Greetings and Happy Monday out there in Crossword-Land! A gentle offering today, with a punny theme suggested in the theme clues by pairs of superscripted words, the small font of which indicates a "diminutive" qualifier. So "(Earth) or (Tatooine)" becomes SMALLWORLD, and so on. Just occurred to me - this could as easily have been DWARFPLANET... Can you think of others? How about "(Gary) or (Bradley)? Or "(Basmati) or (Arborio)"? I'll let you chew on those. For a change, the theme helped me in the solve - as soon as SMALLWORLD revealed itself, the remaining theme answers were easy to write in, and if it hadn't been for an annoying typo partway thru, I'd have been done about 30 seconds faster than the 2:51 I wound up with.
I like the value add of some of these clues - learning that they race YAKS in Tibet, or that the LAKERS were originally a Minnesota team (hence the name, I assume). I will say it is a bit of a reach to pluralize ARSONS, but that's just a nit. "The 'A' of the ABC islands" was a write-in, as ARUBA is where we honeymooned, lo these many years ago.
That's all for today! A nice breezy start to the week.
-philbo
I guessed the MINI Cooper, but I choked on the rices. What’s the recipe?
ReplyDeleteMINUTE RICE, silly!
DeleteI was a little surprised by HAULASS, and more surprised that it wasn't a debut for that particular entry. Heh. I guess I OTTER know better. And I guess BICEP is as good as the real word nowadays. No use me getting MAD about it.
ReplyDelete