Friday, May 16 – 19:51

What a nice evening – an enjoyable episode of Lost followed by a really good time (for me) on a Friday puzzle.  Kevin G. Der creations usually are tough going, so that’s all the better.  Not that I’m saying this was easy, and it had a large number of long answers: 28! seven-letter entries and four eight-letter ones.

One of the marks of a well-constructed/clued puzzle (IMHO) are clues that are vague enough to have at least several plausible answers but which reveal themselves once you got one or two or three letters.  This puzzle had many of those, and it was very enjoyable too.

There were a few information-age words, like ETAILER, NETIZEN, and FACEBOOK (for “Merchant whose customers click”, “Blogger, e.g.”, and “Alternative to Friendster or MySpace”, respectively).  And I loved “WHASSUP” for “Yo!”.  I though I had something wrong when I saw one answer begin with AA, but when I saw the clue was looking for an author, I knew it had to be AAMILNE, even though I never heard of the novel “Chloe Marr”.  Another really nice clue was “Crush holder that’s crushable” for SODACAN.

What almost stuck me was the section just below the center of the grid.  Going across there was “Military grp.” (I had TRP for troop at first), “Places to develop one’s chops” (I had GRILL).  Going down there was T_REEN Tracey from “The Mickey Mouse Club”, FIJI for the island Truman wants to go to, and I had GA__TTES for “Parts of some Back suites”.  I knew I had some mistakes.  So I removed GRILL and TRP, and tried out GAZETTES and NOREEN.  That gave me D_Z for military grp, and DOJES for chops.  So then I erased all those and FIJI as well and the D (formerly of DOLCE, opposite of agitato).  I decided that F__I had to be FIJI, so I put that back.  Then I rolled around GA__TTES in my head, and GAVOTTES swam by.  I wasn’t sure what it was, just that I’d heard it before, so I put that in.  Then I looked at __REEN.  Hmm, maybe DOREEN, that’s a name.  Ah, that would give me DIV for military grp!  Put the D in DOLCE back in and we have DOJOS for “Place to develop one’s chops” – ah, karate chops!  Hit the stop button on the timer, done!

Shout out to regular reader Susan – thanks for reading and posting, I appreciate it!