Greetings all! Welcome to November – one of my favorite months: the weather turns cooler, there’s the possibility of snow, and it holds the best holiday of the year IMHO – Thanksgiving! (at least down here – I hope all our Canadian solvers enjoyed their turkey day last month when we were celebrating Columbus Indigenous Peoples Day).
Title: Finding Peace
Grid size: 15×15
Number of entries: 80
Difficulty: Medium Hard (my time: 12:58 which is my 2nd slowest time ever, nearly 2 minutes of that was futilely searching for a typo)
“Finding Peace” is the title of this week’s puzzle: I guess you find peace when it’s “all over now,” which was featured 5 times in the puzzle:
- 14A: [Swiftly, at the symphony]: ALLEGRO over
- 17A: [Just as good]: NO WORSE
- 23A: [Preside over a bingo game]: CALL over
- 27A: [High regard]: RENOWN
- 34A: [Superficial in nature]: SHALLOW over
- 41A: [Having a thicker winter blanket?]: SNOWIER
- 48A: [Battle buddy]: ALLY over
- 54A: [“That’s not it, gimme a sec”]: NO WAIT and the revealer
- 63A: [With 66-Across, no longer a worry]: ALL
- 66A: [With 63-Across, phrase depicted five times in this puzzle]: OVER NOW
I found this a relatively difficult solve- I had to look one entry up and had to check the grid to find the natick (check out the sidebar here if you don’t know what that is) at 28D/43A. There are slightly more entries than usual, so I’m blaming that for the extra long time it took me. I definitely had some trouble with both the Canadian and non-Canadian content. But there’s always a positive to a hard puzzle – you almost always learn something new, and can put that in your pocket for future puzzles. After my usual start in the NW where I banged out all the entries with no problem, I moved fairly confidently down the center then got bogged down in SE. After that I pretty much just jumped around at random trying to gradually chip away, until I ended up with one blank at 45D (no idea what that was) and 54A (which I had a hard time parsing). Finally the light came on, and I entered the A there, only to get the dreaded “The grid is completely filled. Did you get all letters correctly?” pop-up. I scoured the grid for nearly 2 minutes, before giving up and checking all letters, to see I had the wrong letter at 28D/43A.
Canadian content:
- 1D [Hockey level with a fowl name]: BANTAM – Anything hockey is Canadian to me. I didn’t know this but I knew “bantam weight” in boxing so confidently put it in.
- 3D [Jake’s “Blues Brothers” brother]: ELLWOOD – Dan Ackroyd who played Jake was born in Ottawa, ON.
- 11A [Green armchair banks]: TDS – I knew that the Toronto Dominion Bank logo is green, so figured they probably had green chairs inside their branches.
- 18A: [Flashy sock-sporting PM]: TRUDEAU – Apparently Justin Trudeau’s socks are quite the sight.
- 40D [Common sights on Alberta’s landscape]: OIL WELLS – I missed the plural in the clue and had OIL TOWER in there for way too long.
- 41A: [Having a thicker winter blanket?]: SNOWIER – Canada is snowier than the US 😉
- 42D [Like much of a Canadian flag]: RED – easy 🇨🇦
- 51D [Tennis phenom Andreescu]: BIANCA – This was the one I had to look up and I learned she is Canadian, not Romanian as I would have guessed. Today’s learning moment!
- 57D [“Zut” follower, jokingly]: ALORS – not sure why it’s jokingly, but I’ve never heard “zut, alors! used in it’s natural environment and my grasp of French-Canadian idiom is nonexistent.
- 69A: [French word for “garlic”]: AIL – You would see this in markets in Trois-Rivières, I suppose.
Other stuff:
- 1A: [Vessel with a head, perhaps]: BEER MUG – As a sailor, something different should have come to mind, but the first thing to pop into my head was a frothy stein of beer. 🍺
- 5D: [Off. team leaders]: MGRS – I put the abbreviation for “management” instead of “managers” in here, which caused problems as you will see…
- 21A: [RSVP enclosures]: SASES – My mis-entry of 5D made this TASES for a long time which was a real head scratcher…
- 22D [Alpine flower in “The Sound of Music”]: EDELWEISS – I recently listened to a podcast about The Sound of Music and this song was prominently featured.
- 28D: [New, to Nero]: NOVO – As you’ll see below, I thought this was NOVA, which of course would have probably been clued “____ Scotia,” so I should have known it was wrong.
- 39D: [Inconsistent, as a rash]: SPLOTCHY – Just a really good entry, not see often enough.
- 43A: [“Fa ___!” (Definitively in “Superbad”)]: SHO – Having never seen Superbad I somehow thought SHA was vernacular for “sure” 🙄
- 45D: [Spiral-horned African antelope]: NYALA – Another learning opportunity! Yay.
- 48A: [Battle buddy]: ALLY – An ally in war is usually another nation, so “buddy” didn’t quite strike me as right.
- 50A: [Take out a Trojan, perhaps]: DEBUG – I was definitely thinking of something else here, rather than computer code 😳
- 52D: [Perform a key role?]: UNLOCK – What a wonderful clue!
- 54A: [“That’s not it, gimme a sec”]: NO WAIT – I was parsing this as “Now, [something]” so had a really hard time seeing “no, wait.”
- 64D: [Semi seat section]: CAB – I had ARM in here for a while – I thought the clue referred to a section of the semi’s seat.
- 71A: [Fly-___ (airshow crowd pleasers)]: BYS – I could only think of fly overs which if course didn’t fit, so had INS there for way too long.
Tip of the week: ”The cure for anything is salt water – sweat, tears, or the sea.” – Isak Dinesen (a quote my Mom really loved)