Sunday, October 31, 2021

Sunday, October 31, 2021, Alex Eaton-Salners

CHOICE WORDS

Well, color me surprised - there's no Halloween theme today! Only the conspicuous lack of the "trick or treat" choice. Hmmm...

PHAROS of Alexandria

What we do have, is a strange bird of a puzzle featuring five rebus squares, the contents of which are essentially repeated on the same line. "Noted Apple release of 1968, to fans" was obviously THEW[HIT]EALBUM, and all that remained was to find the cross that could also use a rebus, which in this case was "Negligent" (RE[MISS]). So that gave a rebus square with "HIT/MISS" in it. All fine so far. The title is "Choice Words," so I get it. Then, the very next clue after the Apple release is "Haphazard," which turns out to be HITORMISS. Why? Why put it in twice? It just seemed odd to me.

And I get the desire to cross PAT (Action done while saying "Good dog") with PETFOOD (Fare that's eaten hands-free), but it seems a little disingenuine, because most pets don't have "hands." 

On the bright side, I chuckled at "Head for the hills?" (OUTHOUSE) and at "Fluent speaker of Elvish, say" for NERD. Hah! And there's the nice doubling of "Mischief-makers" for RASCALS and IMPS, but off of IMPS was the hardest answer for me - "See captain?" (POPE). It took me quite a long time to figure out that they were referring to the Holy See, and MOOT Court (?) didn't help at all. 

Frannie takes over tomorrow. I'll see you in a few weeks. Happy Puzzling!

- Horace

1 comment:

  1. DNF, alas. I never heard of PHAROS of Alexandria and didn't grok the "Keypad trio" as -- ironically enough -- ABC. Ah, well...funny, but I got the "See captain?" clue right away and it cracked me up.

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