Back from our vacation, in cloudy and overcast Albany. It was sunny and 60 in Lake Placid this morning... We did not get to hike High Falls Gorge as it is closed on Wednesday and Thursday, but we took the gondola to the top of Little Whiteface, and had an astounding vista in all directions, seeing many of the 46 high peaks around us. Lovely.
A fun theme today: our constructors take phrases which have the letters making up synonyms for refuse, detritus, unwanted stuff, and the remaining letters make up a separate word, which is then clued directly. Thus, 23A: *Trick (WILDROSES) has the word "dross," which when removed, leaves "wile," which answers the clue. The revealer comes at 37A (TAKEOUTTHETRASH). Very nice. I suppose you might quibble over whether "scraps" is really "trash." Certainly, they can be.
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I made a number of incorrect guesses or misspellings along the way, which slowed me down. For example, I tried uRu at 65A: Neighbor of Bolivia: Abbr. (ARG). Wrong and geographically incorrect. Fortunately, having two words end in -U seemed unlikely. I misspelled TILDE with an A, but SPEX fixed that.
I also had inT at 8D: QB stat: Abbr. (ATT). SQUiBS seemed possible, but there was no making AUNnIE work in my little brain.
I was going to ask if anyone here had used SANTASLAP, which I had parsed as "Santa Slap," an website I presumed I had not yet heard of. But in fact, it should be parsed as "Santa's lap." Kudos to the clue here!
Otherwise, not a ton of super clever cluing, but overall a fun puzzle. A good start to the turn!
- Colum
It was good. Had SANTASHOP in there for a while, for some reason. Had the same reaction as you when SANTASLAP revealed itself! The modern equivalent of coal in one's stocking, perhaps? Overall couldn't get a good rhythm going and so it was a slow go .. can look at this as the hallmark of a good challenging puzzle..
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