I would argue that these are actually elevated anagrams. Yacob and Erik have taken tweezers, lifted out an RE and carefully placed it, intact, to a word, also intact. OK it's coffee / Taiwanese baseball time. Not the flash of a good themeless, but far far more sparkle than fill tends to have in a themed puzzle. LEMONY WAGNER TACTILE CLOSE ONE YE GODS! CUERVO OOPSIE. Really liked TAKESIGN (about to go watch some overseas baseball as soon as I post this!). Turns out DELHI is " a city and a union territory of India containing the city of New DELHI, the capital of India." The real slower-downer answer was ENOS, whom I thought I had never heard of, but I absolutely watched "The Killing," it's just been a while and I totally forgot the main actress's name. DELHI, LOL, yeah, I've heard of it, it's common, but I think of it as a city, and Uttar Pradesh is a state, so I was stumped ( 58A: Neighbor of Uttar Pradesh). I have heard of TILSIT, but still had some trouble recalling it (and backing into it from the -SIT) ( 50A: Mild Swiss cheese). GILES, but faced with just and having just the "G"-nothing. I have circled the trouble words: GILES, TILSIT, DELHI, and ENOS. In a bizarre turn of events, the theme has not compromised the fill-rather, the fill has thrived in spite of the theme.Īll my trouble came on proper nouns. But in the end the theme works fine, the revealer is clever, and the rest of the grid is quite entertaining. Maybe if the same number had been involved over *three* answers, it would have felt more substantial because the answers themselves would've been more substantial overall (and thus possibly more interesting). That's 34 squares involved, total (outside the revealer, obviously. The theme is thin, in that only one of the involved answers is over eight letters long, and there are only four themers total. not asterisked or anything) and short (easy to sort out BAKING BREAD because that answer looked like a themer, but I thrashed around with IN THREE D in part because it was so short-looking, I didn't think it was a themer). It's weirder today because they are unmarked (i.e. It's always slightly weird to have unclued things in the grid. Turns out relocating the "RE" doesn't do much for you except get you the preposterously spelled, seriously-no-one-spells-it-like-that " IN THREE D" (in case you're still looking at those letters going "what is it!?," it's "IN 3-D," like a movie). The revealer (not only the highlight of the theme, but the only thing enjoyable about the theme) eventually made sense of those anagrams, which. so they're simple anagrams, then." This was me while solving this puzzle, which I found mostly easy and which I mostly enjoyed, though I mostly enjoyed it as a themeless that contained some random anagrams For Some Reason. I also started the blog in 2012 in response to many requests over the years to write about the daily LA Times crossword."Huh. I’ve been writing this blog (about the New York Times crossword) since 2009. I post my findings along with the solution, usually just after midnight Pacific Time. Then, I “Google & Wiki” the references that puzzle me, or that I find of interest. I work on the New York Times puzzle online every evening, the night before it is published in the paper. I try to answer all emails, so please feel free to email me at ABOUT THIS BLOG I’ve never put together an American-style puzzle, but maybe one day … I am almost exclusively a crossword solver these days, working on American-style puzzles published by the LA Times and the New York Times. I don’t construct crosswords anymore, but I do have over a hundred cryptic crosswords to my name, published in my native Ireland. I am retired from technology businesses that took our family all over the world. I grew up in Ireland, and now live out here in the San Francisco Bay Area. The name’s William Ernest Butler, but please call me Bill.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |