It took me a while to get into this one. Sure, there were small things like IRA Flatow and DEBorah, but for "On what to write one's final words?" I guessed heAdstone instead of EXAMPAPER, and because of that incorrect T, I guessed "stairs" for "Locale for an echo." I thought "stairwell," might have been better, but better still is CANYON. And further on, I thought of a qUaSAR, not a PULSAR, when I read "Celestial object producing a so-called 'lighthouse effect' as it rotates." Sigh.
But enough about my troubles. Don't you sometimes get caught up in clues like "Location of the world's oldest surviving piano, with 'the'?" I mean, it's easy enough to enter MET pretty confidently, but then you have to look it up and find out that it is a piano made in Florence by Bartolomeo Cristofori in 1720. And then you think "Bach lived until 1750... could he have played it? He was all the way up in Germany... but maybe..." And yes, it's now at the Met. And Cristofori was, apparently, just trying to make a harpsichord with more control over soft and loud (piano e forte), and it was the revolutionary soft-playing ability that eventually gave the instrument a new name.
The work-y BUSINESSACUMEN (Know-how in negotiations, say) and ACTIONITEM (Post-meeting to-do) don't really pass the "weekend breakfast test" with me. Who wants to be FORCED to think of work on a Saturday?! :) And VISA (Need for an international student, often) is a little too soon for this Harvard employee. Sigh.
- Horace
Solved on paper, of course, and it was a fairly free-flowing late-morning enterprise. No major problem areas. I like a harder go on Saturdays, but this one was quite pleasant. I enjoy words like ACUMEN, but my favorite C/AP was "Those whose time has come and gone" for EXCONS. That brought a smile. Nice research on the piano. Do clouds really SCUD??
ReplyDeleteOh, I forgot about that EXCONS clue. That was good.
ReplyDeleteAnd clouds do come up in definitions of the word SCUD, but it doesn't feel natural to me either.