Hey, everybody! Apologies for the lateness of the review, but I’m on West Coast time here INLA. I know some of the reviewers on this site have been traveling in fancy-schmancy places like France and Europe and stuff, but us true Red-Blooded Americans only travel within the 50 states, to places like Los Angeles. It’s been pretty amazing here; definitely the highlight was seeing the Getty Museum. I highly recommend it.
But back to more important stuff like reviewing today’s puzzle. It’s a pretty classic concept: take a well known phrase, stick the letters RE- on the front to make a new verb at the outset, clue wackily, and hilarity ensues, as we like to say. My favorite examples are usually the ones where the added letters require a degree of reparsing. Today’s was 69D: Places to swim during school? (RECESSPOOLS). Note how the original word has now been split in half to make sense of the new entry.
My second favorite is 70A: Hate getting ready to move? (RESENTPACKING). This time, the reparsing makes you change the pronunciation of “sent.” Otherwise, I was amused by RESTOCKSANDBONDS, but the others were fairly neutral. Your milage may vary.
In other news, there are plenty of fine entries in the non-theme entries. I’m not fond of a DEATHTRAP in real life, but I like it in my puzzle. Also, STRUCKOUT and SIDCAESAR are excellent. I also am fond of a RINGCYCLE, although I’ve never had the opportunity to see one or even any of its component parts.
Fun clues include 7D: Bad records to have (RAPSHEETS), especially when the puzzle also includes a reference to Guinness’ Book of Records. I also was amused by 11A: Calendar abbr. that’s also a French number (SEPT).
I’m flying most of the day tomorrow, but should have time along the way to get the review done.
- Colum
28:15
ReplyDeleteThis comes in a little on the fast side for my taste, but I'll accept it. I'm surprised that Colum has yet to see the RINGCYCLE in part or whole. Was it not put on that much in NYC when you were there full-time? I enjoyed all of the theme entries, and I'd probably rate them in a similar manner to Colum's list. I remember ENCARTA, and may have even used it once or twice. That was before the internet was as fast and sometimes-useful as it is today, and I seem to recall having to load the program onto my hard drive via some sort of disk, perhaps a floppy. I haven't had much chance to be a SNOWSKIER this year, as I do enjoy the cross-country variety, but there's still time, if only we'd get a cold snap with some snow. Good clue for SIDEONE (123A Where first tracks are found); I wasn't quite expecting that. PERFECTO is great, as is JOYRIDE (which I never take any more except in my boat in the summer, but even that is somewhat rare). The rest of the puzzle is ATPAR with nothing particularly surprising in the MIX, although we normally hear ARREAR with an "s" on the end, don't we?