Sunday, April 16, 2017

Sunday, April 16, 2017, Timothy Polin


Today's theme features characters and their horses. I only knew a couple of these for sure - everybody knows the LONERANGER and Silver, and TONTO and Scout and ROYROGERS and Trigger were at least familiar once I got them - but you could have waterboarded me for weeks and I never would have come up with Diablo, Tornado, or Buttermilk. Overall, this seemed more like a history lesson than an engaging theme, but perhaps others were more RAPT by it.

The fill had a few gems, like 62D: Top secret? (WIG), 78D: Repeated part of a five-mile hike? (LONGI) (Again, they got me!), and I like the way of cluing STEM (101A: Check). 41D: Pea nut? (MENDEL) was cute, and they're pounding 102D: Vernacular (PATOIS) this week. My favorite, though, might have been 37D: Is Greek? (IOTAS). Tricky!

But for the most part, the fill didn't wow me, and sometimes it even annoyed me. ALLO (64A: French greeting), for instance, just seems so weak. It's not actually a word in French... but I guess neither is NAH a word in English... and 96A: Brownie, e.g. (GIRLSCOUT) - Sure, I guess that Brownies are run by the same organization as GIRLSCOUTs, but Brownies are Brownies and Girl Scouts are Girl Scouts. I can't think of a hymn that begins OGOD (but then, that doesn't mean much), and I've never seen GRANPA (16D: White-bearded sort) spelled like that... And what about 72A: Third word of many limericks (WAS)? That's a good clue? Who knows. Maybe I'm just SOUR. Perhaps I should end with a limerick that doesn't use WAS as the third word:

On the chest of a barmaid at Yale
Were tattooed the prices of ALE
And on her behind
For the sake of the blind
Was the same information in Braille.

- Horace


  1. Well, there's "O God our help in ages past" which leapt to mind immediately. There are some other good clues, like 30D: Cuts on the back? (BSIDES) - took a long time to see. And I don't know why I couldn't get 56D: It may leave you in stitches (SURGERY). Even after filling it in (my last answer) I wanted to read it as "sugary".

    I can see why the fill in here suffered some, due to the piling of long theme answers on top of each other, often with a third long answer adjacent. It didn't bother me as much as you.

    A flea and a fly in a flue
    Were imprisoned, so what could they do?
    Said the fly, "Let us flee!"
    "Let us fly!" said the flea.
    So they flew through a flaw in the flue.
    --O. Nash

  2. 25:33
    This was a pretty fun theme. Unfortunately I had the same problem as Horace and only knew two of the answers off the top, so I filled those in but still had to work for the rest of them, which were before my time.
    Thanks for the great limerick!

  3. 43:38
    Good old Ogden (thanks Colum). Since I knew almost all of the horse/person pairings, and this puzzle timed out right where I like it, I'll give it a thumbs up. I, like Horace, did not enjoy GRANPA. RIODIABLO slowed me down a bit in the west (RIOgrAnde fits there, too), and I entered mormoN instead of UTAHAN in the south, but nothing was too bad. ASS.

  4. It was a good puzzle, but what is 44A ela king?

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  6. - spelled peals wrong doh. A la king