Theme: C.C.C.W.~!
Words: 72 (missing J,Q,V,X,Z)
Blocks: 31
First things first - I wanted to say thank you for all the Birthday
comments on Thursday - I had the time to review them because I was
buried under 8" of snow - I always get snow on my Birthday~! And I have an answer to a question from one of the
comments at 5d today. Anyway, on to today's puzzle - another from our
gracious host, C.C., and for the second week in a row, a pretty easy one
for me. I did not get my "ta-DA~!" because of one crossing, but I
found it without having to cheat. Odd looking grid with two black
corners, leaving us with triple 10s in the Across, and almost triple 9s
in the Down;
1. Bar line : "WHAT'S ON TAP~?" - because "What's your sign~?" didn't fit
12. Poker telecast equipment : POCKET CAM - none of these at our table
32. They're high on the Scoville scale : HABANEROS - nailed it. The pungency 'hotness' scale of chilis
63. "That'll never work!" : "ROTTEN IDEA~!"
oh, it'll work alright....
lONleyWARD~
ACROSS:
11. They're sometimes black : OPerationS
14. Question at an alumni gathering : "REMEMBER ME~?"
15. Word with leg or elbow : ROOM - planes and trains
17. "Looking at all sides ... " : "IN FAIRNESS..."
18. Real estate unit : ACRE
19. Tijuana addr. : SRA
20. Nada : Nogales :: __ : Reims : RIEN - some alliteration, too
21. Phone user : TALKER - oops, not CALLer
23. County in Ulster : TYRONE
in the middle of the yellow
25. Some broken pegs, or where they're found : TEES - clever; I had no clue to start with
27. Multi-purpose shortening : ETC.
28. Cooler tenant : CON - cooler as in jail, the clink, ETC. - although ICE was a good thought; straight clecho with 31. Cooler tenant : THIEF
29. Crew tools : OARS - got it
30. 4-Down in France : THE - circumreferential with; 4. 30-Across in America : TEA
34. Pot addition : ANTE - two weeks in a row I'm in the black at the poker table~! I pulled four 6's in one hand - and nothing wild
35. Patriot target : SCUD
36. Went berserk : HAD A FIT - oops, I filled in HAD AT IT
38. Sushi bar appetizer : EDAMAME
40. "... crafty seer, with __ wand": Pope : EBON
41. "__ Yankees" : DAMN - such language~!
43. Feet in a meter? : IAMBS - I tried BEATS
44. Title of respect, in Tokyo : SAN - ah, yes, Daniel-san
45. Bug zappers? : SERA - the stomach and flu kind of bugs
46. Ed. basics : RRR - the three "R"s; reading, (w)riting, 'rithmetic
47. "Major Crimes" network : TNT
48. Green Smoke product : eCIG - I think I'll get one with the money from my B-day; the new car stinks of cigar with the windows closed in the winter
49. Misbehaves : ACTS UP
53. Take back : RECALL - here's my mistake; I had recaNT, which messed up my SW
55. Mark for good : ETCH
57. Old televangelism letters : PTL
58. Second-largest Middle East country : IRAN - behind Saudi Arabia, but I was surprised to see Yemen at #3 - I guess Turkey is not considered part of the area
59. Wipe out : ANNIHILATE
62. Scrapple ingredient : PORK
64. Waves home : SEA - and another pure clecho with; 24. Waves home : OCEAN
65. Cell notice : EMAIL ALERT - my first thought, but I hesitated
DOWN:
1. Slap spot : WRIST
2. Edsel's father : HENRY - Ford Motor Company men
3. "Making AIDS History" org. : amfAR - american foundation for AIDS Research
5. Brand in many a Moscow mule : SMIRNOFF - I got it, but I didn't know why - turns out, it's a drink
Hey - Wilber Charles, that's "Sloth", from Bill W., St 6, 12 & 12~!
6. "The Barefoot Contessa" Oscar winner Edmond : O'BRIEN
7. Island goose : NENE - official bird of the state of Hawaii
8. 1776 battleground : TRENTON - got it from half perps
9. Morning hrs. : AMs - my AM yesterday was not a good one - my 'private' road did not get plowed, and I could not get to UPS.
