A mini theme today of quotations from fictional men, PRINCECHARMING (30A: He might say "A day without you is like a day without sunshine") and CAPTAINOBVIOUS (35A: He might say "A day without sunshine is like, you know, night"). Which reminds me of a joke I heard somewhat recently - "Red sky in morning, sailors take warning. Black sky in morning, night."
And we have two more characters in symmetrical positions outside of the central two - LILABNER (17A: From which Sadie Hawkins dances come) and ETHELRED (53A: English king nicknamed "the Unready" (ooh, that hurts!)). Interesting commentary on that last one.
To Bruce Haight, though, today, I say YOUGOTME. I dropped in AMeN instead of AMON (20A: Egyptian deity), and failed to remark upon the PECeS river being incorrect. I also did not know FOER (49A: Jonathan Safran ____, "Everything Is Illuminated" author), and IONTV just would not come to me, so I flailed and ended with a mess of a puzzle. Not the greatest way to go into a weekend containing another puzzle tournament. That's right, I've registered for Boswords, and I am very much looking forward to it!
Nice oblique clue for HUE (27A: Outcry), which is pretty much straight from the French word meaning "cry out," (or "boo") huer. And kind of a tricky one for ICEBERG too (13D: A little one is called a calf). "Speech in the Bible" for ARAMAIC was a little too, too, if you ask me. I mean, I guess I get it, but it doesn't seem quite perfect.
There, was, though, a lot I liked. INPEN (46A: Permanently, say) took me a while, and I liked TRAGIC, PENANCE, UNEARTH, and, of course, DRINKUP. Which reminds me, it's Friday! May you all, if you do DRINKUP, act a little SILLIER, perhaps, but not do anything that would cause you to end up ABLUSH. :)
- Horace
12:14
ReplyDeleteSometimes we have a puzzle where nothing clicks, but this one, for me, was not one. I flew right through this with my final entry being the "M" of MASHABLE. I wanted "hash" in there, but Ahon just didn't sound right, and I know of mashups, so there you go. I got ICEBERG off of the "RG," KUNIS off of the "K," ARAMAIC off of the "IC," and lots of others just off of one or two letters like that, hence the fast (for me) time. I did try Mullet where MANBUN goes, but when I got to 49D, I changed it. Speaking of 49D Item in a box in the basement (FUSE), does anyone still have those? I liked the SCENEV trivia. Anyway, nice, smooth Friday offering.
14:43
ReplyDeleteThe Archivist, I will say, got ICEBERG off just the "G."
I did not know what she was talking about.
Horace, I wasn't fooled by the ARAMAIC, although I get your point. But, multiple sources say that the original Bible was written in both Hebrew and ARAMAIC, so I think we have to go with Mr. Haight on that one.
ReplyDelete14:12 (FWOE)
ReplyDeleteMy error came at SCENEV and IONTV. I put an S in there, even while thinking that SCENEs sounded wrong for the Shakespeare clue. I mean, there are way more than two scenes in Hamlet. Anyway... The only answer I didn't like was ABLUSH. I recognized the PECOS / AMON trap in time to fix my original E. And PBSSHOW is excellent in my opinion.
44:22 for me, so, yeah, RIPE, but not a GONER. :) I liked, "Is on the run?" (SKIS) and "Like Miss Congeneality" (NICEST). I also liked the look of ONEONONE down the middle there. I had a lot of trouble in the OSLIN/OSPREY area. And GROIN pull? I didn't see that coming. Ha! I mean, TRAGIC.
ReplyDeleteI suppose this was a typical Friday for me (40:34, but that's including a lot of googling/wikipedia when it came to the last few corners). Which I suppose is why I like early week better.
ReplyDeleteOne of the toughest ones was AMON because ATON is also an Egyptian god, and there are a bunch of other similar spellings for those two gods. But I was pretty confident about PECOS.
Interesting that ARAMAIC is obscure knowledge here. For me that's more or less basic Sunday school knowledge (Hebrew and Greek for most of the oldest bible texts we have, but a few words of Aramaic in the text and also the knowledge that Aramaic was the vernacular in Jesus' time and presumably the language he was speaking to his followers). Yet another case where one person's, "well duh" is another's "I think I might have heard that somewhere" (for one thing, even in churches, some are more into this scholarly stuff than others).
ICEBERG took a while (given how many different animals have young called calves), but that was a good one.
Oh, and it was fun to read some long essays about whether "the unready" is a good translation of poor Ethelred's epithet into modern English (short answer: not especially). That's the sort of thing I never would have given a second thought to, but was fun to read once I had a reason to stumble into it. Oh, and an illustration of how "go online for the answer [especially in late-week puzzles]" is, for me not just "gimme the answer", but "here's a chance to dip my toes into knowledge I don't already have".
Perhaps I should clarify - ARAMAIC is not obscure, but I was thinking that "speech in the Bible" was just a way of saying "the language that the bible was originally written in," which I thought was a bit more tortured than it had to be. But if it is actually the case that the majority of the text was in Greek, and spoken dialogue was in ARAMAIC, well, then, I will have learned something.
DeleteI like the Captain Obvious quote.
ReplyDelete