DETOURS AHEAD
Gosh, it feels like a long time since I sat down to write a review. Thanks Philbo, for a fun week of blogging! Here in the muggy muggy New York upstate, it's nice to settle down with a good puzzle for a bit.
Today, Mr. Wagner plays a fun game with detours in the grid, which are represented with striped orange squares for the spaces you can go around. The clues contain both the original entry and the detoured entry, where you would go around the striped squares. Very nicely, every detoured segment (in gray squares) is a synonym for something you could steer a car down.
Thus, 22A: Dickens clerk DETOUR: Theatrical success (BOBCRATCHIT / B[ROADWAY]HIT) has the term "roadway" highlighted below the detour squares. I love USBORDERS / USB[DRIVE]S as a beautiful reparsing of those first letters, abbreviated in each answer. FILMSPEED / FIL[LANE]ED is lovely because of how "lane" is broken up across three answers.
ELASTICBAND / E[STREET]BAND is not quite as good just because "street" is not hidden at all in the second answer. Still, the reparsing of the word "band" is clever.
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| RAMSESI |
Any puzzle which crosses HODGEPODGE with BADASSERY is going to get a thumbs up from this reviewer. My esteemed co-reviewer Horace probably enjoyed the pairing of APERTURE and FILMSPEED.
4D: Hunt-and-peck types? (BIRDSOFPREY) was a fun clue, and it was also a fun movie, it turns out. 97A: Cells are covered in it, in brief (BIO) took me forever to figure out that they were talking about the subject in school.
I'm a big fan of the song "Come on, EILEEN," but I will not suggest that JOSEF Strauss should be considered in the same breath as his brother Johann (or even in the same neighborhood as their unrelated co-composer, Richard).
- Colum
Neat! The detours are SIDE STREETS!! And until this day, I did not know that Richard and Johann Strauss were unrelated.. Also, thanks for the explanation of BIO, which I wondered about (and then forgot)
ReplyDeleteTwo amazing composers in their own right.
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