It could easily be that I've been pretty much awake for 27 or 28 hours straight, with a nice 6 to 9 (I really have no idea right now) stretch where I was in a nice, roomy (not nice, not roomy) plane seat, but the theme looks to me like four movies. Is that it? No - wait! There's a revealer! It's about TENNIS!
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| Hey, Boo. |
I kind of wanted to see YOUGOTSERVED, but never did. I did see LOVEACTUALLY way back when, but neither of the other two: THENET or FAULTINOURSTARS.
I enjoyed a SLEW of the entries here - TRAVEL, of course, but also ACOUSTICS (Science of sound), CASTRATI (Singers of high notes in olden times), SODACAN (Common recyclable), HATEMAIL (Sour notes?), STOOGE (Underling), and ATARI (Breakout company of 1976?) (Nice one!). And there's interesting trivia in RHESUS (Monkey named for a king in Greek myth) and IOWAN (Herbert Hoover, by birth (uniquely among all U.S. presidents to date). PROSY and HAZER are a bit strained, but that's about all there is to quibble about.
My mistake came on perhaps the best clue in the puzzle - "United, for one: Abbr." (SYN). I had S_N, and couldn't come up with it before I tried something wrong. I should have known that alnico was an ALLOY, but I just couldn't look at it so close to ALJOLSON without thinking of it as a person, Al Nico, which didn't help at all.
I liked this one. Now we're going to go out and explore the town of Alba a bit, before looking for someplace to get dinner - maybe we'll have RISOTTOS!
- Horace
p.s. Happy Debut!
18:34
ReplyDeleteIt took me a bit longer than it did Horace, but that's not unusual. "Enjoyed" CASTRATI? They probably didn't, although one can't argue with the results, I guess. Nice trivia on the LUSITANIA, and not the usual reference to that ship, I believe. This was a little bit of a slog for me for some reason. Not usual for a Wednesday, which normally goes a little faster, but an enjoyable solve nonetheless.
4:43
ReplyDeleteI liked the puzzle, which was surprising, because it was a Wednesday. Particularly all that extra long stuff like ALJOLSON, LUSITANIA, HATEMAIL.