We're at the beach this holiday weekend and thus I had a paper copy of the puzzle for today's solve. I had a notion to mentally keep track of the time it took me to complete the puzzle, but with interruptions and commotion caused by the 4th of July parade, the arrival of guests, and lunch, before I knew it, the time had FLOWN. If pressed, I would guess it took me about 30 minutes total.
I liked today's trick. I figured it out at 23A: Recollection of something that just happened, concisely? (SHORTERMEMORY). The concisity consists in omitting the doubled/overlapping letters at the end and start of the words in the theme answers. SHORT[T]ER[M]MEMORY. SHORTERMEMORY is nice because it kind of seems like a thing on its own. OTOH, BESTIMEVER is also amusing as a thing, IMHO. ROTFLMAO.
Solving on paper allowed me to star my favorite clues and answers today. They are:
58A: Fifth Avenue concern (SAKS) - I love this meaning of the word concern. I always like to say I work for a library concern.
I also liked the clue "Squaresville" and its answer UNHIP. Similarly, I liked "No longer either hot or cool?" PASSE. "Watt or knot" (UNIT) and "Somers or Winters" were also enjoyable (ACTRESS). Also, didn't EREBUS figure into a great rebus puzzle sometime back? I don't have enough Internetz up here to do the necessary research, and am vague on the details. The answer might even have been MTE[REBUS], or similar??
I don't take a HOROSCOPE, but I do like a DUSTMOP for cleaning, and I did try a MOGUL once - literally. After the first one, I had to sit on my skis the rest of the way down. OCHO!
I don't particularly love partials like SETA (___ good example) and EYETO (With an ___ the future), but hey, it's a free country. Happy 4th, everyone!
~Frannie.
6:10
ReplyDeleteVery odd theme. I like your reparsing of BESTIMEVER. We all strive to be the best we can be. You do you, and all that. Otherwise, I didn't find this puzzle all that memorable. And off theme for the day as well. Let's try and get the country to be the best it can be as well. I don't think it's doing a good job currently. Still love it though. Happy 4th!
9:34
ReplyDeleteI figured the theme out right away, hence my pretty-good time. Nice to see ITALY in the grid, but too bad we couldn't squeeze in another "l" in APOLO to commemorate the up-coming fifty-year anniversary of the Moon Landing, or maybe the NYT has already done that; I can't recall right now. I've never heard of REZA Shah Pahlavi, and am not too upset about it, but I've happily heard of EAP.