Today's theme features characters and their horses. I only knew a couple of these for sure - everybody knows the LONERANGER and Silver, and TONTO and Scout and ROYROGERS and Trigger were at least familiar once I got them - but you could have waterboarded me for weeks and I never would have come up with Diablo, Tornado, or Buttermilk. Overall, this seemed more like a history lesson than an engaging theme, but perhaps others were more RAPT by it.
The fill had a few gems, like 62D: Top secret? (WIG), 78D: Repeated part of a five-mile hike? (LONGI) (Again, they got me!), and I like the way of cluing STEM (101A: Check). 41D: Pea nut? (MENDEL) was cute, and they're pounding 102D: Vernacular (PATOIS) this week. My favorite, though, might have been 37D: Is Greek? (IOTAS). Tricky!
But for the most part, the fill didn't wow me, and sometimes it even annoyed me. ALLO (64A: French greeting), for instance, just seems so weak. It's not actually a word in French... but I guess neither is NAH a word in English... and 96A: Brownie, e.g. (GIRLSCOUT) - Sure, I guess that Brownies are run by the same organization as GIRLSCOUTs, but Brownies are Brownies and Girl Scouts are Girl Scouts. I can't think of a hymn that begins OGOD (but then, that doesn't mean much), and I've never seen GRANPA (16D: White-bearded sort) spelled like that... And what about 72A: Third word of many limericks (WAS)? That's a good clue? Who knows. Maybe I'm just SOUR. Perhaps I should end with a limerick that doesn't use WAS as the third word:
On the chest of a barmaid at Yale
Were tattooed the prices of ALE
And on her behind
For the sake of the blind
Was the same information in Braille.
- Horace
Well, there's "O God our help in ages past" which leapt to mind immediately. There are some other good clues, like 30D: Cuts on the back? (BSIDES) - took a long time to see. And I don't know why I couldn't get 56D: It may leave you in stitches (SURGERY). Even after filling it in (my last answer) I wanted to read it as "sugary".
ReplyDeleteI can see why the fill in here suffered some, due to the piling of long theme answers on top of each other, often with a third long answer adjacent. It didn't bother me as much as you.
A flea and a fly in a flue
Were imprisoned, so what could they do?
Said the fly, "Let us flee!"
"Let us fly!" said the flea.
So they flew through a flaw in the flue.
--O. Nash
25:33
ReplyDeleteThis was a pretty fun theme. Unfortunately I had the same problem as Horace and only knew two of the answers off the top, so I filled those in but still had to work for the rest of them, which were before my time.
Thanks for the great limerick!
43:38
ReplyDeleteGood old Ogden (thanks Colum). Since I knew almost all of the horse/person pairings, and this puzzle timed out right where I like it, I'll give it a thumbs up. I, like Horace, did not enjoy GRANPA. RIODIABLO slowed me down a bit in the west (RIOgrAnde fits there, too), and I entered mormoN instead of UTAHAN in the south, but nothing was too bad. ASS.
It was a good puzzle, but what is 44A ela king?
ReplyDeleteThis comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDelete- spelled peals wrong doh. A la king
ReplyDelete