10. Bugged : PESTERED
11. Like some wills : ORAL
16. Car in a King title : MERCEDES - Ah, this book, from Stephen King. I thought it was a reference to "Lord Won't You Buy Me", but that's Joplin
22. Biblical beast : ASS
26. All gone : EATEN
31. Busy Las Vegas area : THE STRIP
33. "Whatever" : "I DON'T CARE."
34. Arcade giant : ATARI - I had two memorable Birthdays - the first one being back in Fifth Grade, when I had just two friends come over - but it snowed as bad that night as it did this year; thought it was canceled, but the moms brought them over in the storm, and we played Atari 2600 all. night. long.
35. Sting : SMART
37. "Well, well!" : "I DECLARE~!"
39. Carrier to Beijing : AIR CHINA - semi-shout out to our host~!
42. Fuchsia cousin : MAGENTA
45. Pommes frites seasoning : SEL - salt
46. Weisz of "The Constant Gardener" : RACHEL - I liked her in "Constantine"
46. Weisz of "The Constant Gardener" : RACHEL - I liked her in "Constantine"
50. Soil mover : SPADE
51. Absolute : UTTER
52. Kilt fold : PLEAT
54. "My Way" lyricist : ANKA
56. Arboreal Amazon monkey : TITI
51. Absolute : UTTER
52. Kilt fold : PLEAT
54. "My Way" lyricist : ANKA
56. Arboreal Amazon monkey : TITI
This is what I did on my Birthday
60. Georges, par exemple : NOM - Frawnche, name
61. Tiny, in a tiny way : LI'L
Splynter
40 comments:
FIRbTD. Final error correction was SaL > SEL, but I'd earlier been slowed down by CHEEK > WRIST, MERCURYS > MERCEDES, HAD AT IT > HAD A FIT, CALLER > TALKER, NUEF > RIEN, and a complete ignorance of how to spell ANNIHILATE!¡
There once was a girl who said, "I DON'T CARE!"
She said it of her dress, said it of her hair!
Her mom near HAD A FIT
And then had to test it:
Would she care about HABANERO Sauce in her underwear?
IN FAIRNESS, if you ask, "REMEMBER ME?"
I'll have to respond disappointingly.
Because if admitted,
I'd be committed
To acknowledge THE ten dollars you're owed by me!
TYRONE was a TALKER, the whole ROOM he PESTERED.
SMIRNOFF and O'BRIEN never got the last word.
If he heard, "WHAT'S ON TAP?"
He'd unreel a full rap!
His buddies all agreed he was an ORAL turd!
An E-MAIL ALERT was a ROTTEN IDEA!
An audible SORE THUMB, not a panacea!
Try being quiet as a THIEF,
The DAMN cell will beep!
Good riddance to that audio diarrhea!
Good morning!
Had trouble getting started up north, so I worked this one from the bottom up. Finished in better-than-normal Saturday time. Only misstep was PAM for the multi-purpose shortening. Don't recall seeing SORE THUMB or ANNIHILATE in a cw before. Thanx, C.C. and Splynter.
I ask DW what she would like to watch on TV and she responds, "I DON'T CARE." It's followed almost immediately by "Not That!" My response: "DAMN!"
Good Morning:
A CC puzzle is always a treat but on a Saturday, it's an extra special one! Had nein before rien (missed on the language) and the first waves home had me thinking baseball, ala CC. The second waves home didn't fool me at all. The cluing was typical CC: lots of misdirections but fair and strong perps. Alas, though, no TADA. After a review for typos and failing to see where I went astray, I turned on the Remove Errors button and saw the culprit: I spelled habanero with two "e"s instead of two "a"s, giving me Sen which looked okay but San looked even better. So, a FIW, but I had fun, anyway.
Thanks, CC, for an enjoyable challenge and thanks, Splynter, for that steady hand on the wheel.
We're facing another storm tomorrow into Monday. Weatherman is predicting 8-12" (as of this morning) and very high winds on Monday. We got about 8" on Thursday and another 3" last night so this new stuff will really bury us. The snow banks on my street are pretty high right now. I guess I'm staying put for awhile.
