Theme: Fun with Fauna, or Fauna-cation
The eight theme answers dotted throughout today's puzzle pair an animal with a noun to come up with a well-known word or phrase.
18A. Animal's paw warmer? : FOXGLOVE. We used to put foxgloves on our fingers as kids and pretend we had purple and green talons.
29A. Animal's hiking gear? : RAT PACK. Was there a rat pack before Sinatra and his cronies? Is "pack" the collective noun for a number of rats? How many more questions can I ask about one clue?
30A. Animal's laundry? : HOGWASH. Hopefully not all of my blog today. Doubtless some of it.
44A. Animal's golf club? : PIG IRON. His partner Fido uses a DOG WOOD.
47A. Animal's undergarment? : COWSLIP. Immediate mental image of the hippos in tutus in Disney's "Fantasia"
54A. Animal's apartment? : MOUSE PAD. The feline who lives in the apartment underneath gets in a CAT FLAP when there's too much noise upstairs.
3D. Animal's timepiece? : DOG WATCH. If you stand the Dog Watch during summer's Dog Days, can you be double-dog dared?
36D. Animal's instrument? : BULLHORN. Bullhorns always seem to crackle, but maybe that's just when someone is quoting cliches through them.
Hi all - Steve here with a fortuitous outing on the day the blog came back from Google's Slough of Despond where it was banished for reasons still unclear. C.C. has been dealing with the bureaucracy that is the Blogger Police Department and deserves a medal and a huge round of applause from everyone for doggedly pursuing justice, freedom and liberty for her blog.
I liked the theme today with eight clues both across and down. Some of the fill was a little scrappy but I'm getting the feeling that's the trade-off you make when you have so many theme answers in a 15x15, but I'm totally out of my depth analyzing puzzle construction and I'll leave that to the experts.
Let's check out the rest:
Across:
1. Exemplar of cruelty : SADIST. The Marquis De Sade's castle is now owned by Pierre Cardin (along with many of the other properties in the village).
7. Approach furtively, with "to" : SIDLE UP
14. Split and united? : ELOPED. Great clue, loved this.
15. 2001 Disney film subtitled "The Lost Empire" : ATLANTIS.
17. Pioneer transports : WAGONS.
19. Boston-to-Providence dir. : SSW I need to brush up on my geography. I pretty well always have to wait for crosses to get these right.
20. Strauss's "__ Rosenkavalier" : DER
21. Neighbor of Ger. : POL. I had "HOL" first and was going to pick nits about Holland not being a country, but then I found out I was wrong. The nits remain unpicked for now.
22. Subject of a China/India/Pakistan territorial dispute : KASHMIR.
26. Tokyo airport : NARITA. My only visits to Japan have been to Narita to change planes. Some day I'll get to stop for longer.
31. Put in a zoo, say : ENCAGE
32. Tippy transport : CANOE. Nice play on Tippecanoe.
33. Suffix like "like" : ISH
34. Sets the pace : LEADS
36. Marcel Marceau character : BIP. M. Marceau is responsible for us all being subjected to watching our friends attempt "man walking against wind" or "man in glass box", always badly.
39. Indian spice : CURRY. Nit Pick alert: "Curry" is a blend of spices.
41. Assistant professor's goal : TENURE.
48. Like some bagels : ONION-Y. My bagels are "everything-y".
49. Undoes, as laws : REPEALS
50. Heart lines: Abbr. : ECG. Electrocardiogram. I thought the "electro" bit was because the monitoring device is electrically-powered, but in fact it measures the electrical activity of the heart muscles.
51. Brief life story? : BIO
52. HEW successor : HHS. I had NO idea about this one. I was trying to think of presidents and eventually the crosses filled it in for me. I went to look it up here.
58. Melodic : ARIOSE. The "R" here was my last letter to complete. I was torn between "RNA" and "DNA" for the down clue, and decided that "ADIOSE" just didn't smell right. WAG'd the R and - Yay!
61. Wet ink concern : SMEARING. When we had to write in pen and ink at school this was truly traumatic. One smear and you start all over again. No UNDO in 1865.
62. Night noises : SNORES. Guilty as charged.
63. One on the lam : ESCAPEE
64. Hot spots : SAUNAS
Down
1. Stitches : SEWS
2. The Palins, e.g. : ALASKANS. My British brain knee-jerked Michael Palin (ex Monty Python) and wondered what his family had done for crossword-recognition.
4. Wall St. debut : I.P.O. Initial Public Offering of part of a company's equity. It used to be done to raise capital for investment, in recent years it's become more of a "cash in your chips" event for the early investors.
5. Obama, before he was pres. : SEN. I was trying to fit "not stressed out".
6. NFL stats : TD'S. Plenty of these in the Conference Championship games on Sunday; let's hope the Superbowl delivers more of the same.
