I’m back from Europe! Over the coming weeks, I may recount some of the touristy things I did and post some photos, but I’ll sum up briefly with this: Copenhagen is a lovely city, Norway has many nice-looking fjords, and the friendly people in Frankfurt didn’t mind sharing their beer with this non-German-speaking American, for some reason.
In the interest of transparency, I have to report that there was a mistake in one of the clues from last week’s puzzle. The clue for 33D read [Cricket World Cup event], with the answer TEST MATCH. As several readers pointed out, a test match is a long-form cricket event that takes place over five days. The Cricket World Cup, however, features one-day matches, so it doesn’t qualify as test cricket. You’d think that I would have learned this attending the college with the only varsity cricket team in the United States, but I never got into the sport. Anyway, mea culpa on that one, and the clue will be rewritten for the online puzzle and any future printed editions.
For today’s puzzle, we have the return of everybody’s favorite battler of linguistic crutches, Captain Obvious! He made his first appearance back in March, and I brought him back for a sequel.
Here’s what Captain Obvious wanted you to know for his second outing in the Post Magazine:
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- 23A: [“___, that info will be unfamiliar"] is BEFORE YOU KNOW IT.
- 40A: [“___, everything we tried previously didn’t work"] is IF ALL ELSE FAILS.
- 48A: [“___, and you’ll have edited the essay I sent you"] is MARK MY WORDS.
- 68A: [“___, which you can see with that graffiti"] is THE WRITING IS ON THE WALL.
- 85A: [“___, you’ll find edible seeds"] is IN A NUTSHELL.
- 98A: [“___, there are fingers just like with that opposite body part"] is ON THE OTHER HAND.
- 117A: [“___, and we can have a conversation about Satan"] is SPEAK OF THE DEVIL.
He covers a lot of different topics, doesn’t he? I picture the good captain as a guy who arrives at some location just to deliver his line, smile at the camera and fly off to another random part of the city, where the citizens really, really need somebody to state the obvious. He’s a superhero, after all.
Other notable answers and clues:
- 46A: [Warplane name defined as “flying solo" when read backward] is the crossword staple ENOLA, part of the name of the World War II bomber Enola Gay. I hadn’t realized until writing this puzzle that it spells ALONE backward. Hopefully the clue wasn’t too much of a stretch.
- 101A: [Anadromous swimmers] are SALMON. An interesting word, there. “Anadromous” refers to fish that migrate from the sea to fresh water to spawn.
- 10D: [Trivia quiz website with the slogan “Mentally stimulating diversions"] is SPORCLE. One neat feature is that the quizzes are all user-generated. Crossword constructor Trip Payne has written many quizzes for the site, and he’s been on a real Academy Awards kick of late.
- 45D: [M. Night Shyamalan’s frequent plot device] is a plot TWIST. Hmm, now that I realize it, maybe I could have made SHYAMALAN the other nine-letter answer in that “Alternate Endings” puzzle from a few months ago. Some food for thought: If Shyamalan’s films all feature some kind of twist at the end, and the audience basically knows to expect it at this point, do they really count as twists anymore?
- 50D: [Teacher of Beethoven, Schubert and Liszt] was Antonio SALIERI. Now, “Amadeus” is a really good movie, but it’s based on a myth about a super-intense rivalry between Salieri and Mozart, in which Salieri even plotted Mozart’s death. Salieri taught Mozart’s son, and it’s hard to imagine a hated rival doing such a thing.
- 88D: [“All right!"] is HELL YEAH. I thought this was a fun answer.
- 108D: [Olympian’s weapon] is the ÉPÉE. I haven’t gotten around to watching any of the fencing events during the Rio Games, but I did learn an interesting fencing fact a few days ago: Aladár Gerevich of Hungary won a gold medal in six consecutive Olympics for team saber over a span of 28 years, starting in 1932 and ending in 1960. (The Olympics were canceled in 1940 and 1944 because of WWII.) Although team saber isn’t an individual event, it’s still the longest streak of consecutive gold medals in an Olympic event for one person, and tied for the longest span between first and last gold medals.
I’ll see you next week!
**Special thanks to Erik Agard and Sam Ezersky for test-solving this puzzle, and to my copy editor Jenny Abella for her thorough fact-checking and proofreading of clues.**
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