In the Thursday NYT, Pat Merrell dishes out another twisty theme—this time, if you add the parenthetical initials to the beginning of the words in the theme entries, you get a famous (or semifamous) name; e.g., HARLEY RIDE yields Charley Pride. I don’t wish to contemplate how long it might have taken Pat to identify a theme’s worth of names that become clueable phrases after dropping their first and last initials. Can you think of other candidates? (And did anyone else solving in the timed applet have a glitch where the numbers disappeared from the grid until you clicked on that area?)
In the Sun, Jeffrey Harris (a.k.a. Jangler) provided a math twist on Oscar week in “Hollywood Squares”: a rebus involving four movie titles that contain a square number (1, 4, 9, 16). Assorted structural limitations relating to the 15x16 grid and the rebus apparently forced a surplus of black squares and 3-letter words.
NYT 5:50
NYS 5:29
LAT 3:54
Newsday 3:08 (on paper)
CS 3:07
March 02, 2006
Tongersdei (Frisian Thursday)
Posted by Orange at 8:16 AM