I enjoyed this oversized Wednesday offering from Mr. Steinberg, in large part because I was forced to hunt for the camouflaged creatures. They told us the rows, but they did not highlight the animals, which was nice. The ones I found were a chameleon, an octopus, a leaf insect, and a leopard. Not bad at all. As far as I understand the natural world, the leopard and the leaf insect merely use their static coats and/or shape to blend into their natural environment, while the top two can actually adapt their coloring to match many different colors and even, in the octopus, textures. Have you seen the recent videos of octopodes? It's really almost impossible to believe what they are capable of. Also, we learned recently (probably from PBS) that they are one of our most distant relatives. Their kind branched off very early in the whole "living creatures" era. Also, while they have been shown to be highly intelligent, they are not tended to by either parent after they hatch, which seems to indicate 100% nature over nurture. (OK, Frannie, you've won this round!...)
I was greatly helped as I started my solve by having just recently missed finding the word ANAPHORA (Repetition of words at the starts of successive phrases, in rhetoric) while playing the "Spelling Bee" on the NYT puzzles and games page. Frannie and I have been very much enjoying that of late, but we will have a few questions for Mr. Ezersky when we see him in Stamford next March about how he decides which words to accept and which to refuse. Anyway, we always look to see what we've missed (if anything), and when we saw this one (and anaphor), we looked it up. I can never keep all those rhetorical devices straight!
I enjoyed finding BECHAMEL (French white sauce), ANEMONE (Sea ____ (tide pool dweller)), GALILEO (Astronomer who first observed Saturn's rings) (That must have been cool!), ELISION (Feature of "G'day" or "Yes'm"), and SIPHON (Gas thief's device) (Does this still happen?). And I liked seeing the late, great PAULINE Kael in the middle, there.
Really, it's quite a clean(ISH) grid. A few things like CROUP (Infant's ailment) and CREEL (Fishing basket) to ease us into the Turn (the three late-week puzzles), but nothing that I found particularly troubling. Also, I like that it's running so close to Halloween, when lots of people will be using CAMOUFLAGE of a sort.
Lastly, I think Michelle Wie is one of my brother's favorites, and thanks to him, I was able to fill LPGA right in! I'll take crossword help wherever I can get it. :)
- Horace
5:11
ReplyDeleteExcellently done by Mr. Steinberg. I even notice that the OC/TOP/US hides one row down as well, with two black squares hiding its second and third letters...
9:50
ReplyDeleteVery nicely-done. COCO looks to me as if it could be an OK movie, but since my kids are too old and grandchildren too young, I'm unlikely to see it. Being close to my anniversary, I fondly remember liberally spending PESOS on our honeymoon, and of course I'm always happy to be reminded of BALI. DECAF has no place in my life as yet (and hopefully never will), and do people still use FREON? GALILEO didn't quite know what to make of the rings at first since: 1) his telescope wasn't that good, and 2) it is difficult to envision the 3D implications of such a sighting. That must've been slightly frustrating, but invigorating nonetheless. The church probably didn't like any of his resulting musings as to the real interpretation.
What the church didn't like about Galileo is kind of complicated as I understand it, but getting back to the puzzle, especially liked SIPHON (and no, probably doesn't happen nearly so much now that gas caps lock). CREEL is something I probably haven't seen in a while. I just know it as crosswordese, maybe some day we need to prepare a museum exhibit of creels and etuis.
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