My time: 9:17, six minutes faster than average.
Theme: TOUCH-TONE PHONES, "products since the 1960s... on which you can see five 'key' things depicted in this puzzle." The five key things are the number keys on a touch-tone phone, which, as a holdover from the old days, still contain alphabetic strings on them. The five themed Down clues each contain a number, while their intersecting Across clues contain the three-letter string found on that number.
So, for example, on a phone, over the 2 is ABC. The Down clue, "bisected," means IN 2. The Across clue "stage a coup" is therefore not to be read as gr2 control, which makes no sense, but GR[AB C]ONTROL.
The first one I got was the band that did "Mama Told me (Not To Come)" (that ain't no way to have fun, no!), which is 3 DOG NIGHT. Because a 3 on a phone has D-E-F above it, the crossing clue must have the string def in it. "Let the air out of" is therefore [DEF]LATE. The themed clue that confirmed I was on the right track was "classic checker-dropping game" CONNECT 4. Above the 4 on a phone are the letters G-H-I, so Mongol ruler in question is obviously GEN[GHI]S.
Now let's DELVE into the fill.
I don't know NORA Lum, aka actress-comedian Awkwafina, though I've heard of her stage name. She has a rap song called "My Vag." Those wacky millennials and their comfort with expressing themselves sexually!
Don't know anything about musicals. Funny Girl, a William Wyler musical film, apparently has a song called "SADIE, Sadie," about how SADIE is married now. "I'm Sadie, Sadie, married lady / Still in bed at noon / Racking my brain deciding / Between orange juice and prune." Ha ha! Classic.
Emma Stone plays a character in La La Land called MIA. She works in a coffee shop, wants to be in a movie, and wrote a one-act play.
I put SUMO instantly for "sport in which rikishi wear mawashi," because, you know, Japanese words. Rikishi, the term for the athletes, came up on November 16, 2018. Mawashi is, of course, the belt or loincloth that they wear. I hope mawashes it pretty regularly.
KLEE has come up several times in the puzzle, for his paintings Fish Magic, Cat and Bird, and The Goldfish. Today it's for Twittering Machine, a 1922 watercolor depicting what appear to be clockwork birds.
"Cooped up like pigs" is STIED. Does anyone say that?
EELS' blood is toxic to humans? Surely we can monetize this somehow.
Not being a Potterhead, I didn't recall that Harry Potter had an Aunt MARGE, but it was an easy enough name to guess.
I didn't know basketball great was on a team called the 6ERS. I didn't know there was a team called the 6ERS. It turns out to be the Philadelphia 76ers. Their friends call them the Sixers.
Emmy-winning and Oscar-nominated actress ALFRE Woodard came up on October 8, 2017.
Clever clues: "Pick a spread, say" is BET. "Course objective" is PAR — golf, not school. "Like rails and stilts" is AVIAN.
This was a clever puzzle, but not too challenging. The main worry I had was whether you were supposed to spell out the number, write the digit, or put the letter string in the rebus squares. As it turned out, I was doing it right. I WON!
No comments:
Post a Comment