Saturday, April 07, 2007

Sun NYT

28:58. Never have I gotten a theme so early, to have it help me so little.

Let's try this spoiler thing again


(For a crossworder, I suck at anagrams.) It didn't help that there was no way to get the long theme entries without the short theme entries (except a lot of crossings + some guessing), and I went a long time without any of those theme entries. Looking back, "SECRETADMIRERS" was the only long entry I got after the short ones.

It's Byron, don'tcha know, so there were some clues-that-you're-not-going-to-get-'til-later-but-you-like-anyway, like "EIGHTH" for "Like Van Buren's presidency", "THRICE" for "How Peter denied Jesus" (on Easter!), "DOGIT" for "Loaf", "TBAR" for "Boarders board it", "AITCH" for "It starts here", "PASSFAIL" for "Course option" (I actually got that one right away, but still). And of course, there are answers that make no sense: "BGIRLS" for "Saloon habitues, slangily" (does anyone say that? really? I assume the B stands for bar), "DISARMER" for "Peacemaker" (it makes sense, but I don't like it. Waah!), "MONOSKI" for "Snowboard alternative" (ditto).

Things I screwed up: NAIROBI for ENTEBBE; CIELA for CIELO; RAISETHE for UNDERONE (raise the roof just seems more Byron's style than under one roof), RKO for MGM (so I don't know my movie history). And I didn't get ELEVEN until *way* after I finished the puzzle (and got onto Google).

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