I love finishing a puzzle and having to look back over the theme to understand what's going on. When it hits, that aha! moment is delightful.
Today, I had to read the clue for the revealer twice to get what was going on. The revealer itself, ROCKBOTTOM, was confusing. Was I supposed to add "rock" to one of the words of each of the starred answers? That didn't seem to help. And then I saw the word "musical" in the clue, and got it. Each starred answer's second word is the name of a well-known rock band.
My own personal ranking of the bands involved in the quiz? I thought you'd never ask. Clearly Queen is number one (DRAGQUEEN), with the other three in a jumbled mix afterwards. Probably I'd put Rush second (SUGARRUSH), and then I guess Kiss (AIRKISS) followed by Heart (CANDYHEART) with a lot of question marks. Thoughts?
It's a nice smooth grid overall. My only real complaint is 46D: Fire felonies (ARSONS). I don't really think that's a noun that can be pluralized. Multiple fire felonies is still just arson in my mind.
Other than that, I enjoyed SLURPS (but not in real life), APLOMB, a word which we all should use more regularly, and DREAMON.
MOTETS and HYMNS gives a little mini-music theme, while it's clever to put LIBRA and ARIES right next to each other.
- Colum
Yes! I had to re-review as well, to see what was going on. As far as ratings go ... well as a Canuck I'd have to go with RUSH over QUEEN, but my patriotism doesn't extend to HEART, who'd be tied for third with KISS, my younger brother's favourite band when he was a kid. There's photo evidence of him one Hallowe'en, decked out as Paul Stanley, complete with plywood guitar. But I digress.....
ReplyDeleteWell I had heard of 3 out of the 4 bands. Which I guess is above average for pop culture references in crosswords (I know, poor me).
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