"Damn Yankees" team / THU 6-12-14 / "Well-bred insolence," per Aristotle / Pawel Pawlikowski film / Nevil Shute's "___ Like Alice" / Line 22 on Form 1040

Constructor: Mark Feldman

Relative difficulty: Pretty hard, I think.


THEME— All of it: Theme answers are the last words of familiar phrases that start with "The whole ..."

Theme answers:

• 17A: MEGILLAH (Long, involved story, in slang)
• 18A: BALL OF WAX (Business, informally)
• 30A: SHOOTING MATCH (Competition in marksmanship)
• 51A: ENCHILADA (Queso-topped dish)
• 54A: THE WHOLE (100% ... or words that can precede 17-, 18-, 30- and 51-Across

Knock knock! Who's there? That's right, you're stuck with PuzzleGirl again today. Rex's flight got canceled so I got an SOS text from Detroit. Now I just told you all yesterday about how I was pretty much done with the whole blogging thing for this week, right? That should mean your expectations are sufficiently low. I guess we'll find out.

I had a REALLY hard time with this puzzle. I didn't want to admit it to you earlier this week, but I actually haven't been solving puzzles daily for a couple months now. Things just got busy here and for some reason, puzzling sort of fell off my radar. When Rex asked me to sub for him this week, I thought "Great! An excuse to get back in the habit!" And it really has been great. The problem is that when you don't regularly solve puzzles, a Thursday can kind of throw you for a loop. At least that was my experience today.

I did manage to finish the puzzle, but it was very slow going. It seemed like every clue was opaque and coming up with the answers required WAY more brain cell activity than anything else I did today. And I tell you all that to say that I'm probably not a great judge of this puzzle's difficulty level. And the fact that I've never heard of one of the theme answer, well to me that says I'm probably not a great judge of ANYTHING to do with this puzzle.

THE WHOLE MEGILLAH. Huh. Megillah is, of course, a Hebrew word, so the phrase is basically Jewish (can a phrase be Jewish?). Me? I'm not Jewish. I do know a few things about Judaism though. I've been to a bris. My BFF sends me hamentashen every year at Purim. I know when to say L'shana tovah and understand why some Jews won't use umbrellas on Shabbat. But "The Whole Megillah" is new to me. I wonder if it would make a difference if I lived in New York or even in a neighborhood with a larger Jewish population. I'm curious to know whether you know this phrase or not. (And whether you're Jewish or not.) In any case, it made that corner of the grid very tough for me but I'm happy to have learned something from this puzzle.

Quick Hits:

• 5A: Spencer of "Good Morning America" (LARA)— Never heard of her.
• 12A: Common flavorer in Italian sausage (FENNEL)— Reminds me of one of my favorite "Sports Night" exchanges.

Casey: Hey what do you know about the fennel salad here?
Gordon: What do you need to know?
Casey: Well, like, for instance...what's fennel?

• 20A: Home of "The Gist" and "Political Gabfest" (SLATE)— Expected this to be a TV station, not an "e-mag."
• 27A: Final order (DESSERT)— I've worked in the legal profession basically my whole life, so I could only think of "order" as something a judge would hand down, which made DESSERT pretty tough to see.
• 40A: Modern term for "Roman fever" (MALARIA)— Who knew?
• 47A: In groups (ELITES)— In this clue "in" is an adjective, not a preposition. So. Tricky.
• 48A: Holy SEE.— Raise your hand if you tried COW here.
• 57A: Mark Twain's boyhood home (HANNIBAL)— Thankful for this gimme.
• 5D: Miller character (LOMAN)— I was thinking "A Streetcar Named Desire," not "Death of a Salesman." Two totally different plays written, coincidentally, by two total different playwrights.
• 9D: Lit up (ABLAZE)— Tried AFLAME first.
• 10D: Certain metalworker (PLATER)— I'm sure this is a real thing, but that doesn't mean I have to like it.
• 12D: Bone whose name is Latin for "pin" (FIBULA)— Lots of learning going on during this solve.
• 29D: It has four bases (DNA)— I have no idea what this means.
• 36D: What a hygrometer measures (HUMIDITY)— I was just telling someone the other day how when I lived in New Mexico I had to laugh at all the people acting like they were dying when the humidity got all the way up to, say, 14%.
• 46D: Kind of center (REHAB)— No no no.
• 53D: Not be able to say "say," say (LISP)— Like Daffy!

Thanks for stopping by. With any luck, Rex will be back tomorrow.

Love, PuzzleGirl