Thursday, May 16 2024, Sara Muchnick

Hello hello!  Well, dear readers, there are themes and then there are themes.  By which I mean, sometimes you can figure out a crossword's theme as you go along, and sometimes you can't - you need the revealer and sometimes some thinking time on top of that.  Puzzle 5 in this year's ACPT was an example of the former - the trick there was, you had to remove the 'C's from every clue in the puzzle, to which I twigged after about 11 minutes of confusion.  Today's puzzle is one of the latter, for me at least.  I reached the point of a completed grid and it took a bit more study of the revealer ALLFORONE to make sense of the five theme answers:

• "Gone" = SOMENERVE
• "Stone tool" = TOILETBRUSH
• "Scoop received in a call" = ICECREAM
• "Shall" = SPARKLED
• "It gets the ball rolling" = ROTARYJOINT

Huh?  Makes no sense, right?  But if you apply the "All for one, one for all" instruction, it becomes clear!  I like how terse and un-contrived the theme clues are, and also the bidirectionality of the transformation.

Thanks largely to the tricky theme, this was a somewhat slow solve for me.  I liked JIFFY for "Flash", and that helped fix my plausible but erroneous SEAS for "Where to find a very wet sponge" (it's REEF).  Also the nearly symmetrically placed "Stag" clues in the NE and SW, with non-synonymous answers (HART and SOLO, respectively).  The QMC "Repetitive clicking sound?" (SHORTI) was quite a stretch, and a real groaner when I finally parsed it properly.  On the other hand, "Head of lettuce" (CFO) was excellent!  I also liked ACHES for "Pounds, perhaps" as it's so correct and yet so non-obvious.  

I put it to you that what you're doing in spin class only resembles cycling.  

I have ITUNES installed on my computer.  This is fresh in my mind, despite not having used it in about a decade, because I click through its "update me" popups about once a week.  I really should just remove it.

Hope you enjoyed this challenge as much as I did!  Ciao for now..

-philbo