Constructor: Ned White
Relative difficulty: Pretty easy for a Wednesday
THEME: Drop The THE (57A - Sean Parker's famous advice to Mark Zuckerberg in naming The Facebook...)
Theme answers:
- 17 ACROSS: Early "Saturday Night Live" camera command? CUT TO CHASE
- 24 ACROSS: "You want Pepsi or Coke? eg POP QUESTION
- 36 ACROSS: Chauffeurs the actor Kevin to his house? BRINGS HOME BACON
- 46 ACROSS: Basic query to a physicist? WHATS MATTER
American Sign Language is the natural language that serves as the predominant sign language of Deaf communities in the United States and most of Anglophone Canada.
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Hello! I'm Karen, first time guest blogger here in Baltimore - home of The Wire, some frustratingly uneven sports teams and snowballs with marshmallow sauce. I'm taking a short break from my regular gig as a yoga teacher while I recover from surgery on a previously fractured hip. The injury was unrelated to yoga so my current situation shouldn't discourage you from taking a class. Yoga is great and everyone should do it. (I can't say the same for bicycling in Copenhagen while it's raining and you have jet lag).
Ok, here goes...This puzzle gave me some anxiety because a) I'm a blogging novice and b) it's been consistently theme-y all week and I wasn't expecting another theme today. Once I settled in, things proceeded smoothly. Except for the theme clues, everything else was relatively simple. I was particularly pleased with the abundance of British references: 14A Archibald LEACH, Carey Grant's real name having just seen a fascinating documentary about and 64A ANNE, the English Princess (who never gets enough credit for being the workhorse of that family if you ask me). Following the Anglophilia trope here, we had 61A EARL, "Downton Abbey" title and 45D ARTHUR, Excalibur's owner. I had no idea that 30A ANTS leave pheromone trails or that the 65A 1953 A.L. M.V.P. was Al ROSEN (the Hebrew Hammer), but the corresponding down clues made those easy to get. Also, 7D, TRANQ was not a word I'd heard to describe calmer, but I was glad for the Q because it allowed to get that second themed clue POPQUESTION. The four themed across clues were nicely constructed to be fairly clever homographs, CHASE, POP, BACON, and MATTER and the theme's modern cultural reference was a nice change in a week with puzzles featuring lots of the classic clues.
- 32A Haiti's Papa Doc or Baby Doc DUVALIER - The family of authoritarian dictators in Haiti until they were overthrown in 1986.
- 1A Insurance giant based in Columbus, Ga AFLAC - They started with that duck in 2000. It's been 18 years of that duck.
- 33D Sharp footwear ICESKATES - The first ones were made from the leg bones of a horse and attached to the feet with leather straps.
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