7. More secure : SAFER
8. "Do __ else!" : IT OR. "Please" would be nice.
9. CCLXXX x II : DLX
10. Trail : LAG
11. Lab blowup: Abbr. : ENL. Not the chemistry lab, but a photo enlargement. "Doc" Rees, High School chemistry teacher, bored with tossing little chips of sodium in a beaker of water and watching them catch fire and zip around, went one step beyond on the last day of term and tossed a sizable lump of caesium into the school swimming pool and was lucky not to set fire to us all. Happy Days.
12. Paradise : UTOPIA
13. Turns on one foot : PIVOTS
16. Psalm instruction : SELAH. I'd only ever come across this in the letters of Hunter S. Thompson, it was one of his favorite sign-off lines.
20. Cartoonist Browne : DIK. I had DAN first, it sounded familiar, then it was ohhhh - no, wait.
23. Health resort : SPA
24. Crone : HAG. "When shall we three meet again?"
25. Neil __, Defense secretary under Eisenhower : MCELROY. Toss-up between this and MCILROY. I guess I've been watching a lot of golf and Rory M. over the last few months.
26. Continuous : NONSTOP. I love nonstop flights, but I'm glad that the pilot decides to break the rules and make one stop.
27. Past : AGO
28. "The American Scholar" essayist's monogram : RWE. One of Emerson's most famous essays. Apparently. (I plead ignorance, I tried to read "Walden" a number of times and eventually realized that it was going to join "Finnegans Wake"on my shelf of the "will never get past page 20" books.
29. Portuguese king : REI.
30. Swindled : HAD. This is an odd word - I've only heard it in the past tense, and passive at that - "I've been had!"
32. Low islet : CAY
35. Coastal flier : ERN
37. It surrounds the Isle of Man : IRISH SEA. The Isle of Man has no speed limits and hosts a week of motorcycle racing each year on a twisting street circuit around the island. When the racing is finished, the circuit is opened to anyone with a motorcycle and a death wish on a day known as "Suicide Sunday". And yes, people die. Every year.
38. Vigor : PEP
39. Gp. in a 1955 labor merger : C.I.O. Now the AFL/CIO
40. Coffee holder : URN
42. Ram's mate : EWE
43. Ultra-secretive org. : N.S.A. The National Security Agency.
44. Burns bread and butter? : POEMS. Favorite clue of the day. Robert Burns wrote the words to "Auld Lang Syne", mangled by all who sing it today.
45. Tips may be part of it : INCOME. And you must declare these in box something on your tax returns. You promise you will, right?
46. Lively Baroque dances : GIGUES
47. Corp. head honcho : C.E.O.
49. Fingerprint feature : RIDGE. The ridges make up whorls and loops. I don't know anywhere else you find a whorl.
51. Ruination : BANE
53. Cong. meeting : SESS. Congo? Conga? Conger? Ohhhh - Congress - in Session! Gotcha.
55. Anatomical bag : SAC
56. Victorian, for one : ERA
57. Die dot : PIP
58. Donkey : ASS
59. Biological messenger : RNA. Always torn between this and DNA as I mentioned earlier.
60. Debtor's marker : IOU. They don't take these in Vegas, at least not from me. Cash only.
That's it! Have a great day everyone, and Welcome Back Blog! Huzzah!
Steve
Notes from C.C.:
1) So Google (owner of Blogger)
wrongly thought we're a spam blog and locked us from Saturday night
until early Tuesday night. Here is their answer this morning:
"I wish that it was possible to identify specific characteristics of a
given blog, that make it more or less susceptible to spurious spam
classification. Unfortunately, that will never be possible. Fuzzy spam
classification cannot be described, with any certainty, in words. Sorry."
2) In case you missed our puzzle discussions on my Ginger Roots blog, please click here for Sunday post, here for Monday post and here for Tuesday.
3)
Captcha will be used in blog Comments section from now on. I know it's
hard to recognize those damn letters, but it's a safe measure we need to
take. Here are a few tips:
- Please always save your comments in a Word document or in an email draft. In case you lose your comments to the blog black hole, you can always copy and paste.
- Argyle discovered that you don't need Captcha to Preview. Captca is involved only when you try to hit the "Publish Your Comment" button.
- It might take a few tries to get an easy-to-read Captcha. So please be patient. Other bloggers/posters have been using Captcha for a long time. We sure can take up the challenge and overcome this obstacle. This will be a learning experience for all of us.
Thanks again to
Husker Gary for taking the time to inform all the regulars in his
mailing list about our glitch & move of the blog. Contact him gschlapfer@gmail.com if you want to be included in his list.
Thanks also to TTP for giving me & Argyle detailed explanations about some technical issue. We learned a lot from him.
And to our long-time readers, Thank you so much for your loyalty and support.