Jinx, how is Zoe?
Have a great day.
Fun, CC. It appeared daunting at first. I worked it from the bottom up and found it was Thursday level for me. Good review, Splynter.
I had well done scrapple for breakfast. We used to be able to buy it in the supermarket, but now I have to order it at the luncheonette. My pastor dad did not receive a very high salary. With six kids we had a huge vegetable garden and farmer parishioners gifted us with scrapple, sausage, and bushels of fruit. I was very tired of scrapple once a week, but now I get hungry for it.
Cooler tenant twice and wave's home twice were my favorites.
Getting the puzzle easily takes some of the STING out of not getting this:
italics or italics
What did I do wrong?
YR, you did it right. Both italics are in italics.
bold italics
Ooh, you don't see it until you hit publish.
Good morning!
Wasn't surprised to see this was a C.C. puzzle- clever clues, some misdirection and crunch but enough known answers and perps. Just wonderful- thanks C.C.!
Splynter- thanks for being our faithful, dedicated, clever Saturday guide. Hope you've been able to get out from under the snow.
Started out a little rough- I also thought "Bar line" would be What's your sign or some other pick up line :)
AMFAR, OBRIEN and TRENTON were perps. Then I couldn't remember the Stephen King title. Christine wouldn't fit and I knew it was "Mr. something but MERCEDES was a cheat.
Had never heard of the Scoville scale, so HABANEROS was a perp as were TYRONE, SCUD, EDAMAME, EBON, AMFAR and TITI.
IAMBS was a learning moment as poetry has never been my strong suit.
Hiccups were RRR ( wanted an S at the end even though I know the "Three R's" for learning) and had Heist for SMART - thought of bank heist/sting operation ;)
Loved the clever clueing for CON/THIEF, SEA/OCEAN , SERA, TEES and ETC ( was thinking of Crisco shortening)
Have a great day everyone :)
Spitz had a good explanation for AIRCOOLINGSYSTEM in yesterday's puzzle . Think of it as a generic term as there are many different systems used. Examples
Wow, either I am getting really smart or this was an usually easy Saturday puzzle. Usually takes me better part of the morning to hope to finish. Was done in a record 45 minutes with only one error. Had "Iron" will quickly changed to "Oral" with horizontal clues. We just missed the blizzard in upstate NY that hit the city. We usually get hit with lake effect snow but dodged the bullet this time
CC provided us with a challenging Saturday. It's a good thing I don't do puzzles in ink. It was solvable but it required perps and a few wags. Splynter, I liked your tour through the grid, but what part of the picture is MAGENTA (I'm red/green color blind)?
1d and 2d gave me the hooks that I needed to fill in the NW, but it took a while to get there. With the TY I put in RONE without knowing for sure that TYRONE was correct. Tyrone is a town in PA about 20 miles from here.
31d and 32d provided the path for the SW to be filled in and helped stretch into the center of the grid. I remember my grandmother always saying I do DECLARE. All I had to do was drop the DO which gave me the lead-in to the South and SE.
CC gave us the needed anchors to fill in the unknowns. I really liked the two Cooler answers.
My lawyer told me that ORAL wills are like ORAL contracts and aren't worth the paper they are written on.
One hitch that gave me a pause was the King title car. I wanted to put in CHRISTINE but it didn't fit and the perps showed I was wrong. One of the few Steven King books that I read. Sorta scary but not as bad as "Silence of The Lambs" by Thomas Harris.
DO: Your interchange with your DW sounds like my DW when I ask her where she wants to go out to eat. She will never offer a suggestion, but I think she enjoys shooting down all of mine until I get to the one she really wants. That way if the she has a bad meal, it's not her fault. Can't win for losing.
YR: I also grew up eating scrapple. My kids and I love Scrapple, but DW grew up on a farm and said that the ingredients in scrapple are what they threw away when they butchered pigs. She doesn't know what good is.
IM: I hope you come through the next round of snow storms OK. In Central PA I think we will just miss this round. I've had enough winter already.
I hope everyone stays warm and dry.
