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Solving => Today's Puzzles => Topic started by: magus on March 02, 2015, 09:29:21 AM
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THEME: phrases of color
GOOD ONES:
Leaves for a cigar TOBACCO [this one must've been missed by the editor]
BTW:
Never knew MHO, which I confused with MOH, another measurement. So even a boring puzzle can be informative, which does not, however, forgive its existence.
RATING: :'(
Three grins = Loved it; Two grins = Enjoyed it; One grin = A bit bland for my taste; One teardrop = Not much fun
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I'm not an electrician nor do I portray an electrician on television, so I won't try to explain the mho. However, it was the original name for a unit of electrical conductance which is now known as a siemens, after Ernst Werner von Siemens. The name was simply "ohm" spelled backwards.
I, too, learned a new word in today's puzzle: "Tread water to check out surroundings, as a whale" was SPYHOP. That word is not in my dictionaries, though, and I question if a whale is truly capable of treading water in the way that humans do.
Twice I have done month-long studies of crosswords to determine the most-commonly-used words. The results are posted on the General Discussion forum. EMU is one of the most common and I discovered that its overuse goes back much farther than I thought. Fantagraphics is reprinting all the Mickey Mouse comic strips in chronological order. The latest volume, #6, includes the strip from August 22, 1940, part of a sequence that features Mickey trying to win a contest at a theatre. The MC asks him, "Is an emu a bird, fish or a musical instrument?" Mickey replies, "It's a bird, sorta like an ostrich." The MC says, "Quite correct. And where is it found?" The audience laughs at Mickey's answer: "In crossword puzzles." There ya go!
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...and what overused word did I find in the March 3 puzzle? That's right---EMU. *Sigh*