NASCAR ROCKS!
We had fun with this one, even though neither of us follows NASCAR, or listens to any of the music listed. My favorite might be WONTGETFUELEDAGAIN (27A: "Hey, what did you think when you missed that last pit stop?" [The Who, 1971]), but IKISSEDAGRILLE (42A: "Did you do anything for luck before today's race?" [Katy Perry, 2008]) is just absurd enough to be funny. I guess the theme was fine.
The general fill started off very well with 1A: Coping mechanisms? (SAWS) (Ha!) and 1D: Only Literature Nobelist to also win an Oscar (SHAW). That's some interesting trivia! (The former was general, the latter was for Pygmalion.)We enjoyed the wordy clues for CITIZENKANE (114A: Movie with the line "Old age. It's the only disease, Mr. Thompson, that you don't look forward to being cured of.") and THEFLEA (7D: Posthumous John Donne poem that includes "It suck'd me first, and now sucks thee"). I would have gotten that last one without crosses, I think, but I didn't know it was posthumous.
There was a ton of small stuff that looked terrible - ELO, ENOL, SSE, GHI, XER, SST, OSU, LPS, OMS… and some long stuff that was less than stellar - NEEDER, IKONS, ENORM, HITAT, EMAILER… but, oh, I don't know, I didn't mind it all so much today. I was consoled by nice fill like DOGGEREL (44D: Almost any poem that starts "Roses are red …"), NOTDONE (89A: Unacceptable to polite society), STEAMER (70A: Soft-shell clam), and SCOUTMOTTO (76D: "Be prepared").
We didn't know OREL (86A: City SSW of Moscow) or, sadly, TIRANA (71D: European capital) (got to learn more about Albania!), so we finished with one error, but everything else went fairly easily.
I'm a little distracted today, but I guess it was fine.
- Horace
ENCRUST (96A Cover with a hard outer surface) threw me, as did the greatly-clued crosswordese ABET (117A Lend a dirty hand to). 40A Fanny (REAREND) is good Huygens fill, and it was nice to see Casey KASEM crossed with SMOKEY Bear (not "the," as I recently found out). CASTASPELL (57A Perform some magic) got me thinking pleasantly of Willow of "Buffy" fame, and anything from CITIZENKANE is all right with me. All-in-all, I enjoyed the puzzle. It took around 45 minutes or so to complete, but I didn't time it. STEAMER took almost all of the crosses for me to get, BTW, and it shouldn't have.
ReplyDeleteWell, I really disliked this puzzle. A slog from beginning to end. I liked IKISSEDAGRILLE best of the theme answers, but LIVINGLAVEHICLELOCA? I don't think so. BRAKEONTHROUGH is banal. And way too much awful fill. Subpar Sunday for me.
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