An enjoyable Friday solve, on the easier side for this solver (11:57), possibly due to the number of answers I was able to enter directly off the clue including OPTED, PARSE, REIN, POISE, DIVING, HYPE, OARED, and MYRRH - the latter being the only one of the three gifts that would fit. :)
On the other hand, I did not immediately come up with PODCASTS ("'This American Life' and others"). I entered 'nprshows' instead. I don't actually know if my guess was even accurate, but it did fit. Further along, led astray by my shaky knowledge of geography, I left "Capital of the Phillippines" blank. The answer, however, was (PESO). Fooled again! Another successful misdirection of Ms. Weintraub's was "Light brown seals" (35A), the answer for which was CORKS. I hadn't heard of that type of seal, so I thought I'd look 'em up and find an image of the critters to use for the blog post. A quick search of the term revealed my mistake. LOL.
The puzzle featured a number of very nice QMC's today, including "Goes to hell?" (DESCENDS), "Big wheel at a party?" (BRIE), and "Irrational thing to celebrate?" (PIDAY). To balance things out there was also this non-QMC of note was "It helps make waiting easier" (TRAY) - ha!
~Frannie.
Yet another great puzzle with lots of tricks, traps and triviata. I inattentively put in PADDLEBOARD, and also BANDAID instead of EPIPENS, and that cost me time, but it all sorted out in 7:44.
ReplyDeleteAway for a couple of days - have a great weekend all you out there and "see" you next week!
The only way I've ever heard "This American Life" was on NPR, and how funny that "nprshowS" fits in that space! :)
ReplyDeleteAnd I had the same reaction to CORKS, Frannie, only getting it now after reading your review. Derp.
The A of TAUT was my last square, and I had a brief Kitwo moment with PIDAY, but then lol'd at the loveliness of that clue. 9:00 for me.
Nice photo! :)
I read about AXEL Paulsen too...very cool! Nice puzzle, good time for me -- 10 minutes and some change. Hand raised to include me in the CORKS thing. Here I thought I'd learned about an unknown seal species. :-) And that IS a nice photo!
ReplyDeleteHave a great weekend, Philbo!
I recognize those people, and that body of water, and that boat, in the photo! They troublingly seem to be traveling clockwise, though, which I wouldn't do. The house in the upper left now has a large-ish garage, and no doubt there are more houses out-of-frame to the upper left now than there were when this photo was taken. I also did not go at a SNAILSPACE on this one, coming in at 10:50.
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