Last Friday’s freestyle solution
Word count: 70
Mean word length: 5.46
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I was about ready to prepare another statement of apology for you, because this was going to be a 66-word grid. Originally, the two-square bars in the upper left and lower right weren’t there. I had a full fill at 66 words and started to clue it. But the top left and bottom right were… how shall I say it… boring. It was clean, but it felt more than clean; it felt sterile. There wasn’t any zip. Furthermore, I couldn’t have had very many options for those corners, because I felt like I got lucky to get a clean fill at 66 words and I couldn’t find much else. So I scrapped those corners and made it 70. That obviously opened up my options greatly — you know me by now, I prefer content over openness any day of the week and twice on Sunday (whatever that means).
After I get done with cluing each grid, I go through the whole list of clues, looking at each clue/entry pair one by one just as a final check. I’m glad I did it this time, because I caught two significant clue words that were also entries, and I caught one clue that was outright wrong. A real head-slapper.
As always, I’d like to know, folks… comment is welcome! Come say hello! What did you like? What could I do better?
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Club 72 
I’m still not getting what 37D means and I’ve been thinking about it for minutes.
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This was rather oblique — dent in the sense of a small bit of progress.
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Happy 100th! Thanks for all the freestyle (and other) goodness!
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8 across could also be clued as: Another narcissistic White House manifestation.
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