Hello! Philbo here, back with a vengeance today after a lukewarm performance yesterday - a friendly offering for a Saturday that took me just over 6 minutes to solve.
A peripheral New Year's theme, perhaps added as an afterthought - eight circled letters around the edges of the grid read CONFETTI, and when you complete the puzzle, the black squares transform into festively colourful shapes. So that was a nice surprise and a fun way to wrap up my week of blogging. On second thought (and look), maybe it wasn't such an afterthought after all: the black squares are all separate from one another - no two are adjacent - an impressive feat of setting and also distributes the confetti nice and evenly.
Anchoring the puzzle are 6 grid-spanning clues - 3 across and 3 down - all of which took fairly few crossers to figure out; of course, that was a tremendous help to the solve. I suspect that was the price paid for the unique layout - a bit of an easier shade to the clues. Hidden within was one of my all-time favourites : "Strips in a club", which, belying its racy overtones, is BACON. (Yes!!) And crossing that one is "Craft at camp" (CANOE). For me, these were the highlights in what was otherwise a fairly straightforward solve.
A few other seasonal hints - "Hour at which to sing Auld Lang Syne" (XII, which works); and I learned that "Just Another New Year's Eve" contains the lyric "Tonight's another chance to start AGAIN", which smacks of rarely-kept New Year's resolutions. Didn't know that Tolkein contributed "Waggle" and "Wild" to the OED - can that be right? (Calls for some additional research.)
For those regular readers among you - the Eastern Townships has transformed itself overnight into a winter wonderland, with a dusting of snow covering the landscape. Very pretty and finally Christmassy!
I now pass you on to the esteemed Colum, who will usher in 2024. I wish you all well in the new year!
-philbo
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