other Washington Post Sunday crossword, September 11 (contains answers)

Posted September 12, 2005 • Comments Off on Washington Post Sunday crossword, September 11 (contains answers)

Cw-050911

Title: People, Places and Things
Theme entries: are lists of a person, a place, and a thing, each two or three words, with the neighboring words ‘overlapping,’ as they are the same. Each one is clued the same, as “Person, place, and thing?” I think it’s interesting that the serial comma is present in the clues, but not in the title. The title follows AP style, but the clues follow Chicago.

27A: RAY CHARLES RIVER BOTTOM
47A: ROCK HUDSON BAY LEAF
60A: MAE WEST PALM BEACH PARTY
81A: SEAN PENN STATE FAIR
101A: IRVING BERLIN WALL CLOCK

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

19A, ___ vital: ELAN
20A, Rustling sound: SOUGH
23A, Erupter of 2002: ETNA [it quickly became clear that this was Etna, but I didn’t know it had erupted so recently]
54A, Speaker of fame: TRIS [I learned this recently from another crossword puzzle, so I was kind of miffed at myself for not remembering]
56A, Greeting of old: AVE [apparently means “hail,” like in Ave Maria]
57A, In medias ___: RES [It’s res again! This one means “in the middle of things,” according to Lin, who is quite the Latin scholar.]
109A, Combs of Cooperstown: EARLE
116A, Cioppino, e.g.: STEW
28D, June of “Love Nest”: HAVER
35D, “High Hopes” lyricist: CAHN
68D, Nosy Parker: YENTA [this is an interesting link, actually]
99D, Former Evans partner: NOVAK

Overall:
I messed up an awful TEN squares in this one (I’m not used to IRE being used as a verb and once again wrote IRK, for instance), and left one square blank (the intersection of ELAN and ALTAR, because I didn’t get how “Union station” was ALTAR until Lin explained the pun) but got no letters outright wrong. This was a neat theme, and discovering it was fun. There were only five theme entries, which is fine for a theme like this, and there were 12 things I had to look up, which is a high number but not as bad as last week.