Happy first day of fall everyone! It’s my favourite time of the year – the air is crisp and clear, the days are getting shorter, and the leaves are starting to turn. I’m looking forward to sitting outside in the cool evenings by the fire pit listening to playoff baseball and solving crossword puzzles. So let’s get the season started with this week’s offering.
- Name: Keep It
- Grid size: 15×15
- Number of entries: 76
- Difficulty: Medium (My solve time 7:17)
Last week’s theme went right past me and Barb had to gently point it out to me. I think I get the theme this week, but I may be missing a subtlety so feel free to enlighten me in the comments. The themers are all phrases that you “keep” and they include a part of the body (kind of…):
- 18A: [Keep a —– (stand guard attentively)]: WATCHFUL EYE – I needed to keep a watchful eye out for hasty errors as I was solving this puzzle.
- 24A: [Keep a —– (fly under the radar)]: LOW PROFILE – This is the one that makes me think I may be missing something in the theme. A “profile” isn’t quite the same as the other themers that clearly are body parts.
- 37A: [Keep a —– (stay calm)]: LEVEL HEAD – I’ve never really understood this idiom – so if you’re not calm you have a tilted head?
- 52A: [Keep a —– (firmly control)[: STEADY HAND – This one makes a lot of sense, especially if you’re talking about a surgeon.
- 60A: [Keep a —– (use a tolerant tone)]: CIVIL TONGUE – I always hear this phrase in an English accent, as spoken by Captain Hornblower to an insolent crewmember.
Canadian content
- 12D: [Blue Jays stadium now called Rogers Centre]: SKY DOME – I still call it this.
- 29A: [Who Raffi asks to “please shine down on me”]: MR MOON – Though born in Egypt, Raffi is a Canadian citizen.
- 33D: [Little kiss, in Québécois]: BEC – Very cute; I’ll have to start using this word.
- 40A: [Winnipeg NHLer]: JET – I got confused with the Edmonton CFL team and initially put ELK in here.
- 66A: [Line on a “carte” of Montréal]: RUE – Streets on maps of Montréal will be depicted as lines.
While the solve went fairly smoothly, I hit a few snags, mainly on shorter fill. 33D was unknown to me so I made a guess at it. I initially had ON to start 45D, and changed it to AN when I got 44A, but then had 50A misspelled and had to seek it out when I got the dreaded “Did you get all letters correctly?” pop-up, so that cost me at least 30 seconds. Though my solve time is about 20 seconds faster than my average, I just felt that this was harder than my time indicates so rated it as Medium difficulty.
Other stuff:
- 1A: [___ Tikkanen dubbed “The Grate One”]: ESA – This name rang a distant bell, and I had a hunch it referred to a hockey player, but needed all the crosses to get it. His nickname apparently comes from the fact that he grated on his fellow hockey players.
- 16A: [Popular photo-sharing site]: FLICKR – It may be popular, but I had to check myself to see if it was still a thing. It is.
- 46D: [He’s “buried in his jammies” in a Steve Martin song]: KING TUT – Now I’ve got this song running through my head for the rest of the day…
Quote of the week:
“The nice thing about doing a crossword puzzle is you know there is a solution.”
– Stephen Sondheim