I like the idea of this puzzle, although I'll admit to confusing the song in question (by Marvin Gaye) with Ike and Tina Turner's "River Deep, Mountain High". This led to a brief error in the middle East section, and confusion as to what that VALLEYLOW was doing in the song at all.
Separate from this personal confusion is the fact that there are two answers of 10 letters each (longer than the middle 9-letter theme answers) that are not theme answers at all. Is this really a problem? It seems less than aesthetically perfect, but doesn't bother me too much. Others may quibble more than I choose to.
That being said, the remainder of the puzzle was okay. The aforementioned middle East section seemed to be made up entirely of Es, Ss and Ts (STPETE, STEEDS, SLEET, JETSET). I'm also not a fan of WEENIE, even with the evocative clue "Twerp".
I'm interested to know what people think of ROBERTELEE. My sense of him is of an effective general without enough resources to win an extended war, and an honorable man working for a horribly dishonest cause. He may not have owned slaves himself, but that seems small comfort.
I was not aware that Morehouse College was all-MALE. It is also historically mostly African-American, but I guess that wouldn't fit into a 4-square answer. The answer goes a small way towards balancing Gen'l Lee. I'll give it a B+.
Oh, I almost forgot to point out the Natick at ACER/ARCO. I guessed, and guessed right.
- Colum
19:01
ReplyDeleteACER is well known, no? I agree about ROBERTELEE. I also had RIVERdeep for awhile in the middle east section, but slowly corrected it when I realized that JETSET and STEEDS were needed over there. I thought that OSLO (15A Kristiania after 1925) is some nice trivia, and it took way too long for me to get 59D John's "bed-in" bedmate (YOKO), even though that should have been obvious.