Theme: Clue! (or in my case, Blockhead!). Fun and Games!
17A *Vessel with heavy armor: BATTLESHIP
30A *Rodent catcher: MOUSETRAP
47A *Military campaign: OPERATION
24D *Professional pursuits: CAREERS
26D *Shakespeare play that inspired a Verdi opera: OTHELLO
and the reveal
64A What the answers to starred clues are: BOARD GAMES
Top of the morning to you. Steve here with MaryEllen's foray into the world of squabbling kids. I liked the theme, the longer downs and some nice fill, both across and down. While I was solving I got the feeling there were a lot of abbreviations in the 3- and 4-letter answers, but when I looked it all over at the end it didn't seem to be the case, so no complaints. I hit a couple of humps along the way, but that's what Wednesday's all about, right?
Let's take a look at everything else:
Across:
1 Small thicket: COPSE. I'd be hard-pressed to tell a copse from a thicket. If you told me a thicket was a small copse I wouldn't argue. Throw in a coppice and a spinney and it's woodland confusion.
6 Dry cleaner’s target: SPOT
10 Simple rhyme scheme: A-B-A-B
14 Like many who tweet: AVIAN. TEENS was my first thought here, but I resisted. I have a pair of sparrows nesting in the street sign outside my front door, those guys get up early and don't hold back with the vocals.
15 John’s love: YOKO. Their ballad popped up on my iPod yesterday.
16 “Compliments guaranteed” corn syrup: KARO
19 “Take __ from me!”: A TIP. Your server would say "thank you very much, 20% should do it".
20 Foxy: SLY
21 Without pretense: ARTLESS. I realized I didn't know the true definition of this word. I'd always thought of it as meaning "without class" or something along those lines. Learning moment.
23 Suffix with malt: OSE
24 Algonquian language: CREE
25 Bridge over the Arno, e.g.: PONTE The Ponte Vecchio is the best-known bridge in Florence, but there are plenty more.
27 61-Down prison: GULAG
34 Having a steeple: SPIRED. This is Salisbury Cathedral in England - a beautiful example of a medieval spire. It was built in the 1300's and is more than 400 feet tall - the tallest in the UK.
36 __ Cucamonga, California: RANCHO
37 Trident part: TINE. One of the three prongs. I wonder why the bident and the quatrodent never caught on?
38 Evoking the past: RETRO
40 Continental capital: EURO. "Capital" in the sense of "currency" here.
43 Ranking angel: SERAPH. I find it odd that there's a pecking order of angels. I get that Gabriel has got bragging rights being the Annunciator, but once you've got your wings shouldn't you all be on equal clouds?
45 Protruded: BULGED
50 Snow coasters: SLEDS
51 Versifier’s art: POESY. Thank you, crosses. New word for me today, I'll need to see it at least five more times before I finally can remember it.
52 Varied mixture: OLIO. I've seen this one five times, so now I remember it (and C.C. taught me the difference between this and OLEO when I first started out here!)
54 “The Fox and the Hound” fox: TOD. The old English "todde" means fox. I met someone called Todd Fox once, which seemed a little unfair.
55 Very hot and dry: SAHARAN. This took me a little while because I had a "C" where the "H" should be. See 57D for explanation of muddled thinking on my part.
59 Big bird: EMU
62 Megastar: IDOL
66 Ad writer’s award: CLIO. Check out the Wikipedia description of the 1991 ceremony "The Most Bizarre Event in Advertising History" if you'd like a chuckle today.
67 Actress Petty: LORI. Thank you, crosses.
68 Military divisions: UNITS
69 Get rid of, in a way: SELL
70 Omar of “House”: EPPS. This is another "I've seen it five times so now I remember it" entry for me.
71 Peeling device: PARER. And a paring device is a peeler.
Down:
1 Fare dealers?: CABS. Nice.
2 Like Humpty Dumpty: OVAL
3 “No beast so fierce but knows some touch of __”: “King Richard III”: PITY. Two Bard references today.
4 Emulated Humpty Dumpty: SAT. Two eggman references also. I learned somewhere that Humpty Dumpty was a siege engine deployed to scale the walls of the defenders' castle during the English Civil War in the 1640's.
5 Swell: ENLARGE
6 Part of DOS: SYSTEM. The Disk Operating System is the foundation of Microsoft's fortunes. Bill Gates wrote MS-DOS which ran the IBM Personal Computer, and all PC-compatibles thereafter.
7 “Jem” sci-fi author Frederik: POHL. Thank you, crosses.
8 Migrant on the Mother Road: OKIE
9 First-rate: TOPS
10 APB letters: AKA. Because it was quicker than saying "All Points Bulletin - be on the lookout for Alphonse Capone, AKA Scarface Al". You just say "APB BOLO ....
11 Southern capital with a French name: BATON ROUGE. Red Stick. The red stick was a tree on the banks of the Mississippi festooned with dead animals marking the boundary between two tribal hunting grounds.
12 Record label owned by Sony: ARISTA
13 Crook carrier of rhyme: BO PEEP. Not a police car.
18 Present, Cockney-style: 'ERE. Orl present an' correct, sah!
22 Design detail, briefly: SPEC
27 Clock std.: GST. Greenwich Sidereal Time. You can stand astride the zero meridian line with one foot in each hemisphere at Greenwich (pronounced Grennitch) Observatory in London.
28 News org.: UPI United Press International.
29 Flax product used in paint: LINSEED OIL
31 Gardener’s brand: ORTHO
32 Old Mideast gp.: UAR. The short-lived United Arab Republic comprising Egypt and Syria.
33 Condescending one: SNOB
35 “Oh, fudge!”: DRAT
39 Prefix with center: EPI. We had a little earthquake yesterday morning in LA - a mild 2.5 with the epicenter close to the airport and my office.
41 Color in a Crayola eight-pack: RED
42 Has too much, for short: OD's
44 Light beams: RAYS. Weird stuff, light. In physics terms, it exhibits the behavior of both a wave and particle depending on how you observe it, and it seems to know that you're looking at it and changes its behavior just to mess with your head.
46 Consuming entirely: USING UP
47 Eye doctor’s science: OPTICS
48 Curly-haired dog: POODLE
49 Chuck of “The Delta Force”: NORRIS. "Death once had a near-Chuck Norris experience". One of the many Chuck Norris sayings.
53 Youngster: LAD
56 Not all thumbs: ABLE
57 Cager’s target: HOOP. I forgot the "cager" slang for a basketball player, and instead went off at a barking mad tangent and filled in the missing letter with "C". I decided that the cager was a person who needed to lock up a bunch of chickens, and therefore his target was the coop. Didn't exactly make SACARAN easy.
58 50-and-up group: AARP. This is no longer an abbreviation, it's the official name for the organization and therefore no cluing issue with cluing "group" rather than "gp."
59 Arabian chieftain: EMIR
60 Dole (out): METE
61 Cold War inits.: USSR. Our old friends the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, and another clue-pair with GULAG. (Side question to our constructor experts - could you use "CCCP" as an answer to this clue, or is that cheating because the the letters are actually Cyrillic rather than Roman?)
63 Texter’s chuckle: LOL. Isn't laughing out loud more than a chuckle?
65 Gasteyer of “SNL”: ANA
I think that wraps it up. Have a great day and see you all next time.
Steve
