Category Archives: Friday

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?

25:22 – which is actually faster than yesterday’s and 4 minutes under my average for my current 103 day streak. It felt much longer, as I started with little more than BANFF and BOSC after the first pass. Even after having MUESLI for breakfast. Well, I also had “hourglass” and “benefatto” (which is what my Fitbit tells me when I hit 250 steps in an hour), but those were ULTRA not VERY NICE. Other missed FIRSTSTEPs: TETE, ADD, PORK… and HARP in the wrong place…

I got ETHEL and ARAL and the BEAV easily enough, but that corner was otherwise a mystery for a good minute. I was mystified that SMORES didn’t fit (can you make just one?) and VWBUS didn’t seem to fit until I realized “yogurt” (which I also had for breakfast) was wrong, too.

Ok, yeah DYLAN of course was a first pass, too. And REBA only took a couple seconds of thought.

As a themeless Friday goes, it was pretty blah. RASHGUARD was one of the last entries I figured out, although FIRSTSTEP came pretty early on. POLARBEARPLUNGE was cute, I’ll give it that, although they’re called Walruses in Russia.