Well, this past week flew by, probably because we’ve been busy preparing for Thanksgiving (inspiration for this week’s quote). I’ve got the turkey all brined and seasoned and ready to go on the smoker first thing in the morning, most of the prep work for all the trimmings has been done, and we’ve got the TV room all set up to watch football. There’s just time to squeeze in a solve and write up a quick blog entry. Here we go…

• Name: Identifying Mark
• Grid size: 16×16
• Entries: 87
• Difficulty: Medium Hard (my solve time: 7:43)

I thought “Identifying Mark” would mean themers that referred to various famous people named Mark. Instead, it was the noun form of mark we got here – the mark of Zorro, the letter Z. There are no real themers, but lots of entries that include the letter Z, some of them twice. And all the Zs are circled and laid out in the grid in the shape of a Z (in case it wasn’t obvious, I’ve highlighted it in the image above). Since there aren’t really any themers per se, I won’t list anything here, but some of the Z words may end up in “Other stuff” below.

This puzzle is really quite a feat of construction – brava, Barb! According to my record of 390 ClassiCanadian puzzles I’ve solved, this is the first 16×16 grid. It’s also asymmetric, I guess to make the gimmick work. I’m amazed Barb could find so many words with Zs in them, all in the appropriate place to form the big Z and then evenly space them in the grid. And the puzzle itself didn’t suffer to make this work. I had a mildly difficult but mostly smooth solve, and only hit a few head scratchers, noted in “Other stuff” below.

Canadian content:

• 11A: [Canadian sluggers, for short]: JAYS – The Toronto Blue Jays are the only remaining Canadian baseball team. ☹️
• 25D: [Univ. in Antigonish, N.S.]: STFX – Saint Francis Xavier University is a member of the Maple League, a group of primarily undergraduate universities in Eastern Canada.
• 26A: [Gould and Campbell]: GLENS – Glenn Gould was born in Toronto, and was a child prodigy on the piano before becoming a globally famous concert pianist.
• 32D: [Actor Simu raised in Mississauga]: LIU – Simu Liu was born in Harbin, China; his parents moved to Canada, first to Kingston and then to Mississauga.
• 53A: [11-Across, on a scoreboard]: TOR – Short for Toronto, obviously.
• 54A: [First Nations Juno nominee Jasper ___]: INEⓏ – Inez Jasper was born in Chilliwack, BC and is of Sto:lo, Ojibway, and Métis heritage. Her music blends pop, dance, hip hop and traditional First Nations music.
• 65D: [“My Game” memoirist]: ORR – Bobby Orr was born in Parry Sound, and played for the Boston Bruins and Chicago Blackhawks.
• 67D: [Shopper’s 5% levy]: GST – The goods and services tax is required to be collected and reported by businesses that exceed earnings of $30,000 per calendar quarter.

Other stuff:

• 7D: [Costa Rican cash]: COLONES – Costa Rican money is called colones in honor of Christopher Columbus, or Cristóbal Colón.
• 15A: [Linking verb]: COPULA – This was the very last entry I got, and I initially put capula until I saw that 2D didn’t work. A copula “links the subject of a sentence to a subject complement, such as the word “is” in the sentence “The sky is blue” or the phrase was not being in the sentence “It was not being cooperative.””
• 22A: [Classic fizzy candy brand]: ⓏOTⓏ – OMG I had completely forgotten about Zotz! I loved them as a kid and can still remember the crunch and then the fizzing of whatever it is that’s in the middle of the hard candy shell. I need to find some…
• 56D: [Slate trimming tools]: ⓏAXES – Well this is a new one for me, but I really ought to know it since I have a slate roof and a lot of spare slate shingles. The Zax “is a hand tool for cutting, trimming, and punching nail holes in slate. It consists of a heavy rectangular knife blade with a large protruding point of square cross section. The blade edge is used to split slate, while the point is used to pierce square holes for mounting the slate on the roof.”

Quote of the week:
“Gratitude is a quality similar to electricity: It must be produced and discharged and used up in order to exist at all.”
– William Faulkner