Wednesday, December 6, 2017

My time:  13:49.

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The mischievous mind of Clive Probert made this monstrously unmerciful marvel.  Every clue starts with M and every answer has an M in it.  That's mighty M-pressive.

I have heard, but couldn't come up with, EMMA's last name in EMMA: Woodhouse.

"Member of the ancient Ionian League" is SAMOS.  The Ionian League was a dodecapolis, or group of twelve cities, that banded together after the Meliac War.

EDOM, which means "red," was an ancient region in what is now Israel and Jordan.  In the Bible, it was said to have been founded by Esau.  It was bordered to the north by Judah and Moab, which was later used as a washbasin, while Edom got a sandal thrown on it.

I felt far from sure that TAMA Janowitz is famous enough to be a clue in the New York Times puzzle, let alone her memoir Scream: A Memoir of Glamour and Dysfunction.  Apparently she is one of the three "brat pack" authors, along with Bret Easton Ellis and Jay McInerney.

For "Mount Olympus is its highest peak" I had a brain blip and put *MONS, as in Olympus Mons.  It's MARS, of course.

The name of Shakespeare's midwife to the fairies eluded me.  It's been many decades since Shakespeare class.  It's MAB, referred to as such in "Romeo and Juliet," though she is also called Queen Mab.

In math, MODULES are... well, take it away, Wiki: they're "fundamental algebraic structures used in abstract algebra. A module over a ring is a generalization of the notion of vector space over a field, wherein the corresponding scalars are the elements of an arbitrary given ring (with identity) and a multiplication (on the left and/or on the right) is defined between elements of the ring and elements of the module."  So are modules sets?  I once read a book about fundamental mathematics that mentioned rings.  I don't know jack about math.

For "modern communications" I wanted to put *MMS as in Multimedia Messaging Service, but it's IMS, as in Instant Messages.

"Microwave brand" is AMANA, which I'd forgotten about since it appeared on October 12.

My, what a clever quiz this was.  It was SUM fun, too!

Clever clues: "Minute length" is ANGSTROM.