Today's spiral offering features an always-impressive stack of 3 long entries in the middle of the grid. Fortunately for this solver, there was a gimme right off the bat - Nick SABAN, the winningest college football coach, unlocked the NE corner, even the unknown-to-me poet ADRIENNE Rich revealed by the crossers. This led to a first peek at the "stack" - generally the most impenetrable part of the puzzle - but not this time, with two of the three also quick write-ins:
31A : DOOMSCROLLING - overdosing on negative news online - this household spent uncountable hours doing just that, all throughout the pandemic.
35A : CANCELCULTURE - modern form of ostracization - all over the news these days, so difficult to miss this one.
36A : WHITERUSSIAN - not a write-in until a few of the crossers were in place.
With these in place, the rest of the puzzle fell into place pretty easily. My favourite C/AP was 53A "They go straight to your head" = EGOBOOSTS. Not a whole lot of other super-witty clues, I didn't think. A few were new to me - I had never heard of PLOTZES ("Faints from emotion") - I even tried to enter SWOONS before I realized the letter count was wrong; SCHMEAR was new to me as a "Bagel shop request" (does it refer to a quantity of cream cheese?) and HEL ("Norse goddess of death") seems tailor-made for escaping from crossword jail. STONEWALL National Monument I assumed to have something to do with Stonewall Jackson, but no - it's a cornerstone of the LGBT rights movement in the US (as Google tells me).
6:09 all in all, including innumerable typos as I went. This wasn't my favourite Friday puzzle of all time. Oh well, they can't all be, I suppose.
Until tomorrow, my friends!
-philbo
I managed a ludicrous 4:54 on this puzzle!
ReplyDeleteHoly crow Colum! That's some Mach-speed solving, right there..
DeleteAmazing speeds, both of you! I didn't even finish the Friday puzzle until Saturday. :( But, I did want to comment on this puzzle because I found it so interesting that we (Philbo and I, I mean) had opposite gimmes. It took me forever to get SABAN, but I dropped in ADRIENNE Rich. Also, I would have thought PLOTZES and SCHMEAR would be familiar to every schlemiel. :) Anyhoo, thanks for sharing your puzzle perspectives. I appreciate it.
ReplyDelete