Today's puzzle features a healthy dose of AI, a topic that's all over the news (and rightly so) these days. Mr. Larson has managed to come up with a quartet of phrases containing the letters A and I, which when juxtaposed yield brand new phrases! To wit:
- PACKINGLIST and PICKINGLAST
- CHIPSTACK and CHAPSTICK
- HATTRICKS and HITTRACKS
- BALLSOFFIRE and BILLSOFFARE <-- my favourite!
This is brilliant to me! The clues to each of these include definitions of both variants. Of course, this puts a burden on the crossers of those mutable A's and I's - they have to make sense with either letter. And so they do of course! For example, the answer crossing the last I/A of PACKINGLIST is BASIL and BASAL. You're helpfully given definitions of both variants in the clues to these crossers as well.
I feel like if I had more time, I would happily spend it trying to come up with other phrases that fit this bill. Really nicely done!
The rest of the fill was pretty straightforward. I liked the Hitchhiker's Guide reference. (Was there really a PARTIV to the trilogy?) I remember reading it and loving it in university, then re-reading it again a few years ago - or trying to - and finding it really lame. That's life, I guess. The seldom-seen OTIOSE ("Superfluous") makes a welcome appearance today!
I got nothing else. Fun puzzle!
-philbo
Very cool idea and well carried out for sure. Hitchhiker's Guide Part IV was "So Long & Thanks For All The Fish."
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