Quite a doozy of a theme today, if you see what I moon. Today's revealer,
OXYGENATION hints at the fact that we should add oxygen, in the form of two OOs, to "inflate" each theme answer. So, for "Mood setters for a romantic dinner" for which you might want to enter 'candles' but find there are two too many spaces, you take a breath and expand the answer to
CANOODLES, which is very nicely apt for a romantic evening. Apt! Bradley Cooper becomes, somewhat less aptly,
BOORADLEY. Possibly least apt of all but still amusing, is the transformation from 'patties' ("Quarter-pound things at McDonald's") to
PATOOTIES - ha. Today, it was necessary for me to figure out the theme in order to
SOLVE the puzzle. Although I was getting the Down answers, the resulting double Os in the Across answers were too troubling to allow me to complete the puzzle until I understood what was gooing on.
For a short time, the top middle section was all gloom and doom - I didn't think of JADE or JEDI, and I didn't know "Soccer star Maradona"'s first name. I also goofed and spelled Kristen WIIG's last name incorrectly at first. Oops. I thought my goose was cooked, but once I understood the theme, poof! the tooth was loose.
Some top nootch C/AP's gave the puzzle a breath of fresh air. "Adam's apple locale" for EDEN was fun, as was "It might get worn out" for ATTIRE. Also clever was "Readers may flip over it" for STAPLE; even when I had the answer it took me a minute to 'get' it. "Wing it" for ADLIB was good. SYMBOLIC and REALM are nice fill. The new take on a clue for IMPEI was a boon for this solver - I never knew what the I stood for (Ieoh).
As usual, got to scoot. Until tomorrow, dear Readers.
~Frannie.
Agreed that there was some nice cluing here. I even filled in chiN while grumbling "well the Adam's apple is below the chin, it seems like a bit of a stretch, but throat is the wrong number of letters and we'll see" and later finding via crosses that the answer was much nicer than that.
ReplyDeleteI'm going to feel smart (ever so briefly) because JADE went in off the clue for me. And I would say JEDI did too but obviously I had a cross for one of those two (maybe JADE first? not that it matters).
One of the answers which amused me was "Some hesitations". I immediately thought "well it could be ERS or something else" but needed crosses to decide. I wasn't wrong - it could have been umS or uhS or maybe a few others