Greetings from Sabiha Gokcen International Airport! I’m here traveling through the Corona epidemic to meet Carol in Athens, Greece. From there, we will travel back to our ancestral homeland of Tbilisi. Our plans include watching the sunset here, running/cycling the route of the original marathon, and eating cheese. Self care is crucial in in the time of Corona!
I like it when constructors incorporate the design of the grid with the theme. And I especially like it when the grid is a cute, smiley panda greeting me when I open the puzzle. Wouldn’t it be funny, though, if the grid looked like today’s, and then turned out to be a theme-less puzzle?
I liked a lot of the long answers in this puzzle, too. SPIRIT ANIMAL, NEAPOLITAN, BLACK AND WHITE, BOW AND ARROW, NOT ENOUGH, and PESCETARIAN* were all more or less first passers for me! That’s how I managed to set a Friday record of 20:20.
*By the way, what’s the deal with the spelling of PESCETARIAN? I thought it should be PESCATARIAN, but was pretty confident in SEA (“Title setting for a Hemingway novel, with ‘the'”). A quick google tells me that people have argued about its proper spelling on a variety of message boards. So, I suppose that as a staunch descriptivist, I’ll have to accept that it could be either.
The puzzle, though, had a few ugly answers. LEA SALONGA? Who is that? What’s a FEN? I want to name my future robot wife OZMA. HIE means to go quickly? Huh?
Other holdups for me included DORSAL for DISTAL, every variation of ESAS except for the correct one, and a complete blank on the what NSC could be.
Well, that’s pretty much all the wisdom I have to impart for today. I want to leave you with this picture. After a cursory amount of research on the internet, it would seem that this how pandas like to make whoopie. Can we rename this position to PANDA style?
Thanks for linking up the itinerary! Now I know why I’m here, and it is pretty lovely. Orange trees everywhere. BTW, I did know who Lea Salonga was but I still had to look it up. Also thought it was pescatarian…