Monday, June 17, 2013

Monday, June 17, 2013, Johanna Fenimore and Andrea Carla Michaels

0:13:28

Not bad for a Monday. We didn't know the exact spelling of HARA (6A: ____-kiri), and the 3D: Swiss river (AARE) is only familiar to us from crosswords, and didn't come immediately. Isn't there also a mountain range or peak spelled "Aar?" Anyway, many of the clues were just a matter of punching in letters, as is often the case on Mondays.

Franny liked the 37D: Nutty (COCKEYED) and 51A: More nutty (KOOKIER) pair. Lots of Cs and Ks in that corner. Also, she wrote in "tape" for 1D: Record for later viewing, in a way (TIVO), which shows our age a bit, I guess. We were also familiar with both parts of 10A: Rubik's Cube and troll dolls, once. There were trolls in both our households as youths. There were also Tiddlywinks, for that matter. And we thought 47A: Fan setting of 1, say (LOW) was a good one.

The theme was solid and beautifully symmetrical, and the POPUP (69A: Easy to catch hit... or what 1- 21- 26- 48- 55-Across all do) was a nice call back to David Steinberg's "POPUPTOASTER" on Thursday. And speaking of callbacks, 33D: Class after trig (CALC), sounded awfully familiar. Did we just see that recently as "Class before Calc?" I couldn't find it in a quick search of the last few days, but I'm almost positive it was in the last week. The long answers were all interesting, and the fill was relatively clean. A few things like SRA, ORO and ORIG, but it wouldn't be a crossword puzzle without a few of those.



- Horace

2 comments:

  1. 9:02
    I don't remember the Trig-Calc-Trig thing from a recent puzzle, but it's not uncommon in these things. I liked the link of such things as PRAIRIEDOG for POPUP, or CARDOORLOCKS...even the short TOAST! I quite enjoyed this for a Monday. Although I finished pretty quickly, it was a good, solid puzzle, as Horace says.

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  2. I'm starting to think that Trig clue was from an old puzzle. Sometimes I pull a puzzle from last year to work on when we don't have a new one going.

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