I liked RAWR - cannot remember seeing that in a puzzle before. I get your point, as at least a good percentage of the solvers cannot zoom in for a better look. Not zoomed in, it looked like the twitter bird to me. However, you cannot do that in the paper version, and possibly on other apps. Apparently he copied that review into this blog - on the IOS app, I zoomed in on the shape you did not like, and it definitely was an elf. I had a bizarre dream last night - one where had two blogs - this one, and another where he is generally nice in his reviews. On top of that, we had RUBELLA as the answer Noticed CDC crossing the DR FAUCI - nice touch. The long downs were a little unexciting, but seemed pretty fresh. It's 53Dpresent whenever I'm looking for a cast iron pan/pot/grill/ or stomach.
Maybe I'm shopping in the bargain basement, but the name I know for cast iron is "Lodge". It felt like the Sundee I've always wanted. This was obviously an impressive feat of constructioneering - brava! - and for me at least, it was fun solving this one - double brava! How 'bout clever and cute? Except for that MAN rebus - kind of a cheat for gingerbreadMAN, but the limitations with that are obvious, so I'll allow it. Okay, so perhaps hilarity is too strong a word. And of course COOKIE names themselves are "clued wackily" for hilarity and please stop making me type COOKIE. "cut THRU" the various names of COOKIE(s). The rebus shapes are in the form of COOKIE CUTTERS and they actually, physically I'm not a fan of the title not matching the theme, but that's a minor nit.īut, can someone explain.oh, I think it just dawned on me! What could that mean? Season as in "Tis the Season" to Taste.COOKIE(s)? Or season as in seasoning your COOKIE(s)? I think the first option makes most sense to me, but it's kind of a stretch, so maybe I'm, wait for it.wrong. So the "elf" can take the long-tailed monkey and get the f*&% out of Dodge, as far as I'm concerned, but the rest of the puzzle can definitely stay. I bet if I go downstairs and look at our COOKIE CUTTERS, there's not an elf in the bunch. Also, I don't think of "elf" as an iconic cookie cutter shape. The other images were all pretty self-explanatory, and visually discernible. Normally when something is hard to come up with, you look to the cross, but in this case the cross was just some weird chicken image, so. TRUE S(ELF) was somehow hard for me to come up with. it looks almost nothing like an "elf" and b. That square was the last thing I got because a. It's wordplay, and that's all it has to be! My only real problem with the theme was that "elf" shape, LOL, what in the world? I mean, look at the grid, above, and you can see *exactly* what the image looked like on my screen, and what it looked like is a chick emerging from an egg? Some weird eagle? It's definitely avian. The cookie cutter shapes literally cut cookie names in two. It's true that you would not use COOKIE CUTTERS on most of these cookies, but that's not really the point. It's an impressively complex theme, involving a double meaning for "cutter" as well as a double use of the "cutter" square (mere image in the Across, actual answer component in the Down). Not sure I *fully* grasped that until I hit the revealer at the very end.
Took me longer than it probably should have to realize that the cookies were cookies ( PEANUT BUTTER doesn't really scream cookie if it's not in a clearly cookie context), and took me even longer to realize that the shapes were related to COOKIE CUTTERS. This was one of those puzzles where I coulda / shoulda just jumped down to the revealer to get a leg up on what the hell was going on, but I'm stubborn, so I just let it unfold top to bottom.