Och! Too Much Information, or TMI for short.
If it's Friday, it must be Mike Nothnagel. He's been on a roll recently and more than half of his puzzles are of the Friday ilk. Today's July 18 crossword (answers) is full of facts I had forgotten or never knew. And if that weren't enough, and by gosh don't you think it ought to be, I also fell head first into most of the traps. "Turndown?" I have to pay more attention to that question mark. The answer is DOG EAR, as in what one does to a page to mark ones place in a book. I remembered Emperor TRAJAN and even Molly IVINS was somewhere in a dark corner of my brain but much to my chagrin, I couldn't recall that KEVIN BACON was in Diner. What's your Bacon number?
"Private modes of transportation" is a wonderful clue for JEEPS. There are various varieties of the IXIA flower. That's one in the photo. And of course a doll can NEST, at least if it's a Russian matryoshka.
A few years ago I read an absolutely fascinating Scientific American book on the CIRCADIAN RHYTHM. You can work out the definition if you don't know the word. Circadian means "about a day." It turns out we humans do have a built-in sleeping and waking rhythm but it's closer to 25 than 24 hours. You can measure it by sticking volunteers in the bottom of a very deep mine shaft for several days and letting them sleep and wake up when they want.
Why 25 hours? Nobody knows for sure but one theory is that it's an evolutionary throw-back to a time when the 25-hour tidal cycle was more important than the 24-hour solar cycle. Now that's deep genetic memory.