Good Morning,
Thanks, C.C., for a very enjoyable Saturday romp. I had more trouble with the three letter answers than the longer ones. THE, TEA, PAM, SEA held me up on a couple of passes. Go figure. Nonetheless, I thought I did pretty well for a Saturday before heading out for the grand kids basketball games.
Thanks, Splynter, for another well thought out tour. I think a snow day birthday is great fun. My January birthday allowed for many of those when I was a kid.
Stay cozy, everyone.
Musings
-I went from Bangor to Miami to San Diego and finished with a Natick in Seattle (tyRone/amfaR) that I wagged correctly. What fun!
-C.C.’s clever use of less obvious words (Cooler e.g.) for cluing is always a treat
-Buffalo Wild Wings’ take on hotness
-ROTTEN IDEA – Selling PORK sandwiches in IRAN
-After having 14,000 students, asking me “REMEMBER ME?” is a ROTTEN IDEA
-More LEGROOM for a price
-My, uh, thrifty friend will look a long time for his TEE after his drive
-More LEGROOM for a price
-My Brooklyn Dodger fan father said DAMN Yankees quite often with no thought of Gwen Verdon
-As a sub you take care of the kid who ACTS UP quickly but quietly
-Find out if you are on the massive Takata airbag RECALL list
-I get EMAIL alerts all day now since I have been searching for D.C. info
-How many slaps on the WRIST do inveterate DUI offenders get before they kill someone?
-Try getting ORAL Contract past Judge Judy!
-I’d like these AIR CHINA seats to D.C. next month
Happy belated BD C.C. You beat me today. I couldn't get 1A or 1D. Wanted BEERS ON TAP and CHEEK and had never heard of AMFAR or TYRONE, and even WAGging SRA and perping OBRI_N knowing it would be either O'brien or O'brian, I couldn't finish. But IN FAIRNESS I won't fine you; I'll just give you a slap on the WRIST. THE-TEA- no way I would have ever known that. And to screw it up further I even tried LES for THE not realizing that I had the languages in the wrong place.
The rest was slowly completed with some bad false starts. The PLYMOUTH (Christine) became a MERCEDES, ABSOLUTE deteriorated into SMIRNOFF, the ABCs were the three R's, and IN ANY CASE eventually became 'I DON'T CARE, it's five o'clock somewhere".
On Saturdays I always mark the newspaper with a G for the gimmes. Today the only ones were ANKA, DAMN Yankees, and IRAN. RACHEL Weisz, PORK in Scrapple, E-CIG for Green Smoke. I knew ANNIHILATE but had to let the perps spell it correctly.
Good morning ! Thank you CC and thank you Splynter.
So much misdirection, compounded with some wrong entries really slowed me down. Finally got to the point where I was certain of every answer except the intersection of "County in Ulster" TY-ONE and "Making AIDS History" org. AMFA-. Guessed it might be something like American ? For A Cure, so entered a C.
That makes the result a FIW. 3X longer than yesterday, but am happy I stuck with it to the bitter(sweet) end.
Had to pull Concord for 1776 battleground when I nailed REMEMBER ME a few seconds later.
Had to remove Caroline for King novel car. Oh yeah, it was Christine. Thanks OC4BEACH.
Caller became TALKER. Ice became CON.
In any case before I DON'T CARE at "Whatever" seemed plausible.
For "Mark for good" today, anyone else think of the "Toy Story character ?" clue from yesterday ?
MJ from last night. You're welcome.
Loved SERA for bug zappers. I DECLARE made me think of Foghorn Leghorn.
RECALL - Cuisinart Food Processor Blade RECALL. Saw it on the news On Dec 13th. Checked ours, filled out the form, and still waiting for the replacement blade.
C.C. ... ya got me! D-N-F ... but a nice Rorschach Ink Blot.
Splynter: Good Job on the write-up (as always ...).
Like Big Easy I was done in by the NW ... 1-d, I entered CHEEK and wouldn't come off it.
Fave today, of course, was SMIRNOFF, go figure ...
Hope you all in the "Snowy Weather Areas" are safe and sound.
I'm going to have to put up with a Mid 70's, sunny, beautiful day.
(Life is tough in Florida ... LOL).
Cheers!
