Hey all - just a quick and dirty writeup today, because we're going out tonight to see classic folk duo and lesbian icons Indigo Girls at The Egg tonight. We've been huge fans for decades: the last time we saw them was in 1996 at the Newport Folk Festival. I recall with deep fondness listening to their first two albums during my college years in the 1980s.
So it's apt (apt!) that the theme of today's puzzle is ARTFORMS, or different ways you can mix up the three letters A-R-T within longer phrases. I appreciate that each long answer has at least two versions of the letter string, and TARGETHEARTRATE has three of them. I also think it's funny looking at PEARTART as PE-art-art.
This is one of those puzzles where the shaded squares makes it clearer what's going on, rather than giving it all away. That being said, if I ever had a hesitation when filling in a shaded square, I could rely on the fact that it had to be one of those three letters. That helped with RATTRAPS. I considered briefly the possibility of RATsnest, which also didn't work because it wasn't a plural.
There are only two non-theme answers of 8-letters long, and one of them is the revealer, so there isn't a ton of zingy type of answers. EUREKA is always nice, and BAABAA is fun.
I had a hard time seeing 62A: Handmade sign held up by a kid in the bleachers (HIMOM). I wanted HoMer, which didn't really make too much sense. Then I thought about HItme, which was sort of masochistic, but could happen. Finally the answer came into view, which slowed me down to 3:48.
- Colum
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