OK, I think I’m ready for summer. It’s been another week of relatively mild weather, though we did have a rainy weekend. I’m enjoying sitting on my deck whenever I can – like right now and in the evenings after dinner listening to the Orioles game on the radio. I know it will not be long before it’s hot and humid and the mosquitoes come out in abundance, but I think I’ll be ready for it. I hope wherever you may be that you are ready for summer and have fun plans – feel free to share them in the comments below – and make time to solve as many crosswords as you can!
- Name: What a Turn On!
- Grid size: 15×15
- Entries: 76
- Difficulty: Medium Easy (my solve time: 6:55)
This is a quip puzzle so the theme is pretty straightforward – each of the themers is part of the quip:
- 17A: [Start of an illuminating quip]: HES THE KIND OF GUY – Start of the quip. It actually hung me up for a short while, as I thought the quip started “He’s the kind of man…”
- 27A: [Part 2 of the quip]: WHO LIGHTS UP – Part two.
- 47A: [Part 3 of the quip]: A ROOM JUST BY – Part three.
- 61A: [End of the quip]: FLICKING A SWITCH – Part four and final.
As I’ve said before, I don’t mind a quip or quotation puzzle, though there are some solvers who do. In any event, this one was doubly pleasant for me as I thought it was going somewhere else, so I got a little twist with the final themer. I thought the quip would be either complimentary and would end with “walking into [it/there/some other way to make it fit]”, or it would be derogatory, and end with “leaving the place” or something like that. The twist is that it’s kind of neutral, or at worst a left-handed compliment. I got a chuckle out of it, so maybe that says more about my sense of humor than anything else. My solve was pretty straightforward, with no real snags except for in the NE, where (as mentioned above) I tried to fit “man” where “guy” goes, I drew a blank on the partial at 26A, and kept trying to fit “sayeth” in 13D. Otherwise mostly smooth sailing.
Canadian content:
- 11D: [Canada’s highest mountain]: LOGAN – I confidently entered ELIAS in here forgetting (1) it’s St. Elias and (2) that Mt. Logan is taller.
- 20A: [RCMP Cpl.’s superiors]: SGTS – Sergeants are indeed senior to Corporals in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.
- 21A: [“___ Canadian! (Molson slogan)]: I AM – This slogan was used by Molson in the late 1990s and early 2000s, and the famous video is 25 years old.
- 43D: [Doug’s “hoser” brother]: BOB – The McKenzie brothers were a big part of my childhood – I used to stay up after “Saturday Night Live” to watch “SCTV” and remember the “Great White North” sketch long before they became crazy famous.
- 69A: [Heeds “hard!”, in curling]: SWEEPS – There is good science behind the act of sweeping in curling. And, yeah, curling didn’t originate in Canada, but c’mon – it’s as Canadian as you can get.
Other stuff:
- 42A: [Sweden’s biggest export, once]: ABBA – This threw me for a second as I tried to think of 4-letter exports: coal, Ikea, ???? but I quickly got it, probably due to having recently seen the ABBA documentary.
- 50D: [Complete a crossword, say]: SOLVE – You got that right!
- 56A: [Physicist Fermi or singer Iglesias]: ENRICO – Enrico Fermi is one of my heroes, so I got this immediately.
Quote of the week:
“[Southern California was] “more about the idea of going in the ocean than actually going in the ocean. I liked to look at the sea, though. It was like a piece of music: each wave was moving around by itself, but they were also moving together.”
– Brian Wilson
I added “quip” to the Crossword Blog Glossary this week.