Thursday, February 9, 2023, Alex Rosen

Well, today's puzzle definitely counts as a trick puzzle. To reveal the revealer, you must first solve the puzzle (or at least part of it). It appears in two parts, one in the top left the other in the bottom right: REVERSEEACH TWOWORDCLUE. While I didn't, strictly speaking, need the revealer to solve the puzzle, I did need it to understand some of the answers. TRIPOD for "Mount Olympus" didn't really makes sense until I read it as Olympus [camera] mount. Although, I suppose, you could read it in the original direction with a hard pause: Mount, Olympus, like a data entry field. Maybe that's just me. :)

One tricksy element of the puzzle is that it applies only to certain clues, making it more difficult to guess. Using my "crossword brain" (with which I can justify almost any C/AP!) I could make sense of many of these clues without the reversal, but they do make a lot MORE sense when the clue words are read right to left. :) 

Here are some of my favorites:

"Firm fruit" (DOLE)

"Cuts short" (BOBS)

"Water buffalo" (ERIE) - should 'buffalo' be capitalized here, or am I missing something?

"Job bank" (HEIST) 

"Does not" (BUCKS) - I especially enjoyed the re-parsing required by this one!!

"Giant storybook" (OGRE)

"Part IV" (TUBE) - another one that was tough to get even my crossword brain around until I both reversed the clue AND changed IV (the Roman numeral 4) to IV (short for intravenous)!

"Pan Asian" (WOK) - Ha!

As if all of the clever contortions above weren't enough, the constructor gets some other good material in here. C/APs I especially liked are "No soft serve" (ACE), "Wasn't, then was" (BECAME), "Went to third, say" (SHIFTED), and "Pelts" for FURS. There was some great fill, too, including CABARETS, EXCUSE, CASPAR, VISOR, RAPIER, and SPINDLE. 

That's it for me today. See you on the flip side.

~Frannie.