Monday, February 11, 2019

Monday, February 11, 2019, Howard Barkin

3:38 (FWOE)

I used to love strawberry ice cream. It was a way to be different from my brothers. My oldest brother liked chocolate best, my middle brother liked vanilla best, so I had to go with strawberry. Nowadays there are so many more choices. I'm particularly partial to mint cookies and cream currently.

So in fact, that only has to do with today's theme in that if you put my two brothers and me together, you'd get NEAPOLITAN ice cream, I guess. Although I don't think we'd fit all that well into a bowl together.

It's a solid set of theme answers today. I never saw VANILLASKY. I don't much care for Tom Cruise, but he's been in some great movies over the years. That one wasn't one of them, from what I hear. CHOCOLATETHUNDER, on the other hand, is one of the greatest nicknames of all times (nearly as good as "The Round Mound of Rebound"). And the two actresses recognized here for their natural hair color (STRAWBERRYBLONDE) are excellent. So that's a number of thumbs up.

The puzzle is extra large to accommodate the last two theme answers, coming in at 16 x 15. My error came because I tried to make that last answer a noun phrase in the plural, rather than a compound adjective. And RENEs Fleming does not exist.
The remarkable RENEE Fleming
Otherwise the puzzle is solid for a Monday offering. The only answer I really have a problem with is ENDER (31D: Rear-____ (auto accident)). But I really like MONIKER and 50D: [I don't know the words to this part!] (LALALA) is excellent cluing.

TADA! I'm out.

- Colum

5 comments:

  1. 4:21

    I never liked Neopolitan ice cream very much. I never knew what to do with the chocolate part. The strawberry, I could deal with, but if I had my druthers I'd have just gone with straight vanilla... but my real favorite dessert might be freshly made, warm TAPIOCA pudding. Mmm......


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  2. Well I was pondering blonde (strawberry or otherwise) versus blond but fortunately I knew RENEE Fleming well enough.

    As for Neapolitan ice cream, well, maybe better as a crossword theme than as a food. Although mentioning that TAPIOCA pudding is making me hungry.

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  3. What if we layered 3 flavors of tapioca?

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  4. 5:38
    There is only one accepted flavor of tapioca. Sue and I saw VANILLASKY during out Kubrick project, in which we watched all of his movies one after the other. It was an interesting experiment, and we could really track his development over the years that way. I like Tom Cruise.

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