Merry Christmas/Seasons Greetings all! Whatever you celebrate this time of year, I hope there is warmth and joy in your hearts. I am typing this on an Xmas gift from my son - a brand new Bluetooth mechanical keyboard - a major step up from my klunky dirty old one. I thought the NYT crossword, and this review, would be the ideal way to put it through its paces! Today's effort bore fruit - the theme being three pop songs with fruit in their titles. I love the way these were clued - by artist and excerpts from the songs themselves - so the answers weren't apparent (not to me anyway - my wife would probably have identified all three immediately) and required help from the crossers. The revealer was clever too - 'THATSMYJAM' with its doubly apt musical and fruity connotation! Very nicely done.
Outside the theme, it was nice breezy Monday fare. I am unsure about WADE ("Walk in water up to one's ankles, say") - I think of wading as being in deeper water. And NEWB ("Novice, informally") gets me every time - I entered NOOB (which I think is actually spelled with zeros, not 'O's) and had to backtrack. I had never heard of the vitamin BIOTIN, so there's my Christmas learnin' right there. (Looked it up. It's one of the 'B' vitamins of course. Neat!) And a special inventiveness shoutout for the cluing of ONE ("Number of times Rose tells Jack she loves him, in 'Titanic'")!!
That's all the REVIEW you get today; you'll have to take this ASIS. I'm going to DASH, or TEAR, off now to be with my family. PEACE!
-philbo
Merry Christmas, Philbo, to you and yours!
ReplyDeleteI made the same mistake re: n00b, and I couldn't think of BIOTIN either. I did like the theme, even though the Prince tune was the only one I recognize by title. Still ... jam ... what's not to like?