It's an Alphabet - Poker crossover event! The theme answers display, within the circled letters, the alpha equivalent of FULLHOUSE poker hands. I'm going with GRASSSEED for the win, as the S's are the "highest" in the alphabet. On the other hand, Scrabble-tile-wise, THREEEGGOMELET has the greatest point value (7 versus 5). I guess it's an OPENDEBATE.
Once again, I was duped by a self-referential clue, in this case,"Lots of fluff?" (EFFS). They get me every time. I thought this one was a pretty good exemplar of the genre. "Pictures created with needles, informally" (TATS) was nice twist on an old chestnut and "Throws on the floor?" (AREARUGS) was very clever, but today's ace in the hole has to be "Lip or cheek" (SASS) - ha!
Some of the fill also URNS praise:
SERAPHIC - you don't see that everyday, unfortunately. 😥
OOLONG - a nice product and a good looking word.
SLEUTH - nothing says Nancy Drew like this word. Am I right?
EXCORIATED - a personal favorite.
There were a couple of wild cards in the pack. I thought the clue/answer pairs "Startle" (ALARM) and "Ambience" (AURA) weren't perfect matches, but IBEX others will call me on that.
~Frannie.
4:00
ReplyDeleteI suppose it would have been impossible to come up with answers that fit JJQQQ or other face card symbols...
Great puzzle. I really enjoyed solving it, especially coming across EXCORIATED and OOLONG.
5:31
ReplyDeleteI liked this one a lot, too. I love the theme. We saw a "triple letter" theme recently, didn't we? But this takes it a step farther, which I like. My favorite was WELLLOOKYTHERE. Hilarious.
I got WELLOOKY----- fairly early and sort of thought WELLLOOKYTHERE but I guess I wasn't quite over "well looky here" (even though I knew that was the wrong number of letters).
ReplyDeleteThene was fun and ended up surprisingly natural given how odd the full houses lpok if you just hone in on that part of the grid in isolation.
HAMSALAD isn't especially familiar to me, but then again I wouldn't necessarily jump on the HAMSAndo bandwagon... so I just hung back and waited for crosses.
6:20
ReplyDeleteGreat theme today. I saw a pattern after GRASSSEED and WELLLOOKYTHERE (I wanted "here," too), but still hadn't thought of the FULLHOUSE angle. And like Frannie points out, there are some great words for non-theme fill, too. No slowdowns today. I loved 9A Longtime members of the bar? (SOTS) for a nice change for that bit of crosswordese. And it was nice to see ARTUR Rubinstein represented. HAMSALAD is well-known to me, as my mother often made a large ham for dinner and then pulled out the meat grinder the next day to whip up some of the goop for sandwiches for the next couple of days.