Constructor: Desirée Penner and Jeff Sinnock

Relative difficulty: Challenging (from a Downs-only perspective) 

THEME: GLUED TO THE TV (56A: Where your eyes might stay during a suspenseful scene … or the only place you’ll find the “eyes” in this puzzle) — “ITVI” appears in three themers:

Theme answers:

• TRANSIT VISAS (20A: Travel papers for those just passing through)
• HOBBIT VILLAGE (28A: Home for Tolkien’s Bilbo and Frodo)
• CROSSFIT VIDEO (49A: Home workout selection)

Word of the Day: Tori AMOS (10A: Singer/songwriter Tori) —

Tori Amos (born Myra Ellen Amos; August 22, 1963) is an American singer-songwriter and pianist. She is a classically trained musician with a mezzo-soprano vocal range. Having already begun composing instrumental pieces on piano, Amos won a full scholarship to the Peabody Institute at Johns Hopkins University at the age of five, the youngest person ever to have been admitted. She had to leave at the age of eleven when her scholarship was discontinued for what Rolling Stone described as “musical insubordination”.^[9] Amos was the lead singer of the short-lived 1980s pop group Y Kant Tori Read before achieving her breakthrough as a solo artist in the early 1990s. Her songs focus on a broad range of topics, including sexuality, feminism, politics, and religion.

Her charting singles include “Crucify“, “Silent All These Years“, “God“, “Cornflake Girl“, “Caught a Lite Sneeze“, “Professional Widow“, “Spark“, “1000 Oceans“, “Flavor” and “A Sorta Fairytale“, her most commercially successful single in the U.S. to date. Amos has received five MTV VMA nominations and eight Grammy Award nominations, and won an Echo Klassik award for her Night of Hunters classical crossover album. She is listed on VH1‘s 1999 “100 Greatest Women of Rock and Roll” at number 71. (wikipedia)

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Well this was unpleasant. The theme is so awfully, terribly forced, starting with the shoehorning of “eyes” (“I”s) into the clue, and ending with super-contrived answers all around. CROSSFIT VIDEO? WTF? And HOBBIT … VILLAGE? When I search [“Hobbit Village”] I just get movie sets in New Zealand. Do you mean The Shire? I only know The Shire. After that … no idea what this is all about. When I solve Downs-only, I *kinda* need the Acrosses to be real things, and today, oof. I honestly finished the puzzle going, “NOEM …. NOEM … NOEM … that’s … well, that’s wrong. That’s not a thing. I must have an error.” But then I got the “Congratulations!” message upon finishing the puzzle correctly, and I just sat there for a bit, wondering what the hell a NOEM was. NOAM Chomsky is spelled with an “A” … what is this mystery word? Only then did I look at the clue and remember with sudden sharp and awful clarity that this was the name of that loathsome, anti-choice, forced-birth-for-pregnant-ten-year-olds, election-denying creep in charge of my best friend’s home state. Why would … why would you put her in your puzzle? There’s no need. There’s never a need, on a Monday, for the country’s 27th best known governor. ALB, awful, NOEM, awful, SLO, awful, what is even happening here today? That is one of the ugliest rows I’ve Ever seen. ALB NOEM SLO. On a Monday. Just head-shakingly weak. And EROS ETAL EENY ETSY ESPY all bunched up in the S and SW. SSE? HER and SHE? I’m struggling to find where the fun was supposed to be here. I guess the “I”s “glued” to the “TV” were the fun. Well, we’re gonna have to AGREE to disAGREE about what “fun” means today. Haven’t seen a Monday miss this bad in a long time.

So many struggles on the Downs-only front. POISE before … SENSE? Just SENSE!? (13D: Levelheadedness). POP TOP before POP TAB, ugh (4D: Built-in can opener). “I’M OFF,” somehow really hard to come up with (29D: “Ta-ta!”). YEW TREE before ASH TREE (44D: Its wood is used in making archery bows). It’s maple, myrtle, oak and (classically) YEW! What is this ash nonsense? Took a while to get AVATARS (47D: Bitmoji likenesses, e.g.) and INVEST (51D: Be an angel?). And then GLARE, yikes. I was looking for weather, like SLEET (53D: Blinding driving hazard). Not all of this struggle is the puzzle’s fault, but some of it is. POP TOP! YEW TREE! POISE! These were better answers. Sigh.