I stood up and clapped for FLAME WAR = [Battle with trolls, say]. Appealing to my love of "Lord of the Rings" and my love of wordplay is a sure recipe for making Jeff happy.
What does it say about my life that LET'S DO THIS THING makes me picture Remy from Ratatouille or Captain Barnacles?
GIVE IT TIME, Jeff …
My kids aren't quite into the actual sports phase yet — Jake's idea of "baseball" is hitting me with a pillow. Don't even get me started on which balls he kicks for "soccer." I have read many a sports magazine to both kids at the library, so I should have gotten SI FOR KIDS easily. Yet I've always known this publication as SI: KIDS (note that the Wikipedia entry doesn't list "SI FOR KIDS").
What does it say about me that I was sure that SI FOR was a super-tricky Saturday-difficult code for "cypher"?
Once I managed to shake that off, I enjoyed SOLO HOMER with its brilliant clue. How is a "round trip for one" possible? In baseball slang, a homer is sometimes called a "round tripper"!
For those non-sportsball lovers out there who missed the wit of the SOLO HOMER clue, I feel you're your pain. This sports fanatic — even worse, a basketball guy — couldn't figure out why a TREY was a [Long shot, informally]. And I've been crunching numbers on three-point shooters this week.
(TREY is slang for a three-point shot, which Steph Curry and Trae Young often launch from a long, long ways away.)
I smugly typed in ALPHA for [Symbol for stock volatility, in finance]. I did hesitate, wondering if Will Shortz had bent the definitions of "risk" and "volatility," though — I figured he wouldn't delve into the technical morass of the Black-Scholes option pricing model. Oh no, he didn't!
THE SHARD is an interesting entry. I already had struggled so much (to de-SIFOR the puzzle) by this point, that it was difficult to muster the energy to look it up. Glad I did! Check out the picture to the right; a stunning piece of architecture, and an apt name.
I'm sure "down for a nap" now — gonna get my DUVET, filled with goose down!