Thursday, July 30, 2026, Joel Woodford

Today's puzzle spells success in more ways than one. There's the excellent theme/trick and some capital clue/answer pairs. As indicated in the revealer, italicized clues needed a little assistance from the NATOALPHABET to help make sense of them. The solver must substitute the first letter of each of them with its NATO Alphabet (NA) equivalent, then find a synonym for the remaining word to get the correct answer. For example, parsing "Cluster" as 'C' and 'luster,' we take Charlie from the NA and a 'sheen' as a synonym for "luster" and the result is CHARLIESHEEN. It's a cool trick to come up with perfectly natural clue words that transform in this way to common phrases. It's seems to me that coming up with these four examples AND working them into a solid crossword is not as easy as ABC. My favorite was "Agent" for ALPHAMALE. Ha! I read up a bit on the NA in the Wikipedia and found that the international spelling for Alpha is Alfa, to assist non-native English speakers with pronunciation, but in this case, obviously, one needs the traditional English spelling to make it work. I also read that in Indonesia, LONDON is used in place of "Lima", because lima is the Malay word for 'five' so there's some tangential bonus material for you. :)

There was plenty of the "write" stuff elsewhere in the grid. I enjoyed "One who doesn't speak while in a cast" (EXTRA), "Training aids for a lab, say" (TREATS), and "That's the whole point!" (PRONG). Heh. Some grade A QMC's include "Do you read me?" (NOVEL), "High achievers?" (STONERS), and best in class "Biblical second coming? (EVE). APT! :)

29D: "Puts down" was a nicely ambiguous clue for PLACES. I also enjoyed the LOCAL reference to HARVARD ("University of Cambridge"), and, who doesn't love a reference to Bob ROSS? GRIM, PATSY, and PTOLEMY are strong fill. I didn't love OVERT for "Plain" but it certainly doesn't spell disaster for this fine puzzle. Bravo.

~Frannie.