I first looked at this just before nodding off to sleep. I figured, "It's Tuesday, it'll be a breeze," but the Across answers were slightly unusual so I switched over and started with the Downs, and somewhere about halfway through them I fell asleep. Later, when I looked at it again, I picked up where I'd left off, and by the time I got to the bottom, having seen the Across answers out of the corner of my eye the whole way, I finally picked up on it with 69A: AA*P (RETIRED), and then it all made sense.
I like it. It reminds me of that word game where you have things like 52 C. in a D., or 64 S. on a C., and it was fun trying to figure out the acronyms. For some reason, the very common ones were some of the hardest for me to think of. Like 45A: R*I (BATTED) and 13A: I*S (REVENUE), the latter of which I briefly panicked over because I didn't know LUANA (6D: Actress Patten or Anders).
Sure, we get REV and TER and TORI and DOR and RIMES (53D: Layers of frost) … but for me, a good theme can sometimes trump the fill, and I really like this theme. I like that every single Across is part of it, and as a result, there's nothing objectionable going in that direction. The Downs suffer a bit, but you still find some good there, too, like SLAKED (9D: Quenched), PINOT (7D: Wine grape variety), TEARDROPS (20D: Things "on my guitar" in a 2008 Taylor Swift hit) (I don't know the song, and got it from crosses, but I still like it as fill), and ECCE (62D: Behold, to Cicero). I'm a sucker for Latin fill.
So anyway, as you can see, I enjoyed it. Hope you did too.
- Horace
p.s. ONTARIO? (17A: H*MES). What the?
20:14
ReplyDeleteHOMES is the common mnemonic for remembering the names of the Great Lakes. I loved this puzzle. I understood the theme right away, but, like Horace, had difficulty with the common ones and ended with REVENUE since I, too, didn't know LUANA (or GRIG, for that matter). EAVES is timely, CANTO is nice, reminding me fondly of Dante, DRATS was good and several of the theme answers were great ways to get common words into the puzzle, such as THE (24A B*W), FOR (49A *YI), NEW (61A *YSE) and ITS (FW*W). By order of the Governor, I now need to leave for work.
Ahh… thanks. There's only five of them - what do we need a mnemonic for? It's like making up a mnemonic to remember the points of the compass.
Delete8:14. It's funny, because without the theme, it's really only a passable at best themeless. It's a choppy grid with a very large number of three-letter answers (24). And yet, I really enjoyed it because of the meta-game aspect. In addition to the answers you outlines above that are less than desirable, there's also DRATS and LUANA (who?). The exception was 50D: Actor Julia and others (RAULS) - nice turnabout there!
ReplyDelete