Last wills merely spoken (not in writing) are called NUNCUPATIVE wills, not ORAL wills. Those worth the paper they are not written on often were made in foxholes. Or think of the cowboy song "When the Work's All Done This Fall." . . .
Good morning everyone.
Agree with Splynter on relative easiness. No searches were needed. Only erasure was I had caller before TALKER. Finally got IAMBS; we have had it before.
TYRONE was a gimme. We had visited Belfast a long time ago, so our friend there ticked off the 6 Northern counties of Ulster, which I somehow memorized. Antrim and Down are a couple of others.
C.C. great job with the puzzle. I liked the flow or cadence of it.
Thanks, C.C., for a fun workout today. Everything fit together smoothly after the first pass. Guessed SORETHUMB right off the bat and stuck it in, and that helped with the rest. Nicely done!
Splynter, sorry I missed your BD, so have a happy BD weekend. Thanks for your hard work every week.
"Puzzling Thoughts":
Not the ink blot I thought it would be, but I did have a few write-overs: CHEEK > WRIST; RETURN > RECALL; ULTRA > UTTER. WHGS, I put a ? above the intersection of 3D and 23A as the "r" in AMFAR / TYRONE was a WAG.
As always, a clever puzzle from CC and great recap from Splynter. CC got her golf reference with a clever clue in 25a, plus the perfect adjective (DAMN) for her BB reference in the clue "Yankees". (Sorry Tin, but I've never been a Yankees fan)
I also used ESP to get 56d - it basically filled in itself - and I did a quick Wiki lookup to confirm its definition. And since there's a famous lake ... oh, c'mon, you know Moe found a limerick! Hope this wasn't a ROTTEN IDEA!!
The Peruvian man is quite witty,
As he showed when he wrote down this "ditty":
"See those monkeys in trees,
Squatting down from their knees?"
Looks like we're gonna see caca, TITI.
Sorry! 😜
Thank you, C.C. and Splynter! It was an almost daunting challenge.
The southern area filled quite quickly and though I've not heard of the Scoville scale I certainly know HABANEROS. I have one growing in my patio; it's a small plant but flourishes wildly with red hot chiles. This week I took the ones I had in the freezer with some newly picked ones, boiled them to soften, then processed them with a half cup of water to make a concentrate. Later, with my siblings at dinner, I gave them each a jar to use for salsas, etc. It doesn't take much.
Since I'm not a King fan I had to research MERCEDES which I would never have guessed. That broke open the NE and THE confused me. I thought TEA in French was TE. As if French wasn't hard enough for me! I know SEL, NOM and guessed RIEN. But TE or THE?
THYRONE was another lucky guess thinking of THYRONE Power, the glitzy actor of the 30s-40s. Many Irish name their children with county names, Kerry, ETC, so that came to mind.
I also liked the double cons and double waves. Clever. AMFAR perped itself and SMIRNOFF flowed in immediately for some reason.
Good job all around!
Have a peaceful Saturday even if you're snowbound, everyone.
Nice one, C.C! Thanks for the expo, Splynter and belated Happy Birthday.
Some interesting letter progressions and some unknowns made this one a fun challenge.
My family's roots are in Ulster - we're from Monaghan on the border of the Republic and the North (some say the Free State and the Occupied Territories).
Unfair clueing for 4D/30A. "LES" in French is "THE" in English. You need the accent over the e in "THE" to get "TEA" or so I thought.
English tea = French thé. The accent is not shown in an American solve. ie. été is written ete in puzzles. Same with déjà vous - deja vous.
Lucina, the h in thé is silent, like the 3 in Fi3fi.
Hi All!
What Tin said - you got me but good today C.C. Thanks for the workout but I wasn't worthy. @1a/1d I couldn't get past THE STRIP and thought Bar Line had something to do w/ Slot machines... ANTE didn't get me out of a casino state of mind. Having bothERS for 10d didn't help a lick.
Thank you C.C. for a Saturday Stumper whilst I listened to Car Talk & Wait Wait. IN all FAIRNESS, the puzzle is really good for people that know more than I.
Thanks Splynter for the final grid. As I RECALL, ATARI 2600's Pole Position was my fav what was yours?
