Greetings and Happy Weekend from rainy Toronto! A nice chewy Saturday puzzle today, with a paucity of black squares and a block of intersecting triple-stacks in the middle that made for slow going. I was helped by a couple of cleverly misleading clues that didn't trick me at all :) - "Muttonchops moisturizer" (BEARDOIL), "Silver streaks, e.g." (LODES) and "Jockey's main competitor?" (HANES). I think when one's done enough of these crosswords, one starts looking out for that kind of misdirection.
One of the Down stacked clues was a complete unknown to me : the author of "Alexander's Bridge", for which I needed every one of the crossers to reveal WILLACATHER, who I now must properly check out. Compensating for this difficulty were the other two Down stackers - LOOSECHANGE, often found under couch cushions, and DATACENTERS (Places for networking) - the latter being another tricksy one but I know all about datacenters so no hiccup there...
Looking back (I'm writing this about 12 hours after finishing the puzzle, which isn't ideal), I don't know why I had trouble in the SW corner. "Capricorn's symbol" = SEAGOAT was neat to learn (the SEA part), and it helped resolve the reply to "Whatcha doin'?", which could as easily have been NUTHIN as NOTHIN. And from my gender-specific POV, I never thought of an ovary as a GONAD. Of course it is! Finally in that corner, MYPRETTY wasn't obvious to me as "Dorothy, to the Wicked Witch". No excuse there!
All in all an enjoyable solve, as are the great majority of these NYT xwords, each for its own special reason. And with that I leave you in the capable blogging hands of Colum. I hope you enjoyed this past week of reviews!
-philbo
Whee, fun puzzle! Great entries, terrific clues...very, very nice. Thanks for the week, Philbo!
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