![]() Why is this relevant? Because he brought up Melville's classic tales of the South Seas, "OMOO" and "TYPEE," and honestly I nearly teared up because I hadn't seen them in so long. I was reading about the rise of Tiki culture in California in the mid-20th century and the writer (Kevin Starr) dug back to its 19th century roots, when America's fascination with Polynesia began. This is why I can never really be that mad at CHER or ADELE, no matter how many times I see them. I could go off about what a great actress GENA Rowlands is and how much I always enjoy seeing her, even if you could argue her name falls under the general rubric of "Crosswordese." Greatness transcends "Crosswordese," imho. These are all clothing-based metaphors used to describe kinds of (flawed) people. STUFFED SHIRT is more a metaphor, and actual SCAREDY PANTS don't even exist. BLACK HAT, EMPTY SUIT (actually, "SUIT" = "executive" is a paradigmatic example of metonymy). ![]() Clothing metonyms! Actually, only some of these are metonyms (where an attribute of a thing stands for the thing). There's a great consistency to this set, as the phrases don't just *end* with clothing (like endings being a conventional thematic premise), but stand, as a whole, for a kind of person. The metaphors got somewhat more familiar to me as the grid went on, with BLACK HAT and EMPTY SUIT being semi-familiar but not terms I'd use, and TURNCOAT and STUFFED SHIRT being familiar terms I wouldn't hesitate to use myself. As for the theme, I think it's pretty lovely. Most of the fill was common, repeater-type stuff ( APED and ANAIS and ATIT and the like), but it was clean enough. I wrote in "THERE!" instead of " TRY IT!," that cost me maybe five seconds ( 29D: "Have some!"). Or the Acrosses were super easy, and so the Downs were easy. And even getting waylaid in PANTSville wasn't so bad, as all those long Down PANTS crosses were super easy. But TOT got rid of DELTS and RNA got me TRAPS and then after getting waylaid in PANTSville for a bit, nothing else stood in my way. well, lots of muscles connect to the shoulder, it turns out. DELTS is a perfectly good answer for that clue, it's just. ![]() I wrote in DELTS at 1A: Shoulder muscles, in gym lingo ( TRAPS), that slowed me down for a few seconds right out of the gate. I kinda wish I were still timing myself, because I wasn't really trying to speed and I still think I would've broken 3 minutes today (extremely, near record-breakingly fast for me on a Wednesday). This played like a Tuesday shading into Monday. The whole "wait, it's not CAT?" thing was a fiasco, but it was also the only part of the grid that gave me any difficulty whatsoever.
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