Constructor: Vasu Seralathan

Relative difficulty: Easy

THEME: Body part + gerund — Theme answers are a body part followed by a gerund verb, clued indirectly by sequences of letters as examples of the relevant actions.

Word of the Day: PLUTO (Second-most massive of the solar system’s known dwarf planets) —

Pluto (minor-planet designation: 134340 Pluto) is a dwarf planet in the Kuiper belt, a ring of bodies beyond the orbit of Neptune. It is the ninth-largest and tenth-most-massive known object to directly orbit the Sun. It is the largest known trans-Neptunian object by volume, by a small margin, but is slightly less massive than Eris. Like other Kuiper belt objects, Pluto is made primarily of ice and rock and is much smaller than the inner planets. Pluto has only one sixth the mass of Earth’s moon, and one third its volume. Pluto was recognized as a planet until 2006.

• • •

Theme answers:

• EYE-OPENING (OPTO-)
• ARM-TWISTING (MAR)
• HEART-STOPPING (VALENTIN-)
• JAW-DROPPING (_IGS__)
• GUT-BUSTING (BEL LY)

Hi friends, and happy Thanksgiving! It’s Rafa here subbing for Rex today. I hope you and anyone you celebrate with are happy and healthy!!

Onto the puzzle! This was a cute Thursday, I thought. Played a little bit easier-than-usual for me (which I am not mad about, at all) … didn’t really have any major snags. I only realized after solving that the theme answers all had body parts as their first words. That was a cool extra layer, and I went from being somewhat meh on the whole thing to being quite into it! Even though them being body parts wasn’t relevant to the clues, it’s details like this that can really elevate a theme.

Do MANDMs look like buttons? I guess they do…

There’s nothing really to nitpick about the theme (unfortunately I feel the need to nitpick the theme of every puzzle I solve … I wish I were not this way!) … GUT-BUSTING was new to me (I had only seen it as the “bust a gut” idiom, but never in that form), but it feels legit enough and was probably just a blind spot for me. I also wish there had been a better way to convey the “stopping” than with a dash, which to me more directly indicates a prefix (e.g. OPTO-), but this worked well enough!

This LADLE is a cute dinosaur!

I wonder whether the editors were desperately poring over this puzzle trying to find a place to sneak a Thanksgiving reference (PLYMOUTH: [Site of what many regard as the first Thanksgiving]), or if the constructor submitted that clue and this puzzle was slated for today because of it? Or maybe it was all just a happy coincidence? Who knows!

Some ASPENS for you

The fill was quite clean for a puzzle with 5 theme answers and 72 words (that’s themeless puzzle territory; theme puzzles can generally go up to 78. Fewer words generally mean more open space, and a greater challenge in finding smooth fill). The trade-off there is that it becomes challenging to include fresh bonus fill (NOTATION / GLOM ONTO is totally fine, but not really the sparkliest of stacks), but overall I really enjoyed the smoothness here and the chonkiness of some of the whitespace areas.