Animation Specs

Ok – we’ll see tonight or tomorrow if the Blue Jays can bring the World Series trophy back to Canada. This Series has been really good – outstanding pitching, fielding, and exciting offense. I actually watched the entire 18 innings of Game 3. Well, some of it was through my eyelids, but I was definitely in front of my TV at 3AM when the game ended. That may partially explain why I’m late getting this posted. In any event, I hope you’re enjoying the games and making time for the puzzle. Away we go with this week’s!

• Name: Animation Specs
• Grid size: 15×15
• Entries: 68
• Difficulty: Very Hard (my solve time: 15:52)

I decided to solve “Animation Specs” on paper this week, as I’ve been doing with the Friday, Saturday, and Sunday NY Times puzzles as practice for tournaments. Sorry if you can’t read my chicken scratch – you can check out the solution file Barb sends along with the puzzle if you need to. The theme is pretty straightforward once you get to the revealer – the themers are all cartoon characters who wear glasses – hence “Animation Specs:”

• 8A: [* “Peanuts” girl who calls Peppermint Patty “sir”]: MARCIE – I knew this one right off:

• 18A: [* Highly intelligent “Scooby-Doo” character]: VELMA DINKLEY – I knew the first name but had no idea about her last name:

• 33A: [* Disney uncle based on a Dickens character]: SCROOGE MCDUCK – Even though it was in the clue I still tried to enter “Uncle Scrooge” before I remembered his full name:

• 51A: [* “Family Guy” dad]: PETER GRIFFIN – I’ve never watched “Family Guy” but knew the last name was Griffin; I needed the crosses to get the first name:

• 61A: [* “Hey Arnold!” kid with a crush on Helga]: BRAINY – I have no idea who anyone is in “Hey Arnold!” so needed the crosses for this one:

• 62A: [Items worn by the starred clues’ characters]: GLASSES – The revealer.

While solving on paper may have increased the difficulty a bit, this was a hard one for me even if I solved in Across Lite as usual. It was my second slowest solve time ever (by 6 seconds)! I wasn’t completely familiar with the themers, and had two really tough spots in NE and SE, see “Other stuff” below for details and for a few other difficult entries.

Canadian content:

• 5D: [Canadian Composer ___ Miller]: ELMA – Elma Miller was born in Toronto, and she composes chamber music, music for full orchestra, electronic music and vocal music.
• 48A: [Last line of a mailing address]: AREA CODE – Calling this Canadian as in the US they are called ZIP codes.

That’s all I found, but it’s tough to review on paper, or at least I’m not used to it. Please let me know in the comments if you see anything I missed.

Other stuff:

• 9D: [Prefix meaning “star”]: ASTERO – Man, this hung me up for a long while. Obviously it couldn’t be just ASTRO but until I got Velma’s last name, and figured out what 21A was, I was completely lost.
• 10D: [Turns from green to amber to red, say]: REDYES – I immediately put RIPENS in here and it messed me up for a while.
• 22D: [N. T. book: Abbr.]: APOC – First I thought this was a book from the Northern Territories, then figured it must be a book from the New Testament, maybe Apocrypha? Still not really sure…
• 45D: [Geology duo]: SOFT GS – This type of clue gets me every time. I was racking my brain trying to think of pairs of geological things.
• 52D: [Grasshopper, to a Brit]: GRIG – I have never, ever seen this before. I had FROG in here forever and when I finally figured everything out, I still was pretty sure I had this wrong.

Quote of the week:
“I think people fetishize glasses in general. You could put glasses on a rotting pumpkin and people would think it was sexy.”
– Tina Fey