other Washington Post Sunday crossword, August 28 (contains answers)

Posted September 11, 2005 • Comments Off on Washington Post Sunday crossword, August 28 (contains answers)

Cw-050828-1

Title: Buy and Buy
Theme entries: phrases that include words sometimes used for businesses, punned into places to buy things.

23A, Where to buy soap?: bar association
38A, Where to buy feathers?: down market
72A, Where to buy easels?: stand firm
103A, Where to buy Jerry Garcia memorabilia?: dead center
120A, Where to buy light bulbs?: electric outlet [heehee]
13D, Where to buy portholes?: window shop
16D, Where to buy no-frills products?: plain dealer [this is the name of the newspaper in Cleveland, the first newspaper I ever remember being aware of]
70D, Where to buy combs?: part company
76D, Where to buy sandpaper?: rough house

Things I learned, with web links so you can learn them too:

29A, Britt, the Green Hornet: REID
34A, European food fishes: LINGS [do they not call a cod a cod?]
52A, Coral formation: CAY [I knew this as soon as I saw it, of course; I read a great book called The Cay when I was in junior high, and spent ages convincing other kids it’s prounced key.]
79A, Saunders of jazz: MERL
81A, Writer LeShan: EDA
85A, Utah ski spot: ALTA
89A, Dadaist Jean: ARP
4D, Actress O’Connor: UNA
25D, Writer Loos: ANITA
40D, Round Table knight: KAY [I knew this as soon as I saw it, too, since I’m pretty sure that’s what the big knight guy in The Sword in the Stone is called]
69D, ___ Island, Fla.: AMELIA
71D, Zhou ___: ENLAI [Yes, of course I knew this, but I wasn’t in school the day they changed the spelling of all Chinese names. This was CHOU before, wasn’t it? And wasn’t Mao called “Tse-Tung,” not “Zedong”?] [Okay, I looked it up, and the ‘old’ spellings are categorized as “Wade-Giles,” which is a transliteration system designed for specialists and not intuitive enough to teach the rest of us correct Chinese pronunciation. Hence the fact that “feng shui” isn’t pronounced “feng shui” but “fung shway.” Neat stuff, especially considering the recent brief discussion on Anna’s blog about Niger.]
73D, Dockers’ gp.: ILA [an organization affected pretty hard by Katrina, I suspect]
119D, “Brat Farrar” author: TEY

Overall:
I messed up 7 squares in this one (though two, where I changed TULLE to TOILE, don’t really show) and got 1 letter (intersection of EDA and ILA) outright wrong. This was a pretty good theme. It’s always a good sign when all the theme entries have question marks, meaning they’re going to be horrible puns. 9 theme entries, slightly more than average, and 14 things I had to look up, which is just awful awful awful.