So, FWOE today. I've never heard of IMGUR (Big online site for uploading photos and memes) and I mistakenly remembered the "Blue-skinned race in 'Avatar'" as NAVu. IDAHO how that happened!
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| By source (WP:NFCC#4), fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=57750579 |
Today's theme is pretty clever. Despite the fact that the theme was boldly announced ("This puzzle's theme" (NUMBERS)) I couldn't make any sense of the "Like the two" part of each clue, until I could. :) And once I did, I thought it was pretty neat. A lot of answers had to be very carefully placed to make this one work. It kind of boggles this solver's mind. The numbers of the two squares that each of the themed down answers cross had to be numbers that fit the category of number described by the down answer. The answer to 2D: "Like the two 40-Across in the grid for this answer" was PRIME, and lo and behold, the two numbered squares the answer crosses are 2 and 23 - both prime numbers. Likewise with the 9 and 25 where SQUARE appears, 34 and 55 within FIBONACCI, and, perhaps slightly less trickily ODD (39, 43) and EVEN (44, 48).
Other nice number-related entries like OCTUPLE, ONE, UNO, and maybe SERIAL, COINED, STEREO. I also liked PUPPETEER, NOTORIETY, and INSIDEOUT.
All of that tricky theme content and the rest of the grid didn't suffer - even the groups of three-letter answers, while a little heavy on crosswordese (EEL and ROC come to mind) it didn't turn into a festival of acronyms, which is not too SHODDY. I give it a 10!
~Frannie.
I agree with Frannie on the 10-rating. Any NUMBERS-based puzzle is great in my book, and with ZAP and VINCENT Price, too, it's ATOP of my list. Nice that ENCORES abuts PUCCINI and that we have two double-C names crossing each other. NOTORIETY is excellent, and I have the DRYEST continent on my List of Places to Visit, so stay tuned!
ReplyDeleteI didn't look up or calculate whether 34 and 55 are Fibonacci numbers, but by the time I got there I had figured out what was going on so I figured they must be.
ReplyDeleteOh and did anyone else notice that gASkEt is the same number of letters as WASHER? Turns out the former doesn't cross either VIEWS or lIkeS, though.