Wednesday, January 1, 2014

Wednesday, January 1, 2014. Peter A. Collins

17:14

HAPPY2014 to all of Horace and Frances' readers! Colum here, guest-blogging, even as H and F spend the New Year in Albany with me.

This Wednesday puzzle played harder for me than I expected, or was it just that I was completing it at one in the morning, after the champagne and rye? It started with 1A: Frank's partner in the funnies (ERNEST). What is this? I've looked it up and found it on gocomics.com, and I still have never seen it before. And 1D is no simpler. I may have heard of EGBERT, but even Wikipedia does not convince me that the ninth century king of Mercia is the nominal first king of England.

Other answers I was unhappy with: HOARSEN, which I wanted to be cOARSEN, and CAVER, which should just not be in a crossword puzzle ever. On the plus side, I liked PAULINA, wife of Ric Ocasek, and thus a nice Boston connection, DONHO, MADMEN, CHIMERA, and AUSTERE. That last answer took some time for me to see.

The central answer should have been much more obvious to me, and I think it's well managed for the most part, except for 24D: Achieved through difficulty (HARD1), which doesn't seem precisely correct. So I guess I don't love this puzzle, but I enjoyed blogging it! You may see my name here again in the future.

3 comments:

  1. I'm commenting on my own post to note that HARD1 works just fine if you replace "one" with "won".

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  2. 26 mins.
    Yes, as well as [TWO]-[TOO], [0(zero)]-[OH], [ONE]-[WON] and [FOUR]-[FOR]. The only one that I don't like too well is the OH-0 since the 0 isn't an "O," it's a zero. I thought it a good puzzle, and enjoyed the guest blog. I'd heard of neither Frank and Ernest nor of King Egbert, but everything filled in with crosses just fine. I thought 31A Far sides of ranges (TARGETS) pretty clever and always enjoy a reference to DONHO, though I find that he's too main-land-ized for me now that I'm a Brudda Iz fan. I had TAKEAsIP for the longest time for 6D Sample the hooch (TAKEANIP), and hadn't ever heard of a BUROAK (17A Tree with extra-large acorns). CAVER isn't terrible, is it? But certainly 38D "_____ there yet?" (AREWE) is, indeed, terrible.

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  3. This was a terrible puzzle. It is not fair to use numbers in the answers without warning. I'm pretty angry about it actually. What a waste of time.

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