Greetings all! It's been almost a year since I joined this little blogging cabal, and it's been a lot of fun! I still don't feel like I'm familiar enough with the regular setters, but I do know a few, enough to know that if it's Mr. Ezersky, we're in for a treat, likely by way of some tough sledding. And so it is today, with a dense, chewy gem of a puzzle with what feels like very little black space.
This was a very slow solve for me, thanks to tricky cluing and a few characters I did not know (looking at you, Li Mu BAI and GENOSMITH, side by side down near the bottom). I was also hampered right off the bat by "Worrisome word from a barber", which I thought for sure was OOPS but wasn't (small nit : isn't UHOH actually two words, not one?).
At the top, AUDIOBOOKS for "Speaking volumes?" was good. I didn't get (and still don't get) SOB for "Blue belt?". The Blue part, yes, but "belt"? Anyone? Bueller?
In the SE corner, a couple of marvellously non-obvious clues - "Hill-adjacent field, in brief" (POLISCI) and "Plates for nuts" (WASHERS - excellent!) Crossing these, I wasn't sure I understood "Lastin' line" (SCAR). I'm guessing it's a play on "Last in line"..? Over to the left, another great clue, to DOGNAP - "Take, as a pointer". I needed five of the six crossing letters to twig to this one. Same as "Get hitched" in the middle - SAYIDO wasn't apparent until it was pretty much filled in.
I'll curtail my random walk around the grid here. A really satisfying, rewarding puzzle today. Thanks Mr. Ezersky! And with that, I hand the mike over to Colum..
-philbo
I think the word "belt" in the clue for SOB is related to the phrase "belt it out" as a song. So a SOB is a "belt" from someone who's "blue." Felt the same way you did about UH-OH, but then I looked it up and it's actually a hyphenated word, not two words. Thanks so much for the week, Philbo!
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