Tuesday, November 2, 2021, Vaibhav Srikaran and Matthew Stock

Because I did the puzzle and wrote the review Sunday night, I didn't know about Monday's NYTX outage until Horace mentioned it over coffee. I did a little searching on the Webz to see if I could find out what had happened - and at that early AM hour, I couldn't - but one thing that I did find that amused me was that no matter what I searched, the second or third result was about UMIAK - the answer to the "Inuit boat" clue. It made me wonder if others thought that one was a bit offsides for a Monday as well.

Anyhoo, back to today's puzzle and its lovely DOUBLERAINBOW theme, as represented by the ROYGBIV letters in circled sets of double letters that form an arc across the top two thirds of the grid - with EGG on top. :)

I got a little hung up in the north east. I didn't read the clue for 12 D carefully and I rashly entered MEDIAmAVen for "Like a public relations pro." The worst of it was that it worked in many Acrosses, and one of the three places it didn't work was an answer I didn't know ("Confection popular in South Asia and the Mideast" (HALVA)) so I kept struggling to make it work and wasted time. I know, BOOHOO. :) 

I liked "Move like a buoy" (BOB), "Lead-in to vision or zone" (EURO) - I'm a big fan of both - and "What's black and white and a threat all over?" (ORCA) - ha! 

It was interesting to have BABYYODA make an appearance. I learned only last weekend that the character is not actually Yoda as a baby, but a baby of Yoda's species named Grogu. While looking up Baby Yoda in the Wikipedia, I find that there's another of this species in the series, apparently named Yaddle. Who knew? And, although largely unrelated, I couldn't keep myself from reading a lot of the Wikipedia article about Anne Boleyn. Sometimes I just CAROB from one topic to another.

And was there a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, you ask? I think so: an enjoyable mini-theme (as I'm styling it) of BEERS, IPAS and ONTAP. Cheers!

~Frannie.