She's So Hot Right Now

by Zhouqin Burnikel

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• Difficulty: easy

Hot as in insanely hot, as this weather is turning out. Record-breaking heat waves abounds this Fourth of July. Stay hydrated, folks.

Today's crossword is a breezy long boy, coming in at 14x6. Puzzles with wacky grid shapes are some of my favorites in the Puzzmo collection, it adds a little spark of surprise to the daily routine.

The longitudinal shape of this grid makes it feel more like solving a series of minis than a complete crossword, each segment is so separated from the others. I don't think the theme necessarily justifies the length, with DONNA (Summers), and SUMMER MCINTOSH forming a trio of self-referencing answers. DONNA really feels like the odd one out. But hey, long grids are cool so what does it matter?

I struggled a bit on LAMA crossing SUMMER and MCINTOSH, a little tricky with both of the latter themers clued plainly as a proper noun. Without LAMA it was a total toss-up, "what's a girl's name that could fit SU__ER?" Luckily the C in MCINTOSH is a dead giveaway that it's some Mc-variant.

I feel like a bit of an idiot, filling VEGAS for "Gambling mecca with many daily ferries to Hong Kong". It fits "Gambling mecca", for sure, but "ferries to Hong Kong"? In my defense I was thinking it was a cheeky reference to some Casino attraction that I don't recognize, like implying Gondolas in The Venetian. So maybe there could've been a Hong Kong ferry in, I don't know, Mandalay Bay or something? Look, it was late and I might've been a little tired.

"Front porches for brownstones" was totally out of my league, I just guessed at STOOPS when enough crosses were filled. Maybe a NYC-minded reader can fill me in here, but by the looks of things Brownstone is referring to a building material common in East Coast townhouses?

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