0:15:30
Rolling right along on Monday, I nearly missed the theme today, but let's see... "roll the dice," "roll your eyes," "roll the ball," and "Roll - ers?" Is that what it's supposed to be? Hmmm.... no. It's rolled Rs, like the one in "raha," which means "money" in Finnish.
I don't particularly love ETCETC (22A: And so on and so forth: Abbr.), but I still like it better than defining "cetera" as "so on." Sure, Ms. Gelfand uses "so on" in the clue here, but she's not claiming it's a literal translation. And besides, I very much enjoyed her other Latin clue - 63A: Bellum's opposite (PAX). And speaking of foreign languages, I didn't know that the RIALTO was a 2D: Theater district. I just thought it was a bridge in Venice. And SOG is 36D: Soak, in dialect? Do they mean "get wet" or "rip off?" And in what dialect?
I like a lot of the words in here. MEWL, CRAW, SORCERERS, MANX, ACHOO... they're the kind you don't see very often, but there are a lot of abbreviations, proper nouns, and foreign words. PSY, TUE, THOS, VET, CAL, USNA, ENS, ABS, ISM, DES, LEO, SADIE, ELWAY, TYLER, ANN, IMARET, MALAWI, OESTE, OISE, MESSRS, ELO, SIKH.
I didn't hate it, but it wasn't one of my favorites. How's that?
- Horace
It took me 9:26, so I have to like that on a Monday, right? I knew you'd love the cluing for PAX. I did too; how cool is it to see "bellum" in a puzzle, especially a Monday? Monday's usually have a lot of three-letter answers, so that means a lot of abbreviations. I wasn't at all offended by any of them today. Is THOS really the abbreviation for Thomas, though? Sorry, why would I be asking a Horace. I consider MALAWI, SIKH, and IMARET quality fill. I guess I'm considerably more positive on this effort. And our blue ADDICT Huygens shouldn't have much to MEWL about, what with the OBESE, ORAL MESSRS in MENSROOMS ALLWET and making GOOGOOEYES at the prospect of rolled BALLS and TITS. Too much?
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ReplyDeleteToo much. I never heard of Bellum or PAX, but had no problem with them. Both TITS and TOTS in the same puzzle was nice, though I'm not a huge fan of one of them. I liked the reference to TYLER, the first Veep that, without a mechanism available for it in the Constitution, started signing documents "President Tyler" following Harrison's death. I'd also add TAMALE to ET59's Blue List, and what about Sexy Sadie?
Very nice, you two.
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