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Thursday, November 28, 2024, Brent Sverdloff & Katie Hale

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 Music of the Spheres O vis eternitatis ( O force of Eternity ) Hildegard von Bingen As our friend Jayce would say, "I liked this puzzle".  Today's constructors, Brent Sverdloff and Katie Hale , remind us that music is literally a universal language, a "force of eternity", recognized and appreciated not only here on Earth, but all over the Universe.  They demonstrate this with three theme clues filled with songs from different genres, each ending with the name of an extra-terrestrial body ...  16. *Frank Sinatra song:  FLY ME TO THE MOON .  Sinatra is covering a jazz standard written in 1954 by Bart Howard  ... 29. *Beatles song:  HERE COMES THE SUN .  A classic rock song written by Beatle George Harrison  ... 49. *Bing Crosby song:  SWINGING ON A STAR .  An American pop standard with music composed by Jimmy Van Heusen and lyrics by Johnny Burke . It was introduced by Bing Crosby
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Thursday, November 21, 2024, Owen Bergstein & Shannon Rapp

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  Breaking Up is Hard to Do Today's constructors are Owen Bergstein and Shannon Rapp . Shannon is a veteran and Owen is taking his opening bow on the Corner.  Their theme was a little unusual today as it is ROW  based rather than CLUE based.  To make that a little clearer I'll start with the reveal ... 62A. Tune that can soothe an aching heart, and a feature of rows 3, 5, 8, and 11 in this puzzle:  BREAKUP SONG .  To try to make that a bit clearer I've snipped the aforementioned 4 rows out of the grid to make them easier to annotate (don't worry I'll put them back in a bit).  Also I've left the original clues and fill in their original locations below. Here's ROW 3 :   The first thing we observe is that our constructors' "break up songs" are not necessarily sad songs (a la maestro Neil Sedaka in our opening number).  They are merely "broken up" by a BLACK space.  The second thing is that they are genres of songs,
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Thursday, November 14, 2024, Lynn Lempel

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 A SIMPLE THEME Today veteran Lynn Lempel returns with a simple letter insertion theme.  Each of her 3 themers is clued with a perfectly reasonable question and the resulting 2 word fill is a pun on the clue, prefixed with the letter  ... which when removed results in a new in the language phrase.  This was a helpful theme and if you found the reveal it made the puzzle easier to solve.  Here are Lynn's themers ... 16A. Reason for copyright suits filed by Atari?:  APING PONG .  I recall playing Atari's  PONG in college back in the 60's at a local eatery in College Park, MD.   It was one of the very first video games.  I'm sure it was often imitated, but I don't know if Atari actually sued anyone for APING it. It was played on a computer controlled CRT mounted in a table top and looked like this ... 24A. Where squirrels stash treats?:  ACORN HOLE .  Where else would they stash them?  OTOH C orn Hole is a game -- here's how it's played ... 
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