Late in the evening on Friday the 13th, having just watched Silence of the Lambs with my 17-year old daughter... Probably a good time to be writing this review, because nobody's falling asleep any time soon!
This is a nice and chunky Friday themeless. Each corner is a nice exercise in crossing stacks. I like the NW corner the best, and it was there I broke in with DAD crossing TIRADE. 5D could have referred to either parent, so I was glad to have the crossing to confirm. With GAL in place at 27A, I quickly realized that 19A: ____ of Solomon (part of the Apocrypha) would not be "song." With that out of the way, ACTOFGOD and CUREALLS followed. ROIDRAGE and FRAPPUCCINO are excellent additions, along with EREBUS.
I'm not sure what Mr. and Ms. Larsen are getting at with their GOOBERS and their DWEEBS. And are they themselves SWEDES? You might think so with that last name.
YELLOWVESTS is a nice nod to contemporary news. I love the clue at 58A: Major second, e.g. (INTERVAL). That's a musical interval. My first guess (off of the ____AL) was "corporAL" thinking in some weird way of an aide to a military Major.
How's this for overthinking a Friday puzzle? I looked at 30D: European capital ... and thought to myself, I'm not going to fall for that old chestnut. I confidently put "euro" in. But that didn't work. I was forced to reconsider and recognize they were referring to a capital city in BERN.
Other nice bits include 40D: What are still attempts to score? (SETSHOTS) and the sillier 39D: What a fork in the road might lead to? (FLATTIRE). I imagine Frannie might enjoy 37A: Dict., gaz. and others (REFS), although given that it's week two in the NFL, we could have used that definition instead.
Nothing much else to note, although it's an odd way to clue VII with "Edward of the Edwardian age."
Sweet dreams, LARVA!
- Colum
11:37 (FWOE)
ReplyDeleteI should have looked more closely at Edward of the Edwardian Age, because I misspelled the last name of Ed of the Television Age as ONEaLL, and ended up FWOEing. ICK!
Other than that, though, this was a good one. Having spent some time in the Pennsylvania Dutch area, HEXSIGNS was an excellent entry to find.
I don't know if we saw any EMILIO Pucci designs last night at La Scala, or as we sat drinking a Spritz in a bar in the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II, watching the crowds go by, but it's possible. Soon, though, it's back to eating EGGSALAD and using the American DOLLAR, which will, I'm sure, be a RELIEF to a certain co-blogger. :)
11:28 (FWTE)
ReplyDeleteSlightly faster than Horace, but slightly more inaccurate. I convinced myself that 40D What are still attempts to score? could somehow be SETStaTS and that both LATt and EMILIa made perfect sense. Had I guessed correctly with those two crosses, I'd have been under ten. I hadn't thought about Tony RANDALL or EDONEILL in a while, but I do watch HERHONOR regularly for decades now, ONTAPE as it were (although it's on DVR these days). Excellent puzzle overall. "It rubs the lotion on its skin or else it gets the hose again." Ahh, warm memories.