Monday, December 30, 2019

Monday, December 30, 2019, Gary Larson

0:03:17

Four examples of things found ONAROLL today: MARGARINE, HONORSTUDENT, ALUMINUMFOIL, and MONEYCLIP. No punny clues, just straightforward Monday fare. Well, for the most part, anyway. I'm not sure GAHAN Wilson or Mel OTT are terribly familiar to those born after the demise of phones with DIALS, and ADZES aren't found in many toolkits... but somehow it still went right along. In fact, if this isn't my fastest time ever, it's pretty close. (Yes, I know the app has statistics, but when you're a reviewer who sometimes does puzzles on paper and then fills them in on the computer using a keyboard while looking at the finished grid, the times end up being unrealistic. I wish for a "reset" option on the stats page, but until such a tool exists, I will not know my actual fastest solve time.)

ARAL
1989 / 2014 - Once the 4th largest lake in the world
The only slightly oblique clue today was "Hotel amenity down the hall" for ICE. The answer could have been almost anything, really - spa, bar, gym ... - but somehow you still knew it would be ICE.

DOORDIE (Critical, as a situation) looks oddly like "door die" when you glance at it, and those three Os running NE, and the three in the middle of the puzzle running the other way, make me wonder if there's ever been a tic-tac-toe theme. I'm guessing that the answer is probably yes, but if not, and you're a constructor reading this and you beat me to it... well, congratulations. Because really, what am I going to do about it?

I liked CAROUSEL, ORBITERS, RELIC, and RECROOM. Let's focus on things like that, and not OON, RIA, and INE. GOODE?

- Horace

3 comments:

  1. Who wrote this puzzle and why do they have it in for doors? Like wanting them to die?

    What? "do or" not "door". Never mind. Probably only cost me 5 or 10 seconds (of an overall pretty quick solve despite not knowing GAHAN at all and needing all crosses), but it felt like ages. Especially because the DOORDuE, DOORDirE (no, that's the wrong number of letters, this is a Monday man, no rebus), DOORDoE, etc, came at the end of the solve.

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  2. 4:25
    Faster than usual, for sure. GAHAN was the only unknown for me. OTT would have been, but as a regular crossword solver, he's well known to me as a common answer. OON is terrible. And I obviously wanted vAlli where LAINE goes, but I've heard of him, too, and the former probably wasn't singing too much in the 40s.

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