Of WHAT I got, SORE THUMB was nice, SCUD c/a was outstanding in a Desert Storm sorta-way, and c/a for ETC is fantastic misdirection (pie crust anyone?). The 3-R's was brilliant, er, SMART. [The NE fell nicely for me as did the SW - it was all the other tiny, in a tiny way bits...]
L'IL fail... 5d. How many Y's can I stuff into SKYY?, A's into TAAKA?, Stolichnaya was too much... Hic.
TRENTON wasn't mentioned in School House Rock and Concord filled squares... [check out Ween's version from School House Rocks! for a better sounding version.]
Big Fail... 32d. I read the clue and confused Scoville w/ Mohs. I was thinking Lava Rock... Thankfully, the Cornerites discussed Scrapple on Wed and I learnt PORK - Never heard of scrapple until then and that rescued most of the SW. Thanks Corner!
Anyone know the band DAMN Yankees? . L'IL Sister was probably their best song and that's not say'n much... But it did help fill 41a :-)
Cell notice had nothing to do with the immune-system :-(. I was ANNIHILATEd in that corner :-(
{C+, B, B+, A-}. {LOL! Moe}
HG - My Civic is on the RECALL list. Do I take the time to reduce 0.01% risk to 0.001%?
YR - You nailed it girl! Enjoy playing w/ your HTML codes.
Time to hit the garden. I've got <4 weekends b/f bedding herbs, tomatoes, and peppers.
Cheers, -T
At first, seeing all that white space, I thought I'd not be able to solve this puzzle without many lookups. Well, I do like puzzles with lots of white space (long entries), and I did solve the whole thing without needing outside help. As Misty says, yay me!
oc4beach and desper-otto, my DW does exactly the same thing! I no longer play that game. "You said you don't care. 'Anywhere is fine,' you said. So okay, we're eating here." Of course that just gets her mad at me, but I have learned to just shrug it off. She usually runs out of steam after 5 minutes and cools off. Ten minutes later she'll deny ever having been mad at me, as if all memory of it was erased from her brain.
Gotta run; more later maybe.
Well, I'm always excited when I see a C.C. puzzle, although my first glance at the grid made my heart sink on this one. But I got RIEN and NENE, to my surprise, and that got me started. EDAMAME helped me guess SORE THUMB, and that helped me get IAMBS. The AI helped me get RRR and once I had ACTS UP, I got AIR CHINA, and so on and so on. That's how a great puzzle works, I guess--even if it looks difficult one clue leads to another and eventually it all fills in. Well, not all. I did look up RACHEL and O'BRIEN, but not too much else. So, thank you for a delightful Saturday morning, C.C.!
Splynter, I had no idea what ECIG was until your write-up--thanks for putting that dash in.
Took me forever to get what the CELL was that a tenant occupied. But oddly enough, I thought of a prison cell when I saw CELL notice. Go figure.
Have a great weekend, everybody!
font=color:"magenta" Did everyone get 42 down? /font
I was fiddling around with HTML (see above; obviously with the < > in place,) and it appears we can't use "font" as a tag. Is there another way to change the color of the text? Or are we stuck with black?
North east killed me once I got ROOM for 14 across I was sure 11d was IRON. I even erased the old standby ACRE.
I was surprised 35a caused no problems. As an engineer in the industry I was intimately involved in Scuds and Patriots and even I thought football for the answer not missiles. Oh well...at least the grid wasn't totally white when I gave up !
Not too bad today. ECIG fell out by perps and I didn't even notice it.
Jayce, oc4beach and desper-otto
You are not alone. My problem is in choosing the 'correc' restaurant. She says: 'It's your turn to pick'. I say: "Okay let's go to xyz". Then she says: "any place but THERE."
As far as television shows, it doesn't matter. We have four televisions and I rarely watch any shows on them.
YR & Moe: Playing with HTML.
Blogger is very peculiar about HTML in comments. AFAIK it only allows three: <i>, <b>, and <a>, but not <u> or <s> or anything else.
italic italic bold bold.
The <a> tag can be manipulated a little to give some color, though only blue. Hover your mouse over that ersatz link, and see what else it can do.
