The July 19 puzzle by Todd McClary (answers) is full of Saturday-tough clues and a few nice surprises. I learned more than average from this puzzle which I always like.
For example, I have lots of theatre experience and I know what GOBOS are. They’re filters you add in front of the lens in lighting instruments to do various kinds of special effects. The simplest ones have patterns punched out so the stage has an outline of a palm tree or something. It turns out that word is also used for sound-isolation shields in recording studios. If you’re a studio drummer you’re used to being surrounded by these things.
I didn’t know anything about the Selective Service. If you’re 20 to 25, in America, and MALE, you pretty much have to register. The official government web site explains reassuringly that once registered, “a man will not automatically be inducted into the army.” Yeah, I feel better already. I was over 26 when I arrived on these shores so I’m safe.
Did you meet your Waterloo on this puzzle? (You can’t win ‘em all.) How odd that of all historical battles, it’s Napoleon’s defeat in 1815 that gets immortalized in the common phrase. That was after, not ‘ere he saw Elba, by the way.
“Snowy locale of song” is a terrific clue for OLD SMOKEY. I like “lies along the waterfront” for YARNS too. “Took evening courses” is ATE DINNER. Mmmmm. Best of all, “drug store” is STASH. Very clever.
I had to look up “Creator of 1867's Grand Caricaturama." Here’s a bio of Thomas NAST, the Father of American Caricature. Although indeed Grand, his 33 huge (8 foot by 12 foot) paintings scrolling across a stage accompanied by piano and narrated by an actor did not add up to a financial success.
There's been discussion in the comments recently about whether my Freshness Factor™ formula could be improved. Almost certainly, but I might not bother. It's true that an ERA or an AREA will drag you quickly down and some sort of sliding scale might be kinder. I had thought perhaps a logarithmic approach might be useful. But just by coincidence, the current method nicely scales from a low of 28 to a high of over 96. The resulting values seem to more or less map to my intuitive sense of freshness. (Yes, it's easy to find exceptions.) I'll keep pondering this and let you know if I change.
Note that puzzles will exhibit a kind of "freshness entropy" over time. Whenever a new puzzle is posted it will ever-so-slightly pull down the scores of every other puzzle that shares any of its answer words.
