Wednesday, December 23, 2020

Wednesday, December 23, 2020, Juliana Tringali Golden

An early Christmas (or a late Hanukkah) present - a Wednesday rebus! And one that, like Winter can, contains periods of rain, wind, ice, and sun. Let's dive right in, shall we?

Lawless figure with legendary fighting skills (Great clue)

Starting things off with a mint JULEP is never a bad idea. I hadn't actually had one of these until late in life when I started attending a yearly Kentucky Derby party at a friend's house. When we arrived, we were handed a beautiful, pewter vessel with a sprig of fresh mint sticking out of sweetened Kentucky bourbon. What's not to like? One might even go so far as to compare it to SL[ICE]DBREAD!

And immediately following (HEREON) that, we run into a lovely KAFKA quote: "I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us." You know, when asked recently what I would be reading over the winter holiday, I replied that I had received the complete stories of Kafka earlier in the year, and that I would be reading more of that. Well! I might as well have said I'd be reading FAUST in the original for all the sighing and the "What about something a little lighter?" that I got back. If you ask me, KAFKA is a comic genius. I have never read anything like it. He's just so ... I don't know ... different!

Anywho, let's move on. Remember sitting in a RECLINER in a movie theater, eating popcorn? Or going to the HOTELBAR at the A.C.P.T.? Sigh. I hope that can happen again in 2021 ... maybe in the fall?

I thought all the rebus entries were good. The top two were fairly straightforward, but when I got to "53D: Scary cry on a beach" - even though I knew it had to have a rebus in that circle, I was still very tempted to enter "shark" and try to somehow justify the single H. As it turned out, T[SUN]AMI is much better, and TEARA[SUN]DER (Rend) is also strong. Some reviewers like it when a rebus is broken across two words (unlike in both of these examples), but I have never been the least bit bothered by thinking about that, and I believe it to be a non-issue. The symmetry of rebus answers, on the other hand, can really give away too much, but here, on a Wednesday, where we already have the circles, well, I don't see that as a problem either.

This is running long, but I did want to mention that the last rebus (C[ICE]RO / SL[ICE]DBREAD) took me the longest time to get! I was EVERSO stuck on the "Wonder-ful product" being "white bread," and I wanted "Caesar" as the enemy of Antony, but I couldn't make either work at all - partly because CLEO (Royal role for Liz) just had to be correct. Finally, I think I ran through other weather phenomena until I stumbled upon "ice."

Finally, the "no time" decision paid off big today, because I FWOE'd hard on QUEEN (Contestant on "RuPaul's Drag Race"). I had confidently, but erroneously, entered RtES for "They intersect in Montréal," not noticing the absence of an abbreviation indicator, and I thought "Sure, 'Q-Teen' could be a young contestant's name. Why not?" Sigh.

Fun puzzle. Great debut.

- Horace


  1. What kind of Malarkey is VISTA? I tried a bunch of first letters there, not that any of them worked better.

  2. 15:24
    Odd that I and not Horace would drop RUES right in off the clue, but there you go. I, like Mr. Kingdon, was not fond of VISTA (17A Prospect), though I'm sure it's valid. I'll probably be a WINO tomorrow (12/25); I have three (3) Zoom sessions to attend, and I'm HOSTS to two of them. Everyone loves a HOMEROW, as it brings one back to typing class in junior high. I must have taken it in 1978 (7th grade). I aced it, having achieved 73 WPM with no errors. We all needed to start on manual typewriters but, based on merit, were allowed to use one of the two IBM Selectric machines that the school owned. I quickly was promoted to one of those. Ah, the Glory Days.