Back home in my beloved Baltimore, which is still reeling from the tragic event early Tuesday morning. While awful, it could have been much worse, and the city is strong and we’ll bounce back. I have very close ties to the incident from several perspectives – obviously I live here, but I’m also a sailor, my work is in the maritime field (I’m tangentially involved in the incident response), and I helped install and frequently operate the camera that recorded the incident video that has now been seen by millions around the world. I don’t want to dwell on this, and there is plenty of coverage in the media. So on to more uplifting things: the baseball season starts tomorrow and this week’s puzzle!
- Name: The Five Eyes
- Size: 15×15
- Entries: 74
- Difficulty: Very Hard (my solve time: 9:19)
“The Five Eyes” means something very different to some of folks I work with than it does to the theme of this puzzle. It took me a while to figure it out because I had more trouble with the solve than usual, but I finally got it: the themers are words or phrases that contain five occurrences of the letter “I”:
- 17A: [Pigs flying or hell freezing over, for two]: IMPOSSIBILITIES – Or me getting this entry quickly.
- 22A: [Caesar’s famous quote]: VENI VIDI VICI – It’s less famously spelled starting “Vini” but it took me a while to catch that.
- 38A: [Disqualification, as from participating]: INELIGIBILITY – Took most of the crosses to get this one.
- 52A: [Starting up, as a program]: INITIALIZING – I kept trying to think if there was a word or phrase for clicking on an icon on a computer desktop.
- 60A: [Grammatical nono, like “to boldly go”]: SPLIT INFINITIVE – not any more…
I just never really got into the groove with this one, even after I figured out the theme. For a little while I though the themers might be in the long down entries, until I realized that there were only two really long down entries. I had trouble with quite a few entries, some detailed below, but what really cost me time was the SW corner where all I could think of for 55A was RUG – pretty sure that was intentional misdirection.
Canadian content:
- 6D: [Broadbent and Sheeran]: EDS – Ed Broadbent was was a Canadian social-democratic politician and political scientist, who recently passed. Ed Sheeran is not Canadian, though he was born in Halifax – the one in West Yorkshire.
- 16A: [Former Blue Jay’s great Alomar]: ROBERTO – After playing for the Toronto Blue Jay’s, Roberto Alomar played a couple of seasons in the late 1990’s with the Orioles. He also played for five other teams in his long career.
- 19A: [Toronto-based vegan handbag company]: ELA – I think this was the last entry I “got” – in quotes because I had no idea if it was right as I had an error elsewhere in the puzzle. I have a sneaking suspicion this has been in previous puzzles, but I didn’t remember this company.
- 25D: [Canadian band ___ and the Slugs]: DOUG – I have a vague recollection of hearing about this band, but can’t recall ever hearing their music.
- 36D: [Horton of hockey and donuts]: TIM – I knew this one right off and now I want a donut and a double double.
- 68A: [Hockey name meaning “the best”]: LEMIEUX – Mario Lemieux was born in Montréal and played his entire career with the Pittsburgh Penguins.
Other stuff:
- 1A: [“Fire” alert]: CODE RED – I had no idea – all I could think of was siren, or alert, or others that didn’t fit.
- 21A: [Prime Meridian Clock setting]: GST – I entered GMT and moved on until I couldn’t recall my high school French and had no idea what ETEM meant but at least I was pretty sure it was wrong.
- 27D: [Train track bar]: I RAIL – I’ve heard of an I-beam but not the one for trains.
- 37A: [Rat tail?]: RACE – Even when I got this I didn’t get it. Is there a special name for a rat’s tail? Was the clue supposed to be “Rat trail” and it referred to a rt racing through a maze? Only after a while did I realize that it was referring to the phrase “rat race” where the 2nd word is the “tail” of the phrase.
- 42A: [“Outer” prefix]: ECTO – I really need to learn the difference between ecto and endo.
- 48D: [Evel doings]: STUNTS – In case you don’t get it, Evel Knievel was a stuntman in the 1970’s. And I have to note the nice pairing in the grid with 50D. Evel gets this week’s quote.
- 55A: [“Arabian Nights” flier]: ROC – not RUG.
- 69A: [Cartoon pirates’ limbs]: PEG LEGS – All I could think of was Captain Hook but what three-letter word went before HOOK?
Quote of the week:
“Anybody can jump a motorcycle. The trouble begins when you try to land it.”
– Evel Knievel