Friday, March 5, 2021

Friday, March 5, 2021, Sridhar Bhagavathula

No FWOEs today, thankfully - just a smooth solve with no ADES needed - the ANTIPODE of the past two days, if you will - and that, despite some unusual fill. You don't see FLAGELLA every day. I say that, but oddly, that was a word Horace and I missed in the Spelling Bee earlier this week. However, before *that* it had probably been years since the cilia things popped up. Also in this category are, I think, COLOSSUS and FAKEBOOK. The towering PERSEPHONE looks good in the southwest. Her partner in the northeast (ECONOMISTS), however, is less interesting, but I always enjoy a Shavian remark.

Another NOD to the unusual was the prevalence of K's and V's in the grid. We get the kicky OFFKEY and TAKERS, not to mention AKIRAKUROSAWA, and the vigorous trilogy VIDAL, VIPER, and VICES.

19D: BATIK


I also enjoyed the pair of "Pilots" clues whose answers cross each other in the southwest: STEERS and EPISODES, the former a straight up synonym and the latter exemplary.

"Plant that may yield oil" (REFINERY), "Work on a course" (EAT), and "Fathers warn against it (SIN) were C/APs that revealed some SLYNESS, but the QMC's today were more entertaining: "Trace element?" (STENCIL), "Spot on advice?" (PSA), and my favorite, "Make chips become bread?" (CASHIN). Ha!

~Frannie.

2 comments:

  1. I dropped FLAGELLA right in, having looked through microscopes for decades to see just that type of thing. I liked that BidEN fit in where BUREN goes, and that avIatorS fits where EPISODES goes. The latter slowed me down a bit in the SW and led to my 22:37 time, which on the whole isn't too bad. I rarely think of Lady Liberty as a COLOSSUS, so that was interesting, and I loved seeing the SPACEAGE in there. I look forward to the upcoming season where I'll WIPESOUT a few times, no doubt, waterskiing. At least I'll be out-of-doors for a change.

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  2. I thought the clue for COLOSSUS was especially nice, given the Emma Lazarus poem, but I thought "End of a three-word U.S. president name" was very strange. Is it really "three-word?" Aside from the fact that it's odd to call names "words," he's never referred to as "Buren," so really, his last name could be said to be "Van Buren," and that it, as a single last name, should be called one word, if it's going to be called a word at all. Bah.

    On the upside, though, I thought this was a fine Friday.

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