Monday, May 6, 2024, Malaika Handa

Greetings, dear Readers! Frannie here with some exciting personal (crossword puzzle-related) news. For the second week in a row, I solved the Monday puzzle in under five minutes. Watch out Paolo - 2025 could be my year! Kidding about that last bit, of course. I recently sat down with a clean copy of this year's ACPT puzzle 5. Even having solved some of it at the tournament *and* knowing the trick, it took me 20 minutes to complete, and I still might have ended up with one FWOE. So, yeah. 

Anyhoo, that's not why you called me here. We are here to discuss today's puzzle with the fun theme IMONAROLL. Parsed literally (like everyone likes), the letters I & M appear above (or on) answers that are different kinds of rolls: SNAKEEYES, CLASSROSTER, and my favorite, CINNAMONBUN. Delish.

Based on my time, it seems the puzzle was pretty easy, even for a Monday. The cluing was clean and often straight forward, for example, "Uses a '+' sign" for ADDS, "Group of three" for TRIO,  "Biblical figure with an ark" (NOAH), plus the pair of keyboard clues. Due to my limited world geography knowledge, TIMOR-Leste, country in Southeast Asia" was probably the most difficult for me. 

I enjoyed the C/APs "Knotted accessories" (TIES), "Pie nut" (PECAN), and "Fuzzy fruit" (KIWI). Both long Down entries SANTASUIT and SIGNATURE were good. I like the words TACIT, SWOON, and LOOT. A couple of ROIs for this solver were "Nine, in Spanish" (NUEVE) and that very useful kind of LIST, a table of CONTENTS. While I'm sure our esteemed co-blogger Philbo TORE through this puzzle, I hope he also found some ROIs to enjoy today ASA a fun start to the day. Happy birthday, Philbo!

~Frannie