A very nice revealer here, in TRIPLE DOUBLE. This is in fact a common enough term among basketball statisticians and fans, although I'm sure the less sports-minded among us might be unfamiliar with it. But it describes the theme answers well, as each entry has three pairs of double letters in a row.
BOOKKEEPER has always been a well-known example of this (ever since early days of my subscription to Games Magazine for me!), and it's the only example which doesn't need a hyphen in common usage. Of the other examples in this puzzle, SWEETTOOTH (especially as it fits symmetrically opposite bookkeeper) and GOODDEED work well. The others I could do without.
Do we really think WOODDEER is a thing? I see that the other two search well on the Google, but this seems made up.
Meanwhile, I had some difficulty with the fill. Even after I entered HIDEF (70A: Far from fuzzy, for short), my mind insisted on misparsing it as hide-F, even as I knew all the crosses were correct. In fact, it's a clever clue which I like, now that I can see it the right way. I also couldn't remember CHROME (even as I enter this blog post on that very browser), nor could I see INCIDENT, especially as ACCT seemed opaque to me.
Still, I like the puzzle. LANDGRAB is very good. And my favorite clue might be at 65A: P ____ psychology (unhelpful spelling clarification) (ASIN). Way to make a partial sing!
1A: No longer a minor (GROWN). B-. I wanted "adult".
- Colum
Let's see, slowed down by SIGNup before SIGNON, nut before POD, and yes, adult before GROWN.
ReplyDeleteLiked ELK and LOBOS, in the latter case thanks to the times I have visited Albuquerque. Speaking of which, xwordinfo says Albuquerque has been an answer only 6 times in the history of their database, which strikes me as not nearly enough. Because of Bugs Bunny if nothing else.
Overall time: 12:52 (slow to typical for Tuesday).
8:37
ReplyDeleteA bit slow-ish for a Tuesday. I'll speak for some slice of non-sport minded individuals: I'm pretty familiar with the term TRIPLE/DOUBLE and dropped it right in after getting SWEETTOOTH and GOODDEED (WOODDEER is, indeed made up, IMO). Decent fill. I didn't remember the full OZMA right away, entering the OZ__ part off of the clue, but needing CHROME to get the M. Even though it's an abbreviation, KAN was pretty good for 61D Manhattan's home: Abbr. Sue's been to a conference there, oddly. ATEASE brought back great memories of basic training, and ROMEOS was pretty nice, as was GWB. All-in-all, OK puzzle.