Sunday, June 5, 2016

Sunday, June 5, 2016, Tom McCoy

WORD SEARCH


BETWEENYOUANDME, I liked this puzzle quite a bit. I LOL'd several times while solving it. My favorite clue/answer pair might be 20A. Ones with good poker faces? (RHINOS). Ha! I'm laughing again.

There were a number of other fun and funny clue/answer pairs:
69A. Result of hitting the bar? (SPACE)
28A. Student saver (BELL)
16D. Offensive poster (TROLL)
42D. Setting for a watch? (MOVIENIGHT)
63D. What the pros say (AYE)
97D. Too big for one's britches, say? (OBESE)

But, I suppose I should back up a little and say that I enjoyed the theme. The 'Word Search' of the title was nicely executed. If you go looking for "building" or "hours," where do you find them? POSTOFFICE. HARHAR - except seriously.

Of course, it's not just word play I enjoy in a puzzle. There was plenty of straight-up appealing vocabulary in this grid like TAINT, UNLEASHED, OCCULT, and my favorite, NICETY. You don't see that word every day. I was thinking our friend and fellow solver Huygens might enjoy 52A. Like Fermat's last theorem, eventually (PROVEN). I wondered also if he would be adding PAEANS and MAXIMS to the puzzle he imagines creating that will contain only unnecessary or odd plurals.



In among the gems, there were a few odd balls, including 119A. Back entrance (POSTERN), which I thought was cray cray, but when I looked it up, I found that it is a completely normal way to refer to a secondary door or back gate to a fort or castle. And I thought the clue for 13D. (JAWBONE) was a little weird. Chin former. Hunh. But maybe that's just me.

Despite my enjoyment of the puzzle as a whole, I am giving the 1A. answer a C. I'm not a big fan of your "quote" clues to begin with, and neither "Shucks" nor AWNUTS really sings.

As chance would have it, I finished the puzzle in the south west region. I didn't immediately figure out the totally excellent clue 100A. Flames that have gone out? (EXES- ha!), so I looked at the nearby 90D. Red ___, a three-letter answer in which I had already placed the "O" of AHEADOFTIME, and thought to myself, hmmm, I wonder what that's going to be. I couldn't guess, so I went back to 100A. and figured it out. Turns out the answer to 90A was Red SOX. Go team!

~ Frannie

5 comments:

  1. Yes, I agree, excellent puzzle. It was right in my standard amount of Sunday time, and I loved a lot of the clues. The best is definitely the poker faces. Ha! It took me longer than it should have to figure out the theme, but I love it.

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  2. 32:53
    Too fast, but it was quite an enjoyable theme, which I figured out almost right away with CLOSETOHOME. Yes, Frannie, I was very excited at the solving of Fermat's last theorem recently, many years after Fermat scribbled it in the margin of some old Greek text that he was reading. It's possible that I'll use things such as PAEANS or the even worse MAXIMS in my future construction...we'll have to see, hopefully BEFORELONG.

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  3. I, too, enjoyed this one. The theme is very well done, and there are so many good answers, as mentioned above. This was my favorite Sunday in quite some time.

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  4. So to break this down analytically in graphic detail, I believe that....... Aw, kitty! never mind.

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