50a FUCKING EIGHTY / FUCKING AĪs always, this is an interesting theme, though it was interesting that the title focuses on tea as in the drink but the added letters are the homophonic TY.Four stars.Īdam Wagner’s New York Times crossword-Ben’s reviewīrendan Emmett Quigley’s Crossword #1497, “Spot of Tea” solution for 8/18/202 It did require a fair amount of post-solve cogitating to sort out (at least on my part) so I’m not sure it totally works, but it gets points for ingenuity. Well, I often like something different, and this is definitely that. I didn’t know ELSTON but the crossings seemed fairer than ERNANI’s. ON A TIRADE feels a bit artificial, but it works. DRY CLEANS is nice in the NW and SMIDGEN in the NE. I’m not sure I totally buy that explanation, so if you have something better, pray tell.įill-wise, I love that SW corner with “ HOT DAMN!” and ESPERANTO. Therefore they are “hidden” in their entries, but the colors help us to identify them in the grid. “Stick” is actually a verb in the grid, “grass” is part of a last name, and “rock” is the musical genre. My guess is that each of those items are not actually those items in the grid. A stick is usually brown, grass is usually green, and a rock is often (though hardly always) gray. The revealer says “based on its surroundings.” So, what’s around those colors? Well, nothing above or before or after each color seems to pertain, but below each “color” phrase is another entry of the same length: BROWN RICE & STICK IT TO, GREEN-LIT & GRASSLEY, and GRAY LADY & ROCK STAR. Try as I might to change letters around, nothing worked. Are the letters in the colors somehow changed from the letters in CHAMELEON? I decided LEONE was a red herring.Ĭhameleons change colors, right? And there are three long entries with colors in theme: BROWN RICE, GREEN-LIT, and GRAY LADY. Aha! Could this be part of a CHAMELEON? But where was the rest of it, and why didn’t I see any other parts in other sections of the grid? I decided to finish off in the SE.Īfter some struggles with ERNANI, especially crossing NYK and RACES (clued opaquely), I again saw no other parts of a CHAMELEON. So we’re looking for chameleons, eh? But I could see nothing on the left side that pointed to anything hidden. My solve proceeded thusly: I had filled in nearly the entire left half when I got to the revealer at 65a CHAMELEON.
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