Barry C. Silk seems to enjoy big squares divided evenly into grids. I got off to a fast start on this Sunday, July 20 puzzle (answers) by guessing that "Viking, for one" was a PUBLISHING IMPRINT. That made the circles spell out BISHMR. Hmmm, this theme will be trickier than I thought. Then when I finally made sense of that answer, I couldn't figure out why there were seven theme rows since I could only come up with six chess pieces. Oh well.
There is a lot of old European history today. The EDICT of Nantes was issued in 1598 by Henry IV of France, giving various rights to the French Protestants called the Huguenots. The gentleman with the intense eyes in the photo is Mr. Guy Fawkes whose annual night is an excuse in Britain to set off fireworks commemorating his failed Gunpowder Plot of 1605. Venice Preserv'd is an English Restoration play written by Thomas OTWAY in 1682. No doubt there were SMEWS in the ponds back then too.
More recently, Dave BERG created "The Lighter Side" for Mad Magazine. A "pickup attachment" is not, in fact, a rifle rack but rather a PLOW. "Bossman or bosswoman" is a wonderful clue. Why the explicit both-sex qualifiers? No reason. They're just screwing with our brains again, and we continue to let them do it.
In the "not what one expects" department, the "purveyor of chips" wasn't some variation of one who antes but rather the corporate entity INTEL. The "climactic scene in Hamlet" wasn't ACT V but rather the big DUEL with Laertes.
The odd word of the day is SKIRR. It means, approximately, to scurry, so we're not losing anything essential by letting the obscure archaic word disappear from common discourse. From the Useless Stats department, this is Mr. Silk's eighth puzzle of the year and second pangram in a row.
In the Freshness Analysis, a word that, surprisingly, has never appeared before is SQUIRT. What percentage of all the answer words in my database would you guess have made only a single appearance?
Update: I failed to note that this puzzle represents a milestone for Mr. Silk. This is his first Sunday puzzle and since he has every other day of the week already covered, he has become only the 25th constructor in the Will Shortz era to have Hit for the Cycle. Quite a remarkable achievement. Congratulations!
