Hello hello greetings and salutations etc.! Philbo here, feeling good after a multi-day bike ride this weekend to raise funds for cancer research.... 220 km (sorry, not thinking : 137 miles) in two days, up hill and down dale in southern Ontario. So it was in a state of happy, heavy fatigue that I tackled this Sunday's puzzle, just a few minutes ago. A little disappointed off the bat to see it was themeless, as I do like themed puzzles, but it *is* Sam Ezersky and he does set a mean puzzle ("mean" could signify a couple of things here...)
Digging in, I could have made my life easier by entering TOBACCO as a major NC crop in the very first clue, as was my immediate inclination, but I thought that was too obvious and so left it for later. I set a couple of traps for myself by entering JOENAMATH and not BARTSTARR as the first Super Bowl MVP (20A), and LOCUSTS instead of CICADAS as things of which there can be "plagues" (28A). These caused minor grief later.
Things got on a better track with 32A CALLLOG, which I thought neat with its three consecutive 'L's. From there it all flowed quite nicely. I liked ALGALBLOOM (69A: "Harmful aquatic overgrowth") for its tricky fifth letter, COGNOSCENTE (27D: "Expert, from the Italian") for its tricky last letter, and of course OARSWOMEN (2D: "Some boat crew members") which of course usually appears with two fewer letters, and this answer led to TOBACCO and BARTSTARR as well.
I wound up getting tripped up by ILEAC (53A: "Related to part of the small intestine") which I misspelled as ILIAC and it took me a while to root out that error. And that led to my new favourite answer : CORNELL as "Ivy seen among cliffs", which I assume is a reference to the topography in the town of Ithaca. Confirmation anyone? (Don't want to lazily just check the Google)
Overall impression - a fun challenging Sunday puzzle, even if it was themeless, and I can't help but observe that there sure were a lot of unusual words and phrases - I suspect that was the whole point! 13:00 solve time today. And now it's bedtime! Oh no it's not. The Monday puzzle is out and I may as well review that one too..
-philbo
Yes, Ithaca is Gorges, as the saying goes. Lots of cliffs.
ReplyDeleteThis one played easy for me, but "easy for me" ends up with my time being about two minutes slower than your "challenging Sunday" time. Heh.