Sunday, August 13, 2017

My time: 45:18.  It's unusual that I finish two Sundays in a row!

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I loved this magic trick rebus theme.  An answer which should be Peking becomes PEACE with the added clue CHANGING CARD (king to ace).  Similarly, the word co-insure becomes SURE with VANISHING COIN being the rule.  One answer is SAWING A LADY IN HALF, so later in the puzzle, two Across answers on the same row ELLA and DYS show that the word is indeed in half.  And the answer LINKING RINGS shows us that two crossed answers, ST[RING]BEAN and SY[RING]E, indeed link at the square sharing ring.  Extremely clever.

"Feudal vassal" yields LIEGE, although I am more familiar with it in the sense of its opposite, a feudal lord.  I don't think of it as a contronym.

Kudos for AM I being "Is that true about me?" rather than yet another French friend.

There is a musical based on Fellini's movie 8 1/2, called... Nine?  Written by the award-festooned Maury Yeston, its plot concerns film director Guido Contini, who is dreading his imminent 40th birthday and facing a midlife crisis, which is blocking his creative impulses and entangling him in a web of romantic difficulties in early-1960s Venice.

The magic trick theme wormed its way into my brain, because I couldn't put together "Escape maker" as anything but a Houdini-like reference until the fill made FORD clear.

Something I have never heard of: a TRIOLET.  Is it called that because the first line repeats three times?  I don't know!

EERO Saarinen and Carl ORFF should get crossword mention royalties.

The OTOE were a nomadic tribe that lived around the Missouri River.  I think the sentence from their Wikipedia article "They struggled to adapt to reservation life" is pretty much the purest example of understatement meeting white privilege as you're likely to find.

Lesley STAHL has been a "60 Minutes" reporter since 1991.

From 1978 to 1997, the CableACE AWARD was given out as a counterpart to the Emmy Awards.  In April 1998, National Cable Television Association members voted to end the ceremony as cable programming began to meet parity, and eventually to the present day, overtake broadcast competition within the categories of the Primetime Emmys.

I like to think I know some exotic animal names, but I've never heard of the TITI, a South American monkey with a very long, furry, non-prehensile tail.

"Name on some boxes of film" is AGFA, which refers to Agfa-Gevaert, a Belgian-German multinational concern that produces analog and digital imaging and systems.

Timothy DOLAN is the tenth Archbishop of New York.  Why don't we sweep all these nasty people off the streets and deport them to Theocratia, where they belong?

"Furs from rabbits" is CONIES.

Being pretty far away from a Mormon, I have no desire to acquaint myself with their sacred text.  Apparently one of the books is called ENOS.  Yes, but in which book does Jesus come to America and chill with the Sioux while driving a bitchin' Camaro?

This took a VARY long time.  This is the sort of thing that CHASTENS an inflated ego.