The Turn starts off with a bang this week! Or was that a car backfiring? :)
There's a RE[BUS] traffic jam in the center, and my favorite (yes, I'm just going to go ahead and say it's my favorite) pinwheel-type theme surrounding it. A TRAFFICJAM might occur due to a BOTTLENECK on the INTERSTATE and make you LATETOWORK. And in the center, that jam is made up of a [CAR][VAN][SEMI][TRUCK] and a [BUS]. Very nice.
The central crosses all work quite well too. [CAR]OL (Winter air) was nice and tricky, SER[VAN]T (Minor role in many a Shakespeare play) was unexpected, YO[SEMI]TE took me forever to get, even after I had gotten YO_TE! The last two, S[TRUCK]OUT and RE[BUS] were the first two I got of these, and they really helped blow the puzzle wide open.
The non-theme material was strong today as well - MALARKEY (Hogwash) is great, ALLEGRO (Brisk, musically) is fun, it's always nice to be reminded of things EUROPEAN (Polish, e.g.), and it was surprising to find FREAKS (Goes off the wall) as a verb. BUTTE (Rocky Mountain city once home to the Anaconda Copper Mining Company) is one of your better-named U.S. cities, but where the heck did that clue come from?
A lot of good, and only a little bad (DETS, AMS) - I liked it ALOT.
- Horace
5:41
ReplyDeleteLove love love this one. And it even has RE[BUS] in the puzzle! 34A: Remember this! (ALAMO) made me chuckle.
37:00 or so (finished on paper and timed without a second hand)
ReplyDeleteIt took me a while because I did not get the trick for forever, even though I suspected a RE[BUS] early on. The one that finally fell for me was YO[SEMI]TE, where I'd tried YOrbE off of the Y___E, even though I suspected LOTTO would be the cross since I hade L___O there already, and knew that "Yorbe" was not any place I'd ever heard of (Yorba Linda is, of course, the home of former president RMN). Anyway, once I saw the "semi" in there it made sense and the puzzle fell. I was looking for "gravity" or "nuclear weak" where KARMA goes, so that took a short while to get straight. Plus, "KUBO and the Two Strings" is completely unknown to me, and will remain so. Everyone likes the word BOORISH, and most love this kind of puzzle. Just what I hope to see on a Thursday.
I love the idea of a puzzle which uses the nuclear weak force as an answer. Maybe even a theme with the themers being some form of the four or so forces of nature (and no, I didn't try to figure out whether there is a way to cast them with suitable numbers of letters, but maybe I shouldn't give up so easily because there might be a way to pull this off without diving as deeply into particle physics as I or Huygens would apparently prefer.
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