I must kick off today's review by perpetuating the Canadian stereotype and saying "sorry" - sorry that Tuesday's puzzle didn't really do it for me. The four theme entries are distinguishable by their circled letters - a short consecutive string and an extra circled letter on its own. I didn't pay much attention until hitting the revealer clue spanning the middle of the grid : "Hemingway tale about an elderly fisherman, with 'The'...", at which point OLDMANANDTHESEA was an easy write-in. And sure enough, the theme answers all contain some form of OLD MAN (in the fatherly sense), plus an extra 'C', as indicated by the circles. To wit:
17A "Pontiff's emblem with three horizontal bars" = PAPALCROSS
29A "Amigo" = COMPADRE
42A "Crustaceans sometimes called 'mudbugs'" = CRAWDADS (I did not know this!)
57A "Open some bubbly with a bang" = POPTHECORK
All makes sense but I felt a bit "meh" about it. To be fair, none of the embedded "old men" have a fatherly connotation in the context of the words/phrases in which they're embedded, which is a plus.
Notable stuff in the fill : 8A "Place for the highest-scoring golfer" (LAST) was amusing. Interesting factoid in 55D about WHO being sung over 100 times in the WHO's WHO Are You"... Speaking of 100, there must be that many ways of cluing ORCS (here in 36D as "Green-skinned World of Warcraft characters"). LALALA (18D "Fingers-in-ears syllables") was cute too. I still find it an effective tool in an office context, given the right audience. 🙂
My only misstep was IMEANTO for 53A "That's my next move" - quickly corrected to IPLANTO.
That's all she wrote! Hoping for sunnier skies (or, maybe just a better attitude) tomorrow..
-philbo
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