Monday, August 1, 2022, Garrett Chalfin

To Tell the Truth, today's puzzle didn't give me much trouble. I made short work of Monday-level C/APs like "Three on a grandfather clock" (III), "Vowel quintet" (AEIOU), and "'Va-va-____!" (VOOM), and it didn't take much Concentration to come up crossword darlings EEL, LIL, ELSA, and friends. There were a few clues that, depending on one's milieu, might require one to Scrabble a bit more like "Duke of _____, title for Prince Harry" (SUSSEX), "'The Walking Dead' cable channel" (AMC), "Classic German camera" (LEICA), and "Cuisine with pad see ew" (THAI), but no real stumpers. While not exactly $64,000 questions, there were a couple of more challenging clues like the ambiguous "Shoot!" (DARN), and "What baseball players, striking employees and pet dogs each do" (WALK). Even so, I wasn't able to Beat the Clock. Due to an unlucky spin of the Wheel of Fortune,  I had to solve the puzzle in my browser today instead of the app, as I usually do; the differences in grid navigation were enough to put my solve time over the 6 minute mark. 

In case you haven't guessed it by now, the puzzle theme features a classic game show. The endings of three grid-spanning theme answers form a sort of Match Game with the THEPRICEISRIGHT ("Classic game show ... or a hint to 17-, 26-, and 47- Across") - the connection being synonyms of price, FEE (WHOLEBEANCOFFEE), RATE (CARETOELABORATE), and FARE (GUERILLAWARFARE). 

There were no clues that made me say, "this Joker's Wild," but it's a solid Monday puzzle with minimum Jeopardy! that might encourage new solvers to Press their Luck with the New York Times Crossword. 

~Frannie.