Suzzzanne

A B O L I C A L

To Deb: NOOOOOOO! As the inimitable Hammerstein wrote: Regretfully they tell us But firmly they compel us To say goodbye To you So long, farewell Auf widersehen, goodnight [...] Goodbye Goodbye Goodbye Goodbye [Insert SOBbing emoji here!] But good luck in the new life. I love your writing, and hope to read your works elsewhere.

Best (or worst) thing to read as a teenager in 1972: "Aren't you glad you use Dial? Don't you wish everybody did?" That smell will haunt me to my dying day.

Fun fact: It seems that Pinocchio (1940), the second animated Disney feature film, is the first to have a named “cute animal” character (not counting Mickey Mouse short subject personas.) Snow White (1937) had lots of animals, but only named the cute little men, of whom I was thinking when saw the 47A clue. As to the whole puzzle, who can’t stand back and admire Creation of Adam paired with Celestial event, and Bell curve with Pie (graph); Herod described as a “Christmas story villain”, to name a few of the delectable entries? Mr. Cohn hints at hackneyed hyperbolic descriptions, Fun filled; I loved it--!!! optional. And his telegraphic recipe for Hollywood success: Meet Cute. But he adds equally telegraphic diagnoses of old car problems and what I consider online-comment problems: RUST and RANT. Papa couldn't have put it better. Yep, I did love it.

My most ridiculous misled moment of the year: I thought the mailbox clue was in the present, ie "REACHESIN". Which led to answer for "Mess around a sty" as PUS. Unsavory, yes, but that's no bar here! That ruined GETCOMFY, but I still couldn't recognize need for past tense in 33D. Must be too early in the morning.

Ah, PAEANS: the word that one can barely spell, let alone pronounce; usually LEFTALONE. Day made.

Showed my age on this one: "Fuzz" just had to be COPS! And thought those clouds might be CIRRA (???), so I was stuck on trying to find some kind of "California"-related --FAST--. ("What the heck is in vogue now?") Ridiculous train of thought kept me in dark for a longish time. Sometimes you just have to RENOUNCE those wrong rabbit holes.

KIX was the only way to break into this ocean. My favorite word though was the brilliantly clued AND photographed “GEODE”. Makes me think of Horton Hears a Who!

I am just disgusted with myself for not knowing the author of Hunger Games (not my type of book), when my name is Suzanne. Even when I'd got the 'z' was in there! I mean, how often does one get one's own name as a clue? Hmmph. Was also scratching head for long time to find a planet with 'i' as second letter, because I was stuck thinking the footnote term for "see above" was ibid!. Thought the creator was on to a new planet I'd never heard of, ha ha.

That feeling of panic... when only AMO, LEO and EIN were on my grid. (Rule of thumb: start with lowest hanging fruit, right?) I did love NINE, having tried a few times--in "A my name is Anna and I sell Apples..."--to come up with "A" countries, NOT continents, unable to get past four or five but knew it was surely more; so it had to be nine. (Antigua, Andorra, Angola, sadly fallen beneath my radar.) Ultimately when the letters started to fall in place, though, it was like the end of a game of online solitaire, faster and faster. Was that too easy? Not until the critical mass was reached, for me anyway. Phew. "Ich bin frei" ... for Saturday!

I hope I wasn't the only one who couldn't un-think "BOX" instead of BOA. The long arm of Amazon(.com) strikes again.

The theme clue didn't help me much, being hopeless at current tech talk. BUT seeing a few letters that had to be "INFINITE...", followed by "S_ROL_" somehow made me think of a player piano scroll! Which is an easy visual leap to the theme. Bingo.

X1 et al only made me think of BVDs (but probably would be 1X, 2X ...)

Lies oft told chez moi: Dishwasher needs emptying since yesterday? JAMAISVU Overflowing laundry basket? JAMAISVU Cat barf, not fresh? JAMAISVU

"Daytime Elmo" was sticking in my craw. Oy!

Fun times. It's interesting to reflect on just when the theme dawned on one. For example, when you the first clue you KNOW to be true--but won't fit--surfaces... For me, that was 19A. With OVEN and MICA solidly placed, it just had to be DECANT, but couldn't squeeze that into the glass slipper! So I thought "ok, leave off [AN]" and proceeded to think of the possibilities of [AN] holes throughout. Or LACUNAS, it would seem. Didn't get a gold star, though, until turning them all into rebuses, after paying a visit to Ms. Amlen. Rebuses confuseses. PS: "lacunae" would have satisfied me better (more).

