![]() There's little that I find exceptional - maybe only TEC, which I think is pure crosswordese - and there's a lot of good cluing "Opening of an account," for example ( ASIRECALL). Sometimes I think those extra bits make the answer harder to see at first.ĭINT is a great word. I liked all the answers with extra letters - STELMO, HOUSEMD, EREADER, and USSENATE. She's a bit obsessed with him (although her favorite French king is his grandfather, Henri Quatre). Frannie should be happy to see Louis QUATORZE in the grid. I had never heard that QUEENVICTORIA was the "So-called 'Grandmother of Europe,'" but I enjoyed learning it. They were corrected just as quickly thanks to PEA (Shade of green) and ODIE (Cartoon character often shown with his tongue out), and then things progressed more smoothly. So why did I start that way? I really don't know.Īnd speaking of starting off questionably, I entered the puzzle quickly with two confident mistakes - reckleSs for SLAPDASH (Too fast to be careful) and amAss for HOARD (Stockpile). ![]() Sometimes you just don't know things, and that's okay. (I had already made an educated guess on the beginning R where it crosses ABRAM). Also, I made what I believe still is a decent guess in RURITArIA and DORrAN. One is an actor I've never heard of, and the other is an interesting bit of trivia that I am happy to learn. Sure, I didn't know one cross ( RURITANIA/ DORNAN), but I don't feel bad about that one. They're both kinda junky.īoy, that first paragraph makes it sound like I'm getting ready to rip into this one, but really, that's not true at all. I wanted "sprung" there, but I suppose it doesn't much matter. ![]() Also, I'm not sure how I feel about SPRANG (Busted out of jail). I've never said it (or heard it said) without the "and" in the middle. I just had a little trouble in the SW because I didn't know MIDRASH (Hebrew scripture commentary) or ASHMAN ("The Little Mermaid" lyricist Howard), and I wasn't expecting STOPGO (Congested, in a way). HAWAIIANSHIRT (Top of a Pacific island chain) (Top = shirt) was clever, CATEBLANCHETT (Only person to win an Oscar for playing an Oscar-winning actress) won the oscar for playing Katharine Hepburn in The Aviator, and MICHELINGUIDE (Book of stars?) was a bit of a stretch, perhaps, but I'll allow it. The staggered central trio was very strong (anybody else watch the BBC show, W1A?). SMITE (Off in biblical lands?) was lovely ("Off" meaning "to kill"), and INEXPERT (Amateurish) was fun. I'm sure it would be next to impossible to find a better example, especially one that is the same number of letters as 19A, but still.ĭAD (_ joke (total groaner)) just begs for an example, doesn't it? Well then, what do you call a person with no body and no nose? Nobody knows. It doesn't work, because in the original phrase, the word "speak" still has the meaning of expressing something. ![]() 54A: Narrate audiobooks? ( SPEAKVOLUMES). STATEMOTTOES and EXPRESSLINES are both pretty good.īut then we get to that last one. 19A: Talk trash? ( UTTERRUBBISH) is great because not only is it a silly thing to think about, but the clue is itself an idiom misinterpreted. I like three out of the four examples here. Green was part of Gnarls Barkley? Maybe I'm talking to the wrong audience here.Īnyway, today's theme takes standard phrases where the first word can be redefined as a synonym of talking, and then reclued. I confidently put in Eve at 39A: Morn's counterpart ( EEN), and so I couldn't see CEELO (God, that song was everywhere for a summer, and now I've basically forgotten it completely) or OMNI. Sometimes the smallest of errors can really extend your solve times. So when that got fixed, all's well that ends well. And I had no idea what a "puddle board" might be. In retrospect it actually seems pretty unreasonable. I had forgotten Valerie PLAME, and tried PLuME. That being said, it's an interesting cognitive leap from, say, "Dog Star" to PADDLEBOARD. As I was solving, I found myself not really thinking through the theme answers in the way described above, but rather figuring out the individual words from their crosses. And while I am very impressed by the construction of today's theme, the solve itself was less satisfying (with respect to the theme, anyways). This played like a puzzle out of GAMES magazine of yore. ( JACKSONHOLE) is referring to the intermediate phrases "Peter Jackson" and "rabbit hole." Take a standard phrase of two words (or single word of two separable parts), where each individual part can be the beginning of two other standard phrases or words, the endings of which said words when put together, make yet a fourth standard phrase? As an example, 17A: Peter.
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