Adjustable spanners? Vegetable canners? Cowhide tanners? Eunuch fanners? There's not too far you can go with this theme but young Oliver Hill does an admirable job with the August 4 puzzle (answers), his first-ever Monday. It's not as clever as his previous efforts, but it's still remarkable in some ways.
For one thing, it has an extremely high Freshness Factor for a Monday. In fact, if he didn't have a "priest who raised Samuel" named ELI, it would be amazingly high. ELI is the fourth most common word in crosswords and it really dragged down that score. Some of that fresh originality is a little iffy, though. OWOW has never appeared before, and seems forced. On the other hand, CY YOUNG makes his long-awaited full-name debut and BARYON, while not a typical Monday answer, gives quantum mechanics something to be excited about.
I don't know what a FOO Fighter is. In my line of work, foo is a random variable or function or method or property or something else geeky. Its counterpart is, of course, bar. "Miniature hooter" refers, as I'm sure you guessed right away, to an OWLET. I think the restaurant chain refers to the adult birds.
"Lollapalooza" awkwardly turns out to be ONER. It's the very definition of crosswordese to me, but it's a great excuse to plug Lollapuzzoola '08 one more time. The R&B extravaganza, I mean oner, takes place on August 23rd in NYC.
