My goodness, there's a fair amount of theme stuff going on in this puzzle today. So much that in order to make it work, the grid is pretty segmented. I'm impressed by those large chunks of white in the NE and SW corners.
Meanwhile, in celebration of gay marriage, perhaps? We get MARRIEDMEN as represented by standard phrases that can be reparsed as two men's names side by side. I wasn't clear until I finished the puzzle what the numbers after the clues meant - they are the lengths of the two names so you can more easily figure it out. Thus, 38A: *Bounce (4 & 4) (RICOCHET) is referring to Rico and Chet.
My favorite is definitely 25A: *Opening a beer bottle with a ring, e.g. (4 & 4) (BARTRICK), simply because of the way the names go across syllables. The others aren't as interesting, especially the one that uses Anders.
There's some tough sledding to get through here. It's never fun to start with RSS above ICU. SOCOOL and EMORAP are phrases that feel like they have to be in a crossword puzzle to be used. And ADAH crossing ODAY is a rough thing.
But I did like COLORTV next to HOTWIRES and near THANKGOD.
So quite a few compromises, and the theme wasn't the best ever, so I'll call it a wash over all.
- Colum
Yeah I'll agree about there being a lot of obscure material here, but I'll forgive it this time because of the clue for TRIG. I fell for that one hook, line, and sinker. Needed every last cross and then I had that "oh, now I get it" reaction.
ReplyDelete17:27
ReplyDeletePHILANDERS, despite the Anders, is a great word on its own, though. NORMANDY, while maybe not a standout, is at least timely. I agree with Mr. Kingdon that TRIG's clue was tricky, but I was able to see it after two crosses (COLORTV and THANKGOD), admittedly the most helpful of the four. SCHLUB is outstanding.