SNARFED (43D: Gobbled up) - SNARFED seems to be much more common than SCARFED in puzzles, but that doesn't stop me from putting the -C- in every dang time.Of course, I had no sense of the theme to lean on the crossing until near the end. SCUT (38D: Rabbit's tail) - You can see above that this is where I finished, having never seen the word before.A little twisted without being tortured, a little corny, but gettable without too much pause and it brought me a smirk in a puzzle that had a good amount of straightforward cluing for the back half of the week. The clear highlight for me is 40A: What may blossom from buds? for BROMANCE. The more I look at this, the more I see rough fill, but figuring out the theme after the fact was a great AHA moment that I figure would have been even better mid-solve, literally every down entry intersects with theme material, and I'd rather have more creativity on Thursdays than less. Casablanca is one of those movies I know I should see, but in my life it only comes up in crosswords and by now I've ironed out the difference between Casablanca's ILSA and Young Frankenstein's INGA so I keep kicking the can down the road.Įverything is pretty straightforward (upon review, dare I say 'bland'?) through the top half or so - I enjoyed TELECOM and ECOLAW (6D: Anti-fracking legislation, e.g.) because I dropped them in off their initial letters, but they're not terribly snappy, and MEER feels like a stretch, relevance-wise - but I needed NUDGED, MORITA, and NOCARBS (42D: One dieting strategy) to get me into the short stuff and make sense of the bottom two themers, where I ended. At that time, I tried to piece together a card game from about half the letters for a while. LIAM (though I couldn't remember all three Hemsworths and worried I was picking the wrong non-Chris brother) TETES FRAT FAQIR were quick entries across the top, and I had to chuckle at ROULETTE (11D: Rigged game in "Casablanca"), which would have stumped me for a while had it not come up with the same reference at either the Indie 500 or Lollapuzzoola this summer. All that explained, I didn't get the theme at all while solving, and just decided to brute-force through it.
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