
No theme today, but solid fill and a fun solve. I am immensely proud of some of
my plonks today, with AMOEBA, CARETS, and ONSIDE. Something about the
cluing jived with me, what can I say.
As far as themelesses go, this is one of the better ones. Maybe I'm biased since I solved this together with my partner and we make the greatest crossword tag-team duo known to humankind. Maybe the fill is simply great. One of these is probably true.
I found that this puzzle split the difference between easily plonkable and entertaining in just the right way. A lot of the gimmes sat on the tip of my tongue for a few seconds before I could jot them down. There's something inherently satisfying about the space created after reading a clue, where mental gears are churning and the debate as to whether you can slot it reaches its peak.
The top half of the grid went down easy, each across plonked without considering
its downs. I did mistake CHAD for "British bloke", but it was close enough to
the intended answer CHAP that I can't count it as a loss. The bottom half was
a bit harder, with some more esoteric trivia like TOOTLE for "Play the flue"
which stumped even my flautist partner. We were thinking TOOTED, TOOTS but
couldn't find the right extension for the act of TOOTING to finish it out.
I caught on to CLASSACTION surprisingly quickly, slotting it after only the
CLA was revealed. EDITORSNOTE took a little longer, where EDITOR was
obvious (especially so thanks to the puzzle title) but the back half a little
less so. A couple of solid spanners.
Maybe could've done with a few more wordplay clues, but I do love the inclusion
of the dad joke "Lawyer's underwear of choice?" as BRIEFS.
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