Aha, a stunt puzzle! According to the revealer at 65A, every other letter in this puzzle's grid(!) is a VOWEL. It's such a gathering of a, e, i, o, and u's that you might call it a vowel movement. Too much? The copious number of vowels (by my hasty count, 90 out of a possible 190 squares) would bankrupt your average Wheel of Fortune (TM) player, but still, the special feature escaped my notice until after I completed puzzle. Perhaps not too surprising in a Tuesday situtation.
Maybe I should mind my P's and Q's, but I thought the revealer was a little off the mark in saying every other letter in this puzzle's *grid* rather than every other letter in every *answer* is a vowel. The grid, when looked at in toto, has consecutive words that don't start and end with vowels in alternation, so, across the top we have BONO followed by ODER followed by SODA.
In other areas, I liked POPEMOBILE (Car with a bubble), DECELERATE (Slow down), and IVOTED (Sticker worn proudly in November).
The several abbreviated answers came up short for me. I found DEREG (Loosening of government controls, for short), ELEC ("Juice": Abbr.), ELEV (Mountain fig.), and MAG (People or US, for short) a little ONED. I also thought JADES as a verb (Makes weary through overexposure) kind of odd.
Still and all, a good effort ASIS.
OXO,
~Frannie.
These stunt puzzles usually end up with lots of OREL and NAGAT and other not so great answers, and this one is no exception.
ReplyDeleteHowever, it was better than I feared. High points included UNEXAMINED and AVOCADOS. I'll even accept REWOVE.
Oh, and finished with one error (PAmOMA/OREm) in 8:58.
8:57
ReplyDeleteWell, I bested Mr. Kingdon by one second (and one error)! Close. I do agree that any stunt puzzle has a bunch of VILE nonsense in it, but we do have some nice short answers, like KATO, KIWI, DEVO, LON, ZEN and EVAN. SALAMI was clued OK ASIS, but could have been clued in a more blue manner. Odd that we'd have NIXON___ and OBAMA_ abutting.
4:20 (FWOE)
ReplyDeleteI had put in tsP without thinking at 13D: Recipe unit (CUP). I fixed the U but missed the C because I didn't give tARIB a second thought for some unknown tribe. Mind you, CARIB makes a lot of sense in retrospect. Humph.
Don't love the stunt. Although, to be fair, in thinking about how I might have reviewed this puzzle had I been the blogger of record, I realized how hard it would be to make a sentence that followed those rules...
25:59
ReplyDeleteLoved the V/C grid. I also enjoyed the little words, ONED and ELEV, and of course KATO! Gazing at the completed puzzle, I realize that AVOCADOS is such a beautiful-looking word (and good for you too!), and who doesn't love remembering EVAGABOR once in a while?
Is the "sky" really down below for astronauts? If you were orbiting Earth and someone said, "Hey, look at the sky!" would you look down toward the planet? I think not.
IVOTED. Sigh. If only more decent folks had earned that sticker in '16...
4:55
ReplyDeleteYou're right, Frannie, that sometimes if we look at just the letters, a consonant follows a consonant, but it is consistent in that if every black square contained a letter, it could follow the pattern. I mean, there wouldn't be any real words in the puzzle if we just made all the black squares into letters, but it could be done in such a way that the "every-other-letter" sequence would work. Does that make any sense?