Funnily enough, we were just talking about Dr. Haight during the Crossword Puzzle Tournament this past weekend. Horace mentioned how he'd given a less than stellar review to one of the good doctor's puzzles, and was told to lighten up. I recalled speaking with him in person at the first tournament I went to.
Well, here we are again, and as is usual with his puzzles, lightening up isn't hard to do. The revealer comes at 60A: Comment before a stupid stunt ... or a hint to the ends of 17-, 25-, 36- and 50-Across (HOLDMYBEER). I did not see this coming! Beautifully, each of the aforementioned answers's second word is an ever increasing size of container that is used to hold beer, moving from glass to pitcher to case and finally to barrel.
Also each answer is using those words in a sense which does not mean a container. BLOWNGLASS is an artform typically not used to hold liquids. An ACEPITCHER comes from baseball, while a SPACECASE may be said to be holding literally nothing at all. Finally, a PORKBARREL is a lovely idiom from government. Nicely done!
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| He's a GERMANE ACTOR (well actually Austrian) |
I found the puzzle harder going than typical for a Tuesday. I'm going to freely blame this difficulty on the fact that I had a tooth extracted yesterday and am recovering. Also, I entered POPTopS at 29D: Soda can features (POPTABS). So my PORKpARcEL didn't make a ton of sense.
Ah well. Glad it wasn't during the ACPT...
I'd say other reasons the puzzle played harder than expected included the larger corners, with CLOMPED instead of stOMPED, old-timer EDMEESE, no longer used ZIPFILE and challenging ECOTEUR. Nothing wrong with any of these answers, mind you.
- Colum
Hi Colum, this would have been a good opportunity to further antagonize Dr. Haight by drawing some parallel between solving today's crossword and pulling teeth. Ha ha ha! All in jest of course (geez, what a riot). I was briefly hung up on POPTOPS as well. As a denizen of the tech space, let me assure you that ZIPFILES are very much in use nowadays. You're thinking of ZIPDRIVES, which are like the dinosaurs of Monday's puzzle, supplanted by cheap storage (thumb drives, SSDs) and the cloud. 4:00 today
ReplyDeleteSuper Tuesday -- really liked this one, especially the reveal. Colum, I'm sorry about your tooth and hope it feels better. Oh sure, as Philbo says, ZIP FILES are common. And handy, too!
ReplyDeleteHahaha, Philbo! I stand corrected on zip files. I'm just an old country doc, not up to date on all of this new-fangled stuff.
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