I think it's hilarious that the seemingly simple preposition WITH has come to be so nuanced. No verb, adjective or even adverb required to tell that story. One needs to listen sharply to catch the drift!

Placing PARM next to W...SHIRE (as in "W'shire sauce") is especially resonant here in Mass, even for a non-native like me. The city is "Wuh-stuh", the sauce is "Wuh-stuh-shia". And I can't read the vegetarian dish as anything but "eggplant pahm". Ditto for chicken. (Apologies to proper linguists.) Easy peasy! Er, the pronunciation, not the puzzle...

On another note: There should be a special comment section just for the masterful photo play each and every day in this column. [The sparkly zebra was my all-time favorite but this is a close second.] Was anyone stumped (like me) in finding it not hard to SAY, but hard to PARSE, at first? A random-looking series of depressions that seem to relate to--what? It could be pie dough from some adventurous Youtuber. There is nothing there to crack the code until a vague memory surfaces. It's like trying to connect the dots in this crossword puzzle. Until you know, you don't know. Love that Eureka moment.

This puzzle wins my award for Most Beautiful-Most Repulsive references. You already know which one is most repulsive. But the photo of the sparkly "frisky little zebra pin" almost makes up for it. As an aside, perhaps the claim that this puzzle "belongs in the Louvre" is a bit of an unkind dig at that institution in its time of woe.

I feel like I did Kyle Perkins an injustice, caused by the gut punch of hearing of our beloved columnist's retirement. That is, I did not praise his work as it deserves. Wow. The double entendres here were more fun than a Barrel of Monkeys (more loops hoops and whatnot)!

Yes, a fun one, once you fit heart transplant into 10 letters. (I scoured my mind and the internet for something like "Heany Procedure" that's how blind I was to the nice pattern at first.) But I admit I was also stuck on the clouded mind, insisting that it had to be something about not seeing the trees for the forest (yes, I know that's backward). But, a Python Script Mr. Marquez, seriously? Now I don't feel so bad looking up *a few* things. If you can bring on the big guns, it's tit for tat...

And on another note: did 42A trigger memories of the delicious dialog between McCrea and Coburn in "The More the Merrier" (1943) for anyone else? Joe Carter: What do you do? Benjamin Dingle: I'm a well-to-do, retired millionaire. How about you? Joe Carter: Same. [Meaning, not "That's my opinion, too," but "Sure, whatever ridiculous thing you say"; here loaded with irony.] Just see it!

Dear Moderator, Got your signals crossed? "51A. An automated external defibrillator, or A.E.D., can be used by emergency medical technicians" not in this puzzle. PS Still always find as much clever pleasure in your write-ups as in the puzzle itself; thanks.

Whoever it was in these pages said “This is a great place to learn new things” really got it right. Rabbit hole today: …PARLOR. Does it not often convey something unsavory, salacious, or at least indulgent? My first thought on seeing that the puzzle needed a type ending in “O” was to try to squeeze in “Tattoo.” But here are some others: Ice cream Pizza Bar (in UK?) Suntan Love Sex And don’t forget “parlor trick.” So the word derived from the place where talking, perhaps unreserved, is indulged in, becomes associated with other less-socially-sanctioned activities. Name me one type of “parlor” that’s not just one cut above a “den”!

Stymied for a while by two stubborn wrong answers that I couldn't unsee: "cobra" (1D) jumped out and bit me right off the bat (aren't they curved?), and "sic--cbd" (40A=41D) were oh-so-obvious. Confusion ensued...Curses! (or just "CMON, guys!")

I was struggling in the murk, then all fell into place upon seeing one clue, the Madeleine moment: “AC_E_______TION”. The memories resurfaced, a box, the name ACME CORPORATION on it; an anvil; “Beep beep.” Amazing, dragging that stuff out from the depths: cartoons before every visit to the movie theater. I loathed that roadrunner. Much more hateful than Bugs Bunny who equally be-fuddled his predator, I wonder why.

Top contenders this year are still in that 8-member list. But if one of the alleged “Promising Dark Horses” (according to Google AI) makes it 9, it would be hard to find an appropriate crossword to include it. I can’t think of any words with “JAP” in it, except those with the fully named country. And those would defeat the crossword constructors’ aim of deflection and diversion.