My time: 6:39, two seconds slower than my record! Missed it by [Maxwell Smart voice] that much!
Theme: This one is a bit meta. It features common phrases with the last word of each turned into an adverb, and the clues read as if the adverb is modifying the previous part of the phrase. It helps to imagine a comma in the answer.
For example! "Golden blades that may be tenderly chew'd by equine or bovine beings" is HAY, LOFTILY. That is, it describes hay, but does it in a lofty way, or loftily. It's a play on hayloft.
Second example: "The cat's meow, baby. Dig?" is ALL THAT, JAZZILY. "The cat's meow" is an old-fashioned bit of slang meaning what the Youths of Today would call all that, or something great. And the clue is written in jazz talk, baby. Or jazzily. It's a play on "All That Jazz."
I'm not going to type of the clue that means the last item, but suffice to say the clue is extremely wordy. So the answer is THE LAST, WORDILY.
And so forth. There is no capper or any clue in the puzzle that the theme answers describe how the clues are written. And now, the fill, hopefully not too wordily.
The only girl group I know with three letters is TLC. Apparently they had a #1 album in 1999 called FanMail. I'm not a fan, and didn't send mail.
Since the Parisian food market LES Halles was demolished in 1971, perhaps this is a terrible choice from among the infinite ways to clue LES?
I also don't think the clue "four-star" for RAVE really works. RAVE is either a noun or verb; "four-star," with hyphen, is an adjective. I don't think they're interchangeable in sentences. You'd have to add review to "four-star" to get a RAVE.
"What crystal jellies do when disturbed" is GLOW. I've never heard of crystal jellies! It can expand its mouth when feeding to swallow jellies more than half its size. When disturbed, it gives off a green-blue glow because of more than 100 tiny, light-producing organs surrounding its outer bell.
We all know AOL, but I musta forgot about NETZERO, even though I'm sure I tinkered with pretty much everything from the late '90s. It's still around!
ILENE Chaiken is a TV producer most famous for "The L Word" and "The Handmaid's Tale."
Speaking of people being old, I wonder if the youths solving the puzzle were baffled by the concept of an EJECT button on a "tape recorder" (whatever the hell that is).
I wrote that a female kangaroo is called a DOE on December 19, 2020, but I forgot.
I did remember that a Hawaiian shirt can be called an ALOHA shirt, from July 12, 2018, however.
I forgot author Donna TARTT's name again, even though it came up on November 28, 2020.
Clever clue: "Passing comment?" is AYE. "90s, say" is A AVERAGE. "Follower of pigs or cows" is E-I-E-I-O. "Common congestion points" is NOSES — this is doubly devious, as my first instict was to put *NODES.
This was one of my best times, surprisingly! I think this is a puzzle that's going to irritate or rankle many a solver today because of the unusual theme. But me, I enjoyed it. I'm the prime audience for these kinds of wordplay shenanigans.
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