How do you get rid of ENNUI? In my life, you do the NYT xword every day! One thing I would not do however, is POKE a turtle that's withdrawn into its shell. Leave the poor animal alone, say I!
Anyway, like Horace said yesterday, what will they think of next? This a very well executed theme. The revealer, KEYWEST, says it all. The left half of each theme answer phrase (that is the part towards the west of the puzzle) is a standard computer keyboard key.
The four phrases are excellent. My favorite is definitely ESCAPEROOM. I did one of these at the mall for my birthday in 2017. It was not the greatest example, I'm told. For her birthday, Cece and her friends tried one of the really hard local examples, and nearly made it out in one hour. Although I'm hardly a Metallica fan, ENTERSANDMAN is my second favorite theme answer.
There's some Scrabbly goodness in the SE corner, where JAKARTA and ZAPPA cross each other. On the downside, I don't like that ORONO comes after MAINE, so the connection is backwards as you solve. But I do like ADAM symmetrically across from ABEL, and the dual "Zap, in a way" clues are nice as well.
And we're done. SNORT!
- Colum
6:29
ReplyDeleteThis was a good theme, as they go. I like that ____FREAK appears directly above ZAPPA, of whom I was, and am, a fan, even though some of his music begins to sound a bit dated. Funny that the lesser of LEE's books was used for the clue. It's nice that "James" OLSEN (of "Supergirl") has started to embrace the "Jimmy" moniker referenced in today's puzzle. That is refreshing, but doesn't elevate the terrible show adequately, although I'll still watch.
5:18 (FWOE)
ReplyDeleteFun puzzle. Never heard of ENTERSANDMAN, and I continue to have trouble parsing it correctly. "Enters, and man?"
I dropped OLSoN right in and never looked back. Gotta get all these FWOEs out of my system before next weekend!