Sunday, March 31, 2013

Sunday, March 31, 2013, Caleb Madison

1:27:31

"Special Features"

Easter Egg theme. Movie titles with all the letters of "easter egg" added, one at a time to each theme answer, to make funny alternate titles. There were some clever theme answers, I guess, and there are, what, nine of them? Plus the "Easter Egg" one? That's a lot of theme, it seems to me.

I kind of hate the "Part of, abbr." clues, like 53A: Part of E.M.S.: Abbr. = EMER, and 40D: M.I.T. part: Abbr. = INST. 123A: Part of N.B. is slightly better, because in the first place it uses the whole word in the answer, and in the second place, this particular answer could either have been NOTA or BENE.

My favorite clue might have been 78D: Solo companion.  We thought a long time about what that might mean, before finally realizing that it used a hidden capital, and the answer turned out to be CHEWBACCA. Gotta love seeing Chewy in the grid.

Aside from that, though, there wasn't a whole lot that I loved about this one. It wasn't bad, it just wasn't great.

- Horace


3 comments:

  1. FIgured out the EASTEREGG after one long clue. Had a hard time with LOSTWEEKEND, because I had abate instead of ABASE, leading me to start with LOTTWE_____, and was stuck on Lot Twelve, somehow.

    ReplyDelete
  2. TITT (Worked on it for 55:51.)

    I filled in the entire 2/3 of the East side of the puzzle, but the western 1/3 was nearly blank. Of course, I enjoyed 80A *...Jerry Garcia's band's portraits" DRAWNOFTHEDEAD, but never really got the theme since I missed the westernmost answers. After looking at Horace & Frances's time I should probably have worked on this longer. It took me 44 minutes to finish the Sunday LA Times puzzle, so I thought that it would probably be similar for the NYT offering.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Sometimes you just have to put it down for a while and return to it later. Especially Friday through Sunday. Even Thursday through Sunday, sometimes.

    ReplyDelete