Happy March everybody! It's a favorite month around Horace & Frances (Featuring Colum), as two of us celebrate our birthday during it. I thought I'd get a jump on the blog tonight while it's still Leap Day, because any other year, it would already be March, see. I heard a great report on NPR about 52 year old Jewish people born on February 29 who are having their Bar or Bat Mitzvahs today. Finally, they are men and women!
Anyway, today's (or tomorrow's) puzzle features one of the great films of all time, ALLABOUTEVE. Fasten your seatbelts, it's going to be a bumpy night! There are some 15 uses of the three-letter string EVE in the puzzle, which wouldn't be so amazing in and of itself, but the examples are very strong on the whole. I particularly like SEALEVELS and PETPEEVES crossing EVELKNIEVEL. On the other hand, it also means we get a number of 3-letter words such as GOV, HOV, AVE, VEE, and so on. I've never heard of EVENSTEVENS, but any reference to Shia LaBeouf is okay in my book.
UNPC seems to be much in the news nowadays, at least if you care about Donald Drumpf (c.f. John Oliver if you want to know more #makedonalddrumpfagain). I love 16A: Tri and tri again? (HEXA) - what a great clue for a terrible bit of GREEK crosswordese. Perhaps Huygens enjoyed SEXED? Or maybe the educational portion of it removes it from being risque?
Chris Rock was pretty great as HOST last night of the Oscars, which otherwise was flat out a BORE. I'm glad Spotlight won. It was definitely the best of the three nominated movies I saw (the other two being The Big Short and The Martian, both excellent in their own right).
1A: "Put a tiger in your tank" brand (ESSO) gets points for the motto, loses points for being a brand name, and loses more points for not being a brand in current usage, and even more points for being actually ExxonMobil now. So it gets a D+.
All right! That was fun. Good night.
- Colum
0:06:17
ReplyDeleteYeah, this was decent enough. I've never heard of EVENSTEVENS either, and we'll have to wait a couple weeks to see what Huygens thought of SEXED, because he and Mrs. Huygens are on their way to Bali even as I type! (And as you typed last night. It's a long trip...)
And yes... birthdays. It's a biggie for me this year. And one more, on the 13th, is the blog itself, which will be turning 3!