From the outset, today's crossword seems to be a fill-in-the-blanks exercise. Five Across clues appear to have missing letters, starting with 17A : "Beg your pardo_". Clearly there's a missing 'N', but it was unclear at first what to do about it in the 10-letter answer. My standard MO is to ignore the theme for as long as possible, and accordingly, I skipped this one and the four others until towards the end, when the Down crossers reached a critical mass and revealed what was going on: the answers literally describe the missing letters in the clues! Just like yesterday, I feel that this is easier to show than to describe. To wit:
- "Beg your pardo_" : NONAPOLOGY. NO-N APOLOGY. Get it??
- "Badly dilapida_ed" : NOTTOOSHABBY. NO-T TOO SHABBY
- "__cretary" : NOSEJOB. NO-SE JOB
- "Pe___sephone" : NORSEGODDESS. NO-RSE GODDESS
- "Championship ___t" : NOBELPRIZE. NO-BEL PRIZE
Don't you just love it when I pedantically spell things out like this? Ok ok .. see if you can describe it better 😁 Anyway, this was a clever idea!
All this niftiness was embedded in a not-too-difficult substrate, with the exception of the NW corner where "___ Inu (Japanese dog)" and "El __ Alto (ancient California redwood)" were both unknown to me; fortunately I guessed right on the intersecting 'A' with SHIBA/PALO and avoided the dreaded "Whoops" message.
Other tricky clues .. "Quarter follower" always trips me up, even though I've seen SEMI before... "Meta field" (TECH) was not straightforward... No jury in the land would find me guilty of negligence, for entering RAMONE instead of OSMOND for "Member of a 1970s singing family"!! I liked that AHAB was identified by a quote from Moby-Dick..
I don't have much more on this one. On to tougher sledding tomorrow!
-philbo
It's a fun idea, and well carried out. I liked that more and more letters were missing as you went on. I also liked that Persephone led to the answer "Norse goddess," which she was definitely not.
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