Thank you two for making this!Ĩ:05 Alexander - Same here. Now that I’ve taken my few breaths, I am flying high, abuzz, ready to charge into my day. Which is what you did for me with your hard mind workout, Jeff and Francesca (and way to go on your debut, Ms. Others, when they are finished, seem to open the gates and release unbounding energy for hours to come. Some hard body workouts leave me tired for the rest of the day. And I love the kind of labor the rest of the puzzle gave me, truly. I love this type of theme, and getting it greatly helped the solve, bringing about the only place in the puzzle where I slapped in a bunch of letters. Maybe a quarter of the effort was in sussing the theme, but the rest was just in filling in the squares with cluing that made me dig and scrape, made me scour my memory, often made me wrangle out a clue’s angle. Oh, it’s the kind of hard I relish, but man, this one put me through the steps. You gotta go down the definition list, but it's there.Įxcuse me while I take a few breaths after just finishing this solve, which was very hard won. But it can also mean a large group of something, particularly fish. I thought the SHOAL was the shore and not the fish swimming off of it ( 48A: Group of fish), which it is-primary meaning is sandbank or sandbar, particularly one that constitutes a navigation hazard. As far as the fill goes, it seemed solid enough. Everything that could go wrong did, themewise, and yet my time was still within reasonable Thursday range, so it's possible the puzzle was actually much easier than it seemed to me. Had HOOT for RIOT, yet another theme answer-wrecking mistake ( 52D: Thigh-slapper). Never heard of CITRINES (the blog software is red-underlining it right now) and couldn't parse the Beatles clue so ended up with Lennon writing the opening lines of "I Am the Walrus" ON A COD (which seems like something you might actually try to do ON ACID). I actually wrote in PASSED THE TIME at 33A and couldn't get it to work at one point, stumbling onto the theme without even knowing it. ![]() It was as if these mistakes were designed to cause maximum theme miscomprehension, though I think they were just results of bad luck and the malfunctioning of my own dumb brain. I also wrote in (the much more appropriate) HAR HAR instead of HAH HAH at 5D: "Everybody's a comedian," resulting in yet another wrong letter in that first themer (STARE CRANGE!), as well as a wrong letter in the first position of the *second* themer. well, it's a theme answer I just figured something weird was going on that I didn't understand yet. I had tried and failed to understand 1A: Relief from the desert? ( ALOE), and so I'd forgotten about it, and having STARE CHANGE in the theme answer. This worked for so many of the crosses (all but two, in fact) that I didn't question it. The worst was EATS IT UP for 2D: Loves every second of something ( LAPS IT UP). It's weird how I fell into *perfectly* hidden traps (or "traps," I guess) over and over today. So the cleverness of the theme concept came to me very slowly, and never fully arrived during the solving time, which made the whole thing a bit frustrating. that that answer was an expression of "Home is where the heart is" (beat *that* for epic wrongness, folks!). I had -MEIS- and I wrote in HOMEIISHEART, thinking. In fact, even with many crosses in place, my first stab at the revealer was hilariously wrong. Of course, might not have helped, as I would've been jumping into total blank space (always a time killer) and in the case of today's puzzle I wouldn't have actually known the revealer. I should remember on Thursdays to jump straight to the revealer as soon as I have trouble grasping the theme. I think I was able to use (half-) knowledge of the theme to get TWO CENTS, but at that point I still wasn't fully aware that all of the themers, despite the "time" change, were still genuine, in-the-language phrases-that was the part that only came into view after I was done and reviewing the grid. Never ever grasped the essential concept while I was solving, and since I (stupidly, today) worked methodically from top to bottom, I didn't hit the revealer til very late, and at first I botched *that* answer quite bad as well. ![]() Appreciated this one much more after the fact than I did during the solve.
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