Venn Mini 4

Words:  10

Average Length:  4.60

This one may (or may not) play a bit tougher than previous VMs – I can never tell.  Spolers/explanation below the break.

online | puz | pdf | solution

1A.  AMP – amplifier, ampere

4A.  CORDS – newborns have umbilical cords and cords (corduroy pants) have wales (ridges)

7A.  IDIOT – Village idiot; Dostoevsky wrote The Idiot

8A.  DEMME – Jodie Foster and Anthony Hopkins appeared together in Silence of the Lambs, Jonathan Demme’s most famous movie.

9A.  SLEEP – REM is a sleep stage; the famous Hamlet soliloquy contains the line “to sleep, perchance to dream”.  (The clue would work equally well for DREAM.)  I wanted to further the REM misdirection by having the second half of the clue be “Sidewinder”; the band had a medium-sized hit song called “The Sidewinder Sleeps Tonite,” but it’s 30 years old and I wasn’t sure how well-known it is.

1D.  ACIDS are used in etching, and “on acid” is slang for tripping on LSD

2D.  MODEL – a model poses on a runway, and an A380 is an airplane model from Airbus. Major misdirect on this one!

3D.  PRIME – beef and numbers both may be prime

5D.  DOME – Buckminster Fuller is known for designing a geodesic dome, and the Pantheon in Rome is one of the most famous domed buildings in the world

6D.  STEP – it’s a synonym for stair and, in music, a step is a whole tone (e.g., from C to D).