Well, Saturday's here, it's been a long busy week and I seem to have tackled today's puzzle with a case of the "meh"s. I didn't find it that hard, there weren't really any "aha" moments, and I didn't find myself staring at a blank corner of the grid waiting for inspiration to come. Basically I felt it fell short of the typical Saturday-puzzle level of difficulty.
That aside, there were plenty of enjoyable clues, especially down in the SW corner, with the terse 57A "Stat" (ASAP), 60A "Acquire by default?" (REPO), 30A "Rolls out the green carpet?" (SODS) and of course 42A "'Schitt's Creek' matriarch" (MOIRA - played by the incomparable Canadian SCTV alum Catherine O'Hara).
I also liked the callback-type clues 4D "Wraps in the Mideast" and 24D "Wrap in South Asia" (PITAS and SARI, respectively). This type of clue pair always tickles me.
The neatest thing for me was a 4-letter square near the bottom of the grid - 'WH' stacked on top of 'PR', or from the Down perspective, 'WP' beside 'HR', two very unusual letter combinations. I thought I must have erred with the Across answers, but no - the first one was inside LOWPH ("Acidic") and the other belonged to MOTHRA ("Godzilla adversary"). That's good cluing!!
Also good cluing is 34A "First full word sung in 'The Alphabet Song'", a very inventive way to clue the word AND. On the flip side, I didn't love BLOCK as a "word with letter or grant". BLOCK GRANT? oo-kay..
That's all from me this week. Wish me luck, bloggerverse. This time next week I'll be rolling into Quebec City, wrapping up a 5-day, 960-km (sorry, that's "600-mile") bike trip from Toronto for Campfire Circle, a local organization that provides the camping experience for kids with cancer or other serious illness.
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