Words: 28 (9×9)
Average Length: 5.07
The title of this puzzle relates to the seed, 4 Down/5 Down. The songs mentioned in the clues for 16 Across and 16 Down are quite good. Follow the links if you don’t know them and are curious. Just before I hit “save” on the puzzle for the final time, it occurred to me that there’s another possible answer to 9 Across – it would be interesting to see which one came to mind first for most solvers.
Words: 70
Average Length: 5.29
Fair warning: I had a bit of fun while cluing today’s puzzle. I hope the result, while challenging, is still fun and perhaps even amusing.
One explanatory note regarding 52 Down: a “fake book” is a compendium of lead sheets, which give the melody line and chords of a song but not a full arrangement. They’re useful in settings where an amateur musician might not know all the tunes.
Words: 76
Average Length: 4.87
I’m posting this just before setting out for the “Big W” – that’s Wantagh, NY for those of you not in the know (i.e., everyone except a Wantaghite) – for my 50th high school reunion. On the one hand, I’m really excited to reconnect with some terrific folks from my past. On the other hand, that past is way longer than seems possible!
Anyway, to mark the occasion, today’s puzzle crams in lots of stuff from the year I graduated, 1976.
Words: 11
Average Length: 4.91
The seed for today’s mini was 1 Across, which randomly popped into my head yesterday while watching the Nats “earn” their 42nd blown save of the season (the previous MLB record was 37). Perhaps it was a subconscious realization that the only hope for our bullpen is divine intervention.
Words: 66
Average Length: 5.73
I’m big into Connections. Not the New York Times game, which often irks me. The real thing – the connections between all 8.3 billion of us, all cousins of one degree or another That’s today’s theme.
I’m particularly taken by 43 Across, a bland answer with enormous significance: As the clue says, nearly everyone living outside Africa today can trace a large portion of their DNA to a group of 1000-2500 breeding-age individuals who left Africa only 50,000 years ago.
And if you go back another 100,000 years or so, then all of us – regardless of where we live – can trace our lineage back to a single woman, “Mitochondrial Eve”, who lived in East Africa (33 Across, to be exact) around 6,000 generations ago.*
In other words, we’re all related (17 Down), and we’re all in this together (20 Across)!
OK, lesson’s over. Time to solve, cousins!
*Mitochondrial Eve wasn’t the only woman alive at the time, but she was the only one whose progeny survive today. (The male most recent common ancestor, “Y-Chromosome Adam,” likely lived more than 200,000 years ago – he and Mt-Eve weren’t a couple.)
Words: 28 (9×9)
Average Length: 4.93
Today’s midi came together fortuitously. My three original seeds proved difficult to fill around, no matter how I placed them. But in the course of trying, I came up with the answer/clue at 5 Down and decided to use that as a seed instead. Then came 4 Down, and voila – the rest of the fill came smoothly.
If anyone’s interested, I posted a poem a couple of days ago – A Literal Lyric Poem – where each of the 26 lines is an excerpt from a song lyric. For line 1, the artist begins with A, for line 2 with B, and so on until for line 26, the artists starts with Z. After the poem, there’s a list of the artists and songs, but you may want to try annotating the poem to see how many of the songs/artists you can get without looking at the list.
Words: 72 (21×11)
Average Length: 5.25
While mulling over ideas for a Labor Day puzzle, I found the quote that’s the focus of this puzzle and knew I had to use it. The title refers to the ratio of Fortune 500 CEO pay to the pay of an average worker in those companies. I believe it answers the question in the quote.
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