Short roundup this week that touches on Rosswords, Cursewords, and Boswords. Which is a sentence that really gets my themedar firing.
Parker and I have decided to schedule our live solving/construction over at Cursewords Live for Monday and Thursday evenings, with ad hoc bonus streams when we feel like it, including tonight, 2/21, at 8:00pm eastern. Stop by for some lively chat bar hijinks!
Speaking of Monday evenings, there’s still time to sign up for the Boswords Spring Themeless League. It’s a weekly puzzle competition built around a Twitch stream that runs Mondays from 9pm to 10 eastern. (We plan to start our own streams right after the Boswords stream concludes at 10; forgive us if we’ve still got residual adrenaline there at the outset.)
Construction notes and spoilers for “Do, Re, Mi … uh, Sol” after the jump!
One of the joys of running an independent puzzle site is the latitude one gets to, you know, make jokey wordplay grids that rely on ANTIFA as a thematic conceit.
And actually, there were many fewer -FA words than I thought I’d find. And some of the viable ones that existed didn’t lend themselves to any syntactically valid base phrases (think FAVA BEANS -> V.A. BEANS … which, nope).
As an aside, I *love* when fill stacks, read left-to-right or top-to-bottom, form intelligible sentences. Note ACHES FOR CHINESE LIP BALM in the southwest corner. Also currently feeling outsized self-satisfaction for a new ET TU clue ([Response to a staged coup?]). Way up top! Anyone? Waiting…
Happy solving, friends!
-Ross
yeah, zooming doesn’t make it possible to see the clues without using the scroll bars. Nor does resizing the window. I’ll wait for next weeks puzzle. Thanks.
Sorry it’s not presenting well for you! I’m tying to replicate your issue, but it looks normal to me. One work-around would be to download the .puz and solve on your desktop using an app like AcrossLite.
Depending on your browser you can right click on the puzzle and select “this frame” and then “show only this frame” and the puzzle will be practically full screen with all of the clues. Works in FireFox, don’t know about others.
I liked that I was challenged by the themed clues even after I got the gimmick, though 37A puzzled me even after I finished. Partly that’s cuz in proper French there’d be an s at the end of both words. In the hardboiled world, though, I’ve seen the term with a plural first word and singular second, as you have it, and with a singular first word and plural second—pluralising the whole phrase, I guess. Oh well, c’est la vie!
Hahaha! Oh, thank you for this, Blaine. I’m fondly remembering the comments from a few weeks ago when I went with “Femme fatales” as a clue 🙂 *shrug*
I was your accuser back then, but actually I think you’re on safe ground with FEMMESTALE, because I read it as FEMME’S TALE, which matches the clue construction “Woman’s story”.
Actually, I take that back – on reflection I agree with Blaine – even though FEMME’S TALE makes sense, I guess when you add the FA back in you are left with FEMMESFATALE, which is the same issue as last time. Ignore my prior comment!
Immediately after doing this puzzle, I did today’s 21×21 Universal puzzle, which is titled “De-letion” and employs a very similar gimmick. Curiously, in that puzzle, the clue for 70-Across is “Notes before sols” and the answer is, of course, “fas”. A curious coincidence … 😜
Look at that! Damn if these little “coincidences” aren’t getting curiouser and curiouser…
Bravo for the excellent ET TU clue! I loved it. The entire puzzle was full of witty clues and clever surprises, like 50D. I had a blast with this puzzle. Thanks!
I was born in So Cal, around the time D-Land opened, and raised in the shadow of the Matterhorn. I have memories (23A) of some unchaperoned, teenage, slightly enhanced trips to D-Land in the 1970s, which include 5A. Heh heh heh.
I’ve been on 5A’s Wild Ride, but had no recollection of the hellscape finale until I looked it up and it all came flooding back…
Super! You’ve got the title, you’ve got the theme entries, you’ve got the reveal…a fun time! Thanks, Ross!
Thanks for solving, Kelly!!
I look forward to your puzzles every week. This one was excellent. I did it in a break from the same universal puzzle someone else mentioned, but didn’t register the similarity since I still haven’t finished it. In 49a- Did you mean scrapped or scraped? Scraped made me think of a knee but then the crunched part didn’t work. Once I got the right word in, and had the aha! moment, I had to go back to see why this caused me so much trouble. I think scrapped is the correct word unless you can do something else with data I don’t know about.
Hey, Millie! Thanks for solving! “Scraped” data is a term I learned from my girlfriend. She uses computer code to “scrape” data from websites, which I gather means to collect data from sources that weren’t specifically designed to give you that data. The more you know!
I think I had the same issue as js above. Once I closed the yellow warning box, I was at least able to see the current clue at the top, if not being able to see a subset of across and down clues on the right, like I was used to.
I started doing your puzzle because my local newspaper doesn’t publish on Monday hence no NYT puzzle. (They actually include the Monday puzzle with Sunday’s paper but I always end up solving it instead of waiting. No self control!) Anyway very much appreciate having such an entertaining puzzle to do on Monday. Many thanks!
The pleasure is mine, Joe! I can fully relate. We get the Sunday puzzle with the magazine on Saturdays, and I almost always solve both on Saturday 😛