One-third of my Thursday time! But with a silly error. I guessed ETa, thinking even as I did it that it might be a D, but I never checked back. I wondered about ARRIa. Ah well. At the tournament, I'd have 45 seconds to take a look over and see if I made a mistake, right?
Meanwhile, this puzzle was right on my wavelength in so many different ways. My first answer was 2D: Genetic disorder carried by Queen Victoria (HEMOPHILIA). I recently read a biography of Tsar Nicholas, who was married to Victoria's granddaughter, Alexandra. Their son had hemophilia, which is a horrible disease, by the way. But a gimme for me nonetheless.
SONDHEIM was another immediate gimme, as was CHEVRE (drooling right now...) and LIVER. That whole corner fell in under 30 seconds. 1D: School card (CLASSCLOWN) is going on the list of great clues. I don't think we've added anything to that list for quite some time. [Turns out it was just last week. D'oh!]
Meanwhile, 20D: Mozart title (HERR) is also very good, and I smiled but was not at all fooled by 36A: Port authority? (WINEMAKER).
But seriously, that's not even all. There's a Monty Python reference (KINGARTHUR), an astronomy/Greek mythology reference (CHARON), an acknowledgement of Joe BIDEN's awesomeness.
I have absolutely no complaints except that it was too easy.
- Colum
14:44
ReplyDeleteWow, Colum, I was happy about my time, but jeepers! And I am happy to say that I learned from yesterday and filled in "ET_" and waited patiently for the cross to come in.
Let's see, I'm going to try to figure out how we would have scored here... Let's assume that we were given twenty minutes to finish, I'd have finished five minutes ahead of that, so I'd get a bonus of 125 points. I'd also get a bonus of 150 for having completed it correctly. So my bonus is 275. You finished 13 full minutes ahead, so you'd get 325, but you have one error, which costs you 25 points, and you don't get the 150 for a correct solution, so your bonus is 300. Still higher than me, but I come very close for having taken eight more minutes - and - I'd get twenty more points for having two more correct words than you, so almost a wash. Let that be a lesson to us all. Spend the time you need to make sure you're as correct as you can be! If you had taken the 45 seconds plus another full minute, your total for this puzzle could have been 470 points higher, and that's a lot!
and btw, this was my second straight day solving on paper.
Deletep.s. Scoring information is in the middle of this page:
Deletehttp://www.crosswordtournament.com/info/brochure.htm
ok, one last thing - not "470 points higher" but 170 points higher, making a total bonus of 470.
DeleteI think...
ok, I'll stop trying to do math now.
18:38
ReplyDeleteI, too, finished it correctly, but not on paper. And boarding passes generally just have the departure time on them, I think, so I dropped ETD right in. Other answers dropped right in were CLASSCLOWN, CHEVRE, HERR, CHARON, URSA, KINGARTHUR, HENSON and LENO. I entered WINElovER, which slowed me down a bit, but mostly this went along very quickly (for me) and smoothly.