![]() It's part of that whole awful gang, ITTY ITSY BITTY BITSY EENY EENSY EENSIE TEENY TEENSY TEENSIE OK I probably invented those "-IE" spellings but dear lord, too much cutesy baby talk. ESTOS is like "hey, man, I'm just a word, don't pick on me." But ITTY has no excuses. Is it ITSY or ITTY? Is it ESTAS or ESTOS!? You don't know, you don't care, but you want to finish your puzzle and you can't until you sort this nonsense out. well, seeing MOIRE again so soon wasn't exactly fun ( 29D: Wavy fabric pattern), but the bigger issue was seeing both ITTY and ESTOS in the same corner (crossing!). Buster Keaton aplenty! The only part of the grid that made me wince a bit was. And I was pleased to see HOOPLA, mainly because it is one of my favorite TV apps-it runs in conjunction with my local library and so everything is free! The selection is erratic, but the quality of the video is fantastic. I remembered UZO Aduba's name today, so I was pleased with that. When TREFOIL turned out to be right, I thought, "Yes! I am an idiot-genius!" Anyway, TREFOIL is some kind of clover (see Word of the Day, above). In my head it looked a bit like a fleur-de-lis, but then it also evoked the "foil" that sometimes envelopes little fancy chocolates, so there I was, wanting an answer I couldn't justify wanting because I didn't actually know what it was. After that, I had to deal with the fact that I wanted the answer at 5D: Girl Scout emblem to be TREFOIL, but I had to admit to myself that I had no idea what a TREFOIL actually was. "Ben! Didn't recognize you, how are you!?" was what I thought as I wrote him in. But after a few seconds I realized the clue was referring to probably the most important screenwriter of his day. Ben HECHT has his name All Over the movies I tend to watch (right in the TCM sweet spot: 1930-1960), but even I took one look at today's 1-Across clue and thought (at first) "How the hell am I supposed to know?!" I don't recall ever having seen "Angels Over Broadway" (I saw "Bullets Over Broadway" in the '90s, but that's a Woody Allen film, which I now see was a play on words, cool, only a few decades late on the uptake. Not many sticky parts today, although right off the bat you get a proper noun that is not going to be universally known, by any means. That is the kind of OOMPH I crave from my themed puzzles. It was only a bit later that I actually fully read the OPTIMIST / PESSIMIST clues and saw their specific references to the "starred Across/Down clues." Which meant that the thematic opposites weren't just crossing, they were crossing in this very specific, intentional way: Across good, Down bad. A little pun flourish at the end, sweet, thank you. And honestly, that little pun was enough for me to feel like the puzzle had given me enough. I don't think I got the full import of the OPTIMIST / PESSIMIST thing until after I was done I just thought "wow, how clever to have the PESSIMIST clue play on the word 'Down' like that." You know, 'cause PESSIMISTs focus on the "Down" side of things. I figured all would be explained in the end, and boy was it. ![]() And the fill, despite enormous theme pressure, was colorful and strong enough that I was happy to toodle along with only a loose conception of what it was all about. The fact that the expressions were linked meant that once you got one part of the answer, you could get the whole answer, and thus whole sections of the puzzle, pretty quickly. Sometimes it was an "and" expression (" WAR and PEACE"), sometimes an "or" ( FEAST or FAMINE) sometimes the "bad" part came first ( RAIN or SHINE), sometimes the good did ( HALF FULL or HALF EMPTY). ![]() ![]() They were crossing opposites, but beyond that, the pattern was not entirely clear. As I was solving I thought "hey, I really like this," even though I wasn't quite sure what "this" was. ![]()
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