OK, let's start with something good. I really liked 1D: Children's character associated with a crook (BOPEEP). I was misled into thinking of Oliver Twist, and if I hadn't already guessed OXYCONTIN (15A: Percocet relative) and backed it up with TYRONE (3D: Power of old films), I might have entered it. I also liked 1A: Checks for bugs (BETATESTS) (B+) pretty well. CSINY (10D: TV spinoff beginning in 2004) made no sense at all to me for several seconds as I tried to parse it out, and SEMI (20A: Vehicle with a cab) also took me a good long while to get - even with S_MI!
I did not particularly enjoy the lecherous PARTYGIRL (17A: She's always down for a good time), and DEADSEXY (14D: Smokin' hot) I associate only with Fat Bastard in the Austin Powers movies, which is pretty much the opposite of smokin' hot.
"48D: Containing a spoiler, say" (SPORTY) is a clue that is trying too hard to be clever. Sure, a car with a spoiler may be called SPORTY, but I don't think anyone would ever say that a car "contained" a spoiler. It's not natural speech, and it doesn't make for a satisfying solve. Also somewhat unsatisfying were DEARYME (41D: "Heavens to Betsy!"), SNL (9D: Hot show with a cold open, for short) ("Hot show?"), and EXACTO (2D: "Precisely!," informally). And when you put both mom and dad into the clue "Stay-at-home mom and dad," it doesn't really translate well to ROLES. Maybe "Stay-at-home mom and Stay-at-home dad," but that would have been too cumbersome. When they're grouped together, they are no longer roles, they're a weird situation where neither parent works.
I had never heard of either actress (ENGEL (6D: TV actress Georgia) or SLEZAK (46D: Erika with six Daytime Emmys), but the crosses were gettable. My least favorite section was the one that took me the longest to finish - the SE. JOYBUZZER might have been a joke shop purchase in the 1920s, LAMBROAST (62A: Passover meal in exodus) was a generic guess, and OKEYDOKEY (64A: "Sounds good") was just one colloquialism too many for me.
Here's to tomorrow.
- Horace
11:24 FWOE
ReplyDeleteSurely you remember Georgette from the Mary Tyler Moore show, Ted Baxter's eventual wife on the show. No? Seems like there's a good chance we actually watched that together...
My error was a little silly: tOYBUZZER. I never actually had a JOYBUZZER as a kid, but I certainly knew what they were. Although, I figured it out pretty quickly realizing, also, that JLO is both a person, and one of her albums/CDs. Don't asked me how I possibly knew the latter, I certainly could not name a track from it, but it was somewhere filed in the gray matter.
37:51
ReplyDeleteWell, this took me a little longer than either of you, but it was steady going, regardless. I thought that 29A Letters before Q (LGBT) was good; if it were the Telegram I'd have entered "mnop," but since it wasn't, I waited for a cross. JOYBUZZERs were offered for sale (mail order) in the back of most of the comic books that I read when younger, so I got that off of the "BU." EVILGRIN was good, too, and I liked SPORTY, unlike Horace, who makes valid points about it.
15:32
ReplyDeleteManaged to escape unscathed, despite (like Horace) not knowing who ENGEL or SLEZAK are.