Happy Thanksgiving – even if you celebrated last month, join me in giving thanks for all the good things in life. I’m thankful (and honored) that Barb asked me to write this blog just over 3 (!) years ago, and thankful to all of you who read it. I hope my weekly musings on the puzzle help you understand it better, and maybe even give you a chuckle every now and then. I am going to finish this post then go help with preparations for the feast tomorrow. I’m headed to my brother’s place in Pennsylvania, where we will have a small gathering of family. Whatever you are doing tomorrow, even if it isn’t a holiday for you, be thankful and be safe.
- Name: Grocery List Goof-ups
- Grid size: 15×15
- Entries: 74
- Difficulty: Hard (my solve time: 8:14)
I had a pretty good idea of what we were in for with the title “Grocery List Goof-ups” – a list of items you might buy on a trip to the grocery, with some sort of twist. More specifically, the themers are all two-word items of food, where the second word starts with S but the S has been left off, and the resulting phrase is clued punnily:
- 17A: [Discussions about a Bloody Mary garnish?]: CELERY TALKS – You would normally garnish a Bloody Mary with a celery stalk but why not discuss it before hand?
- 24A: [Parasitic bugs in the sourdough?]: BREAD TICKS – I’ll definitely take my bread sticks without bugs, please.
- 35A: [Settings for studying breakfast strips?]: BACON LABS – A laboratory studying crispy, mouthwatering breakfast meat would likely need to order a lot of bacon slabs, both for study and for meals.
- 48A: [Veggie varieties related to spuds?]: POTATO KINS – I plan to be eating plenty of mashed potatoes tomorrow, and I like the kind where the potato skins are left in.
- 57A: [Brined cucumber/anjou hybrids?]: PICKLE PEARS – I’m a big fan of pickles, but I usually prefer chips, rather than pickle spears. I also like plenty of other pickled items, but not sure I want to try pickled pears.
This one felt hard, and my time was actually quicker than I expected. It took a while to break in – I was drawing blanks for everything in the NW, and it took me a while to get the theme. I finally got a toehold in the upper middle of the grid and chipped away at things from there. I was actually surprised when I got the Congratulations! pop up, because I was sure I had at least 23A wrong, and probably 34A and 54A as well. But, nope, I guessed correctly on all of those.
Canadian content:
- 3D: [Loonies]: DOLLARS – All I had in mind were crazy people instead of money and I was stumped until I got nearly all the crosses.
- 24D: [___ Québécois party]: BLOC – Le Bloc Québécois est un parti politique indépendantiste, implanté exclusivement au Québec. Sa présence à la Chambre des communes permet d’assurer la légitimité et la concordance entre la vision d’un peuple et celle de ses représentantes et représentants élus sur la scène fédérale.
- 60A: [Edmonton Grey Cup hopeful]: ELK – Not sure why I knew the one right off the bat – must have been in a previous puzzle. Not this year for the Edmonton Elks – the Toronto Argonauts took home the Grey Cup a week and a half ago.
Other stuff:
- 1D: [Big name in rum]: BACARDI – I spaced on this huge distiller of rum, and instead all I could come up with was RONRICO.
- 8A: [Genetic ID]: DNA – Anything “genetic” in crosswords is often RNA, so I left the first letter blank until I saw the clue for 8D.
- 9D: [DINK attribute]: NO KIDS – In case you weren’t familiar with this acronym, DINK means “dual income, no kids.”
- 12D: [Fix-it person’s item]: TOOL KIT – I had BOX and BAG in here before I saw that KIT worked a lot better with 28A.
- 23A: [“___ N’ Bedouins” (Guns N’ Roses song)]: RIAD – I am unfamiliar with this song, as I am with most of GNR’s oeuvre. Apparently the song is about the lead singer Axl Rose’s former brother-in-law who claimed to be an international arms dealer.
- 26A: [Force off course]: DERAIL – I confidently entered DIVERT and it took a long time to figure out that was wrong and to come up with the correct answer.
- 34A: [Melancholy, in music]: MESTO – I had LARGO and LENTO in here long before I got to this answer.
- 37A: [Back of an LP]: SIDE B – I thought to myself, “no way this is SIDE B since that’s only used for 45s, not LPs.” Well, I was wrong.
- 41A: [“Thx” counterpart]: PLS – I was wracking my brain trying to think of a three-letter abbreviation for “you’re welcome.”
- 51D: [“The Deep” actor Nick]: NOLTE – While I knew this because I read everything Peter Benchley wrote when I was a kid, “The Deep” is a pretty, um, deep cut in the repertoire of Nick Nolte. I remember him best from 48 Hrs.
- 52A: [Alms box]: ARCA – I’m sure I’ve seen this before as it rings a very faint bell; but I needed all the crosses to get it here, not helped by the Z I put in 42D.
- 54A: [Brown-bagger]: WINO – A brown-bagger means something completely different to me.
Quote of the week:
“Thanksgiving has always been my favorite holiday. It is comfortably free of the strident religious and/or militaristic overtones that give the other holidays their soft emanations of uneasiness. At Thanksgiving, all we have to worry about is whether we can wholeheartedly support A) roasted turkey, B) friends and C) gratitude. My opinions on these matters are unambiguous; I am in favor of them all. Thanksgiving provides a formal context in which to consider the instances of kindness that have enlightened our lives, for moments of grace that have gotten us through when all seemed lost. These are fine and sentimental subjects for contemplation. [We should be thankful for] …the teachers, the men and women who took the time to fire a passion for the abstract, to give us each a visceral sense of the continuity of history and the adventure of the future… This is their day as well. Even closer. Companions. We all learned about good sex from somebody, and that person deserves a moment. Somebody taught us some hard lesson of life, told us something for our own good, and that willingness to risk conflict for friendship is worth a pause this day. And somebody sat with us through one long night, and listened to our crazy talk and turned it toward sanity; that person has earned this moment, too. And thanks, too, for all the past Thanksgivings, and for all the people we shared them with… And the final bead on the string is for this very Thanksgiving, this particular Thursday, and the people with whom we will be sharing it. Whoever they are and whatever the circumstances that have brought us together, we will today be celebrating with them the gift of life and the persistence of charity in a world that seems bent on ending one and denying the other.”
– Jon Carroll – (excerpted from his annual Thanksgiving column)
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