The theme today is pretty good. I mean, I like BONDTRADERS, and TRIPLEAXEL is cute. I only ever saw Beverly Hills Cop and its sequel. I missed the third one, I'm pretty sure. ROCKYSTART is fine, but PLAYINGSOLO is a bit off. It doesn't quite ring true to my ears. Three out of four ain't bad, and I like most of the movies referred to.
The fill has its ups and downs as well. I like the pairing of ALDENTE and CHIANTI: it reminds me of some lovely memories from nearly a year ago, when we visited Italy. And the clue for the latter: "Wine traditionally sold in a fiasco" is a nice piece of trivia, while at the same time it sounds like there should be a recognized label for what to drink when everything goes down the tubes.
I didn't like the pair of footnote answers, ETAL and IDEM. I tried "ibid" for the first, with predictably poor results. Likewise, the pair of "Skedaddles" answers (GITS and SCATS) felt like they might have been clued in a much less fortunate way. SERIN, DORY (what, no reference to Finding Nemo?), ELBE, GSA, ENS, all were not so welcome.
Of interest, yesterday Dr. Withingston gave me a badge for having walked the periphery of Lake Titicaca. I took the time to Google Map the location of said lake, so the answer to 35D: Land bordering on Lake Titicaca (PERU) was a snap.
It's a mixed bag for me.
- Colum
22:39
ReplyDeleteI liked the CUBA reference, and look forward to visiting there in the near future. I, too, enjoyed the theme for the most part. I wasn't familiar with AGATE (42A Tiny type size), and in addition to the nice pairings and fill that Colum mentions, I enjoyed DEEPEND as well. I suppose the clue could have been a bit more interesting had it referred to a slipped mental state, but alas. Also, I thought that ENBLOC (48D All together) was a nice change from En Masse, which I so wanted to put into those six blocks.