Jesse

As a 16-year old, I lived in France for a year learning the language through immersion and living with a host family. The gendered nouns thing proved difficult to master. For example: Our neighbors puppy "chiot" was a girl puppy and I wanted to tell our neighbor that I liked her dog. So I said, "Vous avez une trés jolie chiote." And she reacted with fear and anger, "You have never been in my house! You don't know me. How rude! (in French, of course). Later I learned that "chiote" is the word for outhouse or more coarsely "shi%%er." That same year I got in an argument with a classmate at school and wanted to call her a bad word. I wanted to call her a little b#$ch and used the diminutive ending "-ette" and called her a "salopette." Her reaction was baffled and called me a weirdo and it ended our argument. I had called her a pair of overalls.

The name DEVO for a whippet is hilarious. Especially, one could argue, because of the devolution from wolf to whippet. Proud to boast that today was my fastest time ever for a Sunday. 23m!! Yay! (I am finally in league with my grandmother who could regularly finish Sundays in under 30m.)

Hi Deb and everyone. For clue 30D - "Pitch catcher" - besides a business pitch, the EAR is the discerner of musical pitch.

Db-E - Let the air out. B♮ - stop posing

13m13!! My personal best for a Saturday. Yesterday's was my best for a Friday: 11m21. I'm on a rolllllll!

Hi. I think the only way to parse 31D - "Bend it like Beckham!" is because he recently bent the KNEE and was knighted. Without that particular context the "it" would be ball, shot or goal.

"What ever floats your butt." [slow clap]

Time to get snooty: 51A is improperly clued. Reverb can be an electronically produced or naturally occurring. It is merely the way something sounds in a room or space. If you say something out loud right now it will have the qualities of reverb that pertain to the space you are in. I doubt that one would associate that with echo unless it was an extreme case of very high reflectivity in a rather large space. Reverb as an electronic produced effect is never applied to make an "echo effect" Those effects are achieved by a different class of effects called "Delay" which make echos of the signal that is fed into them at an adjustable rate, amount, diffusion etc... Let the nerd debates begin!

6D "What a budding musical artist hopes to land" felt dated to me. More accurate.... a viral spotify track? a Tik Tok placement? :(

It WAS a personal record. 9m36s. My fastest time for a Friday! 42A and 47A were the only tough spots for me. Yay! I'm bragging!

"71A. [That ship] is an odd phrase, but a neat bit of cluing to get us to SHE — assuming that “that ship” is the subject of the sentence, and not an object. Well, it is technically an object. It’s a boat. But I am repressing my smart-aleck tendencies." I object!