Today we find four inventors names reversed inside the theme answers: Tesla, Nobel, Edison, and Bell. It seems that engineer can also mean inventor, so I guess the REVERSEENGINEER revealer works well.
I thought that the NE was particularly tough, with OCEANAUT (Sub tenant?) beside MESDAMES (French ladies) - both uncommon, and crossed by the difficultly-clued RICES (Splits into bits) and GLUES (Fixes, in a way). And although I know the word GELEE from French, I do not know it as an "Aspic-like dish." That all took me a while to unravel.
In other areas, "High percentage crime?" was a great clue for USURY, and "Attention-getting phrase" was tricky for NOTABENE. BANGS (Apt hairstyle for a gunslinger?) was hilarious, I thought OUTRIVAL (Eclipse) and BEEFRIB (Barbecue cut) were both a little odd, and I have never heard of Chuck LORRE.
So overall, this was slow-going for me, and although there were bits of it that I liked a lot, the end brought more relief than satisfaction. Now if you'll excuse me, I've got to return a call from the IRS about a penalty of some kind...
- Horace
18:29
ReplyDeleteI finished in the NE because of OCEANAUT, mostly (and its TAME and GLUES crosses). However, I somehow was able to pull out MESDAMES, even though I know very little French. Chuck LORRE is pretty famous, and I knew Georg SOLTI off of the clue. Getting GNOME and the other crosses in 9D led me to correct dICES to RICES, giving GREGG, which I determined made more sense than GdEGG (obviously I never heard of Coach GREGG Popovich). A nice Thursday puzzle, but it's well-known that I prefer a rebus.
9:11
ReplyDeleteOCEANAUT was a toughie. I knew both SOLTI and GREGG, so there. I did not however know Mr. LORRE. We all have our blind spots.