This is my favorite Sunday puzzle in a long, long time. Possibly ever. Many of the punny answers made me laugh out loud. MISTLETOE (100A: What brings the rocket to the pad?), for instance, and DULCIMER (95A: Opposite of a strong boil?) are both excellent. LOCKSMITH (27A: Fable about smoked salmon?), ORCHESTRATES (22A: Narrow passages for killer whales?), and PHARMACIST (72D: Help with the harvest?) are also quite good.
Right away I liked this one from the unusual 1A clue "Like most seamen, supposedly" (ABLE). Very nice. I also loved the clue for 65A: Storm harbinger, maybe (CALM). Hah!
And there's lots to like in the fill, too, like LINEARA (99A: As-yet-undeciphered Cretan script), TANKARD (12D: Pub container), DIGITS (95D: All thumbs) (Ha!), FEVERISHLY (68D: At a frantic pace), and the always amusing but never actually welcome NOSEEUM (87D: Small, biting fly).
Sure, there are a few odd things like WIRERS, ROARER, and ARBORED, but so what? This thing was tremendous.
- Horace
I am also WILDE about this puzzle, although it was slow going because we are spending the weekend with friends which made it difficult to stay focused on the grid at hand. IVANS to cite two other theme answers not mentioned by Horace that I really enjoyed:
Small undergarments? WHEATIES
Carried cash around? BORDEAUX
And in the non-theme category:
Are no longer? WERE - excellent.
Trix alternative (ETTE) - ha!
Quite a COO.
~Frannie
And in a different take, I found this tiresome more than enjoyable. Yes, the concept was good enough, but I didn't enjoy back-engineering the answers from a wacky pun. And there were so many of them! I found it to be more of a slog than enjoyable.
ReplyDeleteAlso it should be "ideologue" not "idealogue", although both seem to be acceptable. But I should have known that SToY was not a real answer.
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ReplyDeleteSlog, indeed, although looking back at the answers after finishing I, too, chuckled at quite a few of them, finding neither many MOANERS nor TIRED answers. I'm not familiar with ISHEDEAD; I'll have to read that one, possibly as an IBOOK.