Steve C

@M Yeah, I had coulomb in there too, at first. Same number of letters…. But capacitance is measured in farads. I taught physics for decades and never came across the faraday as measuring charge. Turns out it is an obsolete unit from electrochemistry.

@Barry Ancona Respectfully, if a clue required a cactus to be a bird, would you say “biology is down the hall?” Right is right, and wrong is wrong. I loved the puzzle, but winced hard at the clue for volt.

@Barry Ancona Really? Are we going there? Yes, I think the comparison, while hastily arrived at, is somewhat apt. Cacti and birds are both eukaryotic, multicellular organisms. That puts them in adjacent chapters in an introductory biology textbook. And one species, the Cactus Wren, kind of ties it all together. Electric potential (whose unit, as you know, is the volt, short for the joule per coulomb) and power (watt, short for joule per second) both have something to do with energy, but so do lots of things. The lay person sees “watt” and “volt” listed on a light bulb package, but that does not make them interchangeable. I respect that you post on this board frequently, and I am just some guy, but I stand by my original comment that, while I loved this puzzle (more than most, in fact), and I lack the imagination to improve on the particular clueing referred to by the OP, it is wince-inducing and, on its own, kind of indefensible. Something about an emu…….?