The <a> tag must include href to turn blue, but it doesn't have to = anything if you just want the color. >Here< is what an <a> tag acts like without the href. Then, you can include title="tooltip" to add a tooltip pop-up. So far, I haven't found any other attributes that will work.
An extra tip: the italic clos-it tag works best in some fonts if you have a blank space in front of it, to keep letters from overlapping.
A bonus tip: to have <a> show up in your comment, replace the < with <. To write that, I had to replace the ampersand with & .
I was surprised that CC that didn't use apostrophes in the 24d and 64a clues: "waves' home" rather than "waves home". Would have made more grammatical sense.
I really tried to do this one w/o look-ups in honor of C.C. I made pretty good progress--slow but quite steady--until I locked myself into CHEST at 1-D. I was thinking of all those gorillas that slap their chests to mark a victory or just to draw attention. But that screwed up the top for me, locking me out of any chance at a decent Ta-DA! (It did not help that I had finished 1-A with TAB, not TAP.)
Earlier, when I thought I was doing well, I got some of the (to me) trickier ones, like EDAMAME (which I'd never heard of; is it some sort of Japanese Dutch cheese?) and HABANEROS, but it was little ones that held me back. I kept flitting, for instance, between NOM and ROI at 60-D, and I stalled when objecting mentally to IAMBS at 43-A because, while they are a certain type of foot when counting metric beats, they are not synonymous with feet. I was being too scrupulous on that one.
Eventually, after five or six different levels of look-ups I reached the end, I finished, but I did not succeed.
Ol' Man Keith, EDAMAME are soy bean pods, they look like green beans but taste a little different.
d-o and spitz:
Thank you for explaining THE but I know I've seen it TE in a puzzle, either LAT or some other. French is baffling!
Last night I had a lovely, quiet dinner with my siblings at a nice Italian restaurant. Today it was a loud, noisy kids' party at a pizza place. At least six other parties were happening at the same time. Guess which venue I most prefer.
I don't often get a chance to do the Saturday puzzle but I started this one in the evening and it started filling in from the bottom up and voila! I did it. Thanks for the fun C.C. and Splynter.
WEES by this hour. Return before RECALL, Caller before TALKER.
Like BunnyM, I thought of Crisco, and like Irish Miss, I had the E in HABANERO giving Sen not SAN.
Unknowns like TITI filled in with perps.
I knew my French and even my Spanish SRA.
Smiled at Scrapple after recent discussions here.
We Canadians would never say DAMN Yankees!
I had no time to get to Friday until today and still had Sat. Fortunately neither was as hard as the usual weekend.
Unfortunately, I misspelled LUAU and completely punted Miley CYRUS.
And today, btw nice 'get' Splynter on Sloth, I misspelled SMIRNOFs. After 38 years I'm bad on alcohol clues yet chuckle at Tin's posts.
Poetry was great by both Owen and C-Moe. I don't completely get caca TITI. But the haiku was masterful.
I hastily put in ERADICATE and AMBER ALERT in the SE.
I didn't even notice this was a CC. Just that it was doable and clever. We're back to seeing ASS again.
Last night I had a nightmare where I couldn't fill in easy xwords. Go figure.
WC.
Ps. YR. I hope you 'got' my Seinfeld quote. Albeit I was interested in what you were reading.
Pps. Has anyone read Sholen Asch?
I put Act Up before AMFAR only to discover Acts Up later on. I was pretty certain that the latter one was right for sure, so the former joined many starts and stops & crossouts and rewrites, but still I managed to finish this intriguing and challengling puzzle with no red letters, so it's been a good Saturday.
WC: since you don't have an email address listed, I'll reply here. Hope u return back to see the explanation:
On the border of Peru and Bolivia is the location of Lake Titicaca. I was using the "caca" portion to denote what the Titi (monkey) was about to "release" from his behind ...
FIR but the NW was a lucky Natick WAG:
AMFAR/TYRONE/OBRIEN
Thanks to Anonymous for explaining waves' home punctuated correctly.
TEES also mystified me.
Still, glad to finish it right! Thanks and Happy Birthday, CC!
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