Stefan
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Los Angeles
It's funny how a wrong answer with a right letter can accidentally unlock things for you. Facing a three letter "project" (for I could only conceive of it as a noun) I thought of Job (not the character—that's intended to be in "capital correct/lowercase incorrect" format); checking whether and how the J would work in the across clue with the few other letters I'd put in there, I came up with THATSMYJAM and was excited enough about this that I forgot about finishing the Job until it was obvious that it was JUT and "project" was a verb.
I realized circa 2014 that when you number its letters 1-7 from left to right, GOOF OFF's odd letters spell GOOF and its even letters spelled OFF. Glad to see this knowledge getting around.
I was thinking the "netminder" could be a fisherman (or -woman), which biased how I dealt with the top left corner: when I saw the third word was A, the biting comment became a DIs, and the Spanish "that" became ESe (one of the other two Spanish endings for said demonstrative pronoun), ultimately leaving me with seALIE and making me believe "sealie" might be a slang term for someone who works on a boat. Luckily it was the only questionable word I had when the site told me I wasn't done yet, and once I thoroughly considered my other options on the Spanish word, DIG and GOALIE fell into place.
Trying to join in on the game of making our own themed clues/answers, the best I can do is a bilingual one: Bred -> BRAVO NETWORK ("red" is the Spanish word for "network")
I didn't have a problem with it, but the McDonald's name for the breakfast sandwich is McGriddles, always with an S, for reasons I couldn't tell you. Nothing official (menu, packaging, advertising) ever has it singularized.
After filling in the bottom four crosses, I had smuCKER for a second for the grocery store surname, but gave up on that because I doubted the pool wear would end with U. I was stuck on the top left for a good little bit, until I considered the possibility that EEP could fill in that B___S space, which got me to SPEEDO, then to TVSET and CROCKER, to VENEER, to TREETOADS and SEEDMONEY, which took care of TENREC for me and got me through just under the 20-minute wire.
@Federalista I think this is my favorite in the comments.
@Kathy You don't know what gene therapy is if you think that.
@sotto voce I had been out of school since the middle of the previous decade, but the seed for it was planted when I was in college, working in the music department's recital hall. In 2002, I saw a percussion concert there that included selections called "Rational Melodies" from Tom Johnson. (Since it was a percussion concert, malleted instruments were used.) The one that captured my imagination was Rational Melody XV, in which the performer played a 5-tone figure, 15 notes in length, with this self-similar property. The way it was composed, the figure is to be played through over and over again, adding a note in the spaces between, one by one, until the melody is being played twice, twice as fast, in the same space. I worked out that a sequence of 7, with three different notes/digits/letters was also possible, and I wondered if there might be a word or phrase with a 1223233 pattern (I gave up pretty quickly on trying to find a 122324352345355 sequence of letters), and I kept wondering for years, until I noticed (while doing unrelated work at my job) that GOOF OFF fit the bill. In 2022 I tried punching the sequence of 15, with 12345 changed to ABCDE, into a cryptogram solver with various spacings. The closest thing to a coherent sentence that I got was ILL ALMA SLAMS ___. Given the self-similar property, there's enough information in the words I gave to fill in the blank, but I'll give a further hint and say it's allowed in today's crossword but not in the comment section.
@Stefan Whoops! It was in yesterday's puzzle, not today's.
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