Greetings everyone – I hope you got to observe Remembrance/Veterans Day earlier this week. I went to the Veterans Day parade, saw the wreath laying at City Hall, and enjoyed the day off. We finally got a little rain here, breaking a 37-day dry spell. Not sure it was in time for some of the plants in my yard, but hopefully most were well into their winter dormant period, even though the weather has been so mild this fall. The holidays are rapidly approaching – US Thanksgiving is just over two weeks away! – and it will be 2025 before we know it, and we don’t know what will happen after that.
- Name: Furniture Set
- Grid size: 15×15
- Entries: 74
- Difficulty: Easy (my solve time: 5:51)
Another quick solve this week, but unlike last week I figured out the theme pretty quickly during the solve – the themers all are common phrases that have had an item of furniture added to the end and clued punnily to match the new phrase:
- 17A: [See if a sloshy sleep is for you?]: TEST THE WATERBED – When you test the water you try something out on a small scale before committing to it, as you would stick your toe in a pool of water to test the temperature before diving in. I guess you would want to do something similar if you were considering the purchase of a waterbed.
- 27A: [Be without a bridal box?]: HAVE NO HOPE CHEST – If you are despairing – let’s say about the outcome of a recent contest – you may feel you have no hope. If you don’t have a hope chest, you have no place to put the things you are amassing for a future marriage.
- 45A: [Hymn about a reading lamp and alarm clock holder?]: O HOLY NIGHTSTAND – “O Holy Night” is a classic Christmas song/hymn. I guess if you have really great bedside furniture, you may refer to it as a holy nightstand.
- 58A: [Three-legged livingroom piece?]: WEAK COFFEE TABLE – I could swear I’ve heard weak coffee used as an idiom to indicate something that is less potent than it ought to be, like after tasting purportedly spicy hot sauce, you might remark “that’s some weak coffee.” But pretty much all the sources I found were using it literally – referring to actual coffee that’s watered down or made improperly. In any event, you wouldn’t want to place a cup of hot liquid on a potentially unstable three-legged coffee table.
The four grid-spanning themers would normally give me pause to think that this may be a harder solve, but I dove right in and barely noticed them. Actually, once I got the theme, the themers fell pretty quickly – I was able to guess the ending of at least a couple of them. There are some harder or more obscure entries in the grid – I’ll flag a few in Other stuff below.
Canadian content:
- 16A: [Inuit knife]: ULU – I got familiar with this utensil when I lived in Alaska – they were often seized by security at the airport when tourists who had purchased them as souvenirs tried to take them home in their carry-on luggage. The ulu is used by Inuit First Nations across the Alaskan and Canadian Arctic.
- 24A: [Tommy Douglas’s party, now the NDP]: CCF – Thomas Clement Douglas was elected to the House of Commons of Canada in 1935 as a member of the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation. The CCF became the New Democratic Party in 1961.
- 34A: [Grey Cup airer]: TSN – This coming weekend the Toronto Argonauts take on the Winnipeg Blue Bombers in the 2024 Grey Cup, the championship of the Canadian Football League, which will be broadcast on TSN.
- 62A: [P.E.I. clock setting]: AST – Prince Edward Island observes Atlantic Standard Time between the first Sunday in November and the second Sunday in March.
Other stuff:
- 8D: [Ascot securer]: SCARF PIN – I kept trying to get TIE TACK to work here, but gave up and got it from the crosses.
- 12D: [Alaska natives]: ALEUTS – Clever to cross this with 16A – Aleuts also use ulus.
- 19D: [“Yeah, ___” (doubter’s words)]: RIGHT – I am so used to seeing “I BET” as the entry for clues like this that it took me a few seconds to see that it wouldn’t fit.
- 20A: [Hebrew prophet]: HOSEA – I had 4D, 5D, and 6D already, so confidently put MOSES in here. Hosea is someone quite different.
- 22D: [Not ajar]: SHUT – I laughed a little at this, since AJAR is usually the answer, not the clue.
- 41D: [Rotgut wine]: PLONK – I know this primarily due to former Baltimore Sun copyeditor John McIntyre who uses it (the word, not the drink, as far as I know) periodically in his blog.
- 42D: [Top military drs.]: SGS – I’m assuming this is short for the plural of Surgeon General, but I don’t think that title/rank is really used in the military, at least not in the US. Here the Surgeon General is the the chief medical doctor and health educator for the United States and the head of the US Public Health Service. Almost two years ago I got to meet the current Surgeon General and had my photo taken with him and Secretary Pete.
- 45D: [“Star Wars” sage, for short]: OBI WAN – Another entry where it took me a few seconds before I abandoned trying to fit YODA in here somehow. Obi-Wan Kenobi provides us this week’s quote.
Quote of the week:
“If you define yourself by the power to take life, the desire to dominate, to possess…then you have nothing.”
– Obi Wan Kenobi
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