OK, things are back to normal today. I'm home from the woods, and we've got a classic "Tuesdays Gonna Tues" theme, complete with a funny, made-up revealer - ALLITERNATION. It's cute, but these days my mind runs quickly to the "Can we still call it that?" question, which I will leave out of this review.
Each of the four themers has two words starting with the same letter (the "alliter" part) with a country as the first word ("nation"). All are very much in the language, at least for those of a certain age. So thumbs up on the theme.
In the fill, when I read the clue for 35-Down ("Most common answer in New York Times crosswords (more than 6% of all puzzles)), I already had E as the first letter, so I gleefully filled in Eel - my favorite fill word. Sadly, I had to change it to ERA. Harrumph! ERA can be clued as a stretch of time, or an acronym. It may be the most common letter-string answer, but what's the most common word, I wonder?
Interesting trivia about BANFF (Canada's oldest national park), and "Professional you might need to see?" was a cute clue for OPTICIAN). And is the LEADPIPE no longer a weapon in Clue? It's been a long time since I've played that... and I suppose if I were to play it again, I'd use the game we already have, so this crossword puzzle might be my only way of learning of this change. I guess I'll have to wait for a different puzzle to use "Weapon that replaced the lead pipe" as a clue to learn what the new weapon is.
OK, that's probably enough out of me.
- Horace
No comments:
Post a Comment