Theme: Mary Poppins (film released 27 August 1964; author P. L. Travers born 9 August 1899)
The winner of the August puzzle is Andrew Wyss.
The biggest puzzle of the year with a whopping 53 clues — a key unclued entry — and a bunch of extension rods. This could take a while. Fortunately, you find the theme, and — SNAP — the job’s a game!
The non-thematic vocabulary was pretty straightforward, with only BEIRA at Day 18 sticking out to me as unusual. The word length mix was nice.
The theme is pervasive and provides many character names including the key figure at 2d: M. POPPINS herself. The anniversaries alluded to in the legend are the birth of author P.L. Travers (9 August 1899), the premiere of the film Mary Poppins (27 August 1964), and The Sun headline celebrating Inverness Caledonian Thistle (February 2000).
The extension rods are song lyrics from the film and the headline in question. I initially misspelled CHEREE, but fortunately the check with OER saved me. The repetition of words would be useful if you hadn’t got to the theme before you did these, but I’m guessing most people got tuned in from (literally) day one.
The cluing is mostly straightforward. The surface of Day 6 gave me some pause as I assume CO means coronary occlusion here, which is a far less nice way to get to sleep than COCOA! [Actually it’s carbon monoxide, though either one would work - Ed]
Day 31 seemed to be trying too hard, but short words with common letters often have less interesting clues than that. Might be inscrutable to folks outside the UK though (I certainly had to check).
Day 41 seems needlessly messy as well. But, again, a short word of common letters probably bored the setter enough he wanted to stretch a bit.
A good use of surface in Day 44 leads us to another thematic answer. It’s always nice when hidden words aren’t immediately obvious and don’t mess up the surface to draw (much) attention to themselves.
I liked the apostrophe used as a misdirect in Day 48 as well. I’m sometimes annoyed when people play with the spacing for a clue, but punctuation is certainly fair game.
The pictorial clue asks us to replace a gallon (G) in SPIGOT with a teaspoon (TSP), giving us SPIT-SPOT.
And quicker than you can say, well, you know, that big word, the job is done. I liked this one a lot. Rarely do we see a theme played out to such a degree and with great detail. Only fault is that the larger entries were broken into (sometimes very) small pieces, but considering the amount of thematic content, that’s certainly understandable.
Now, if you’ll be good enough to fetch my hatstand, please, the wind has changed and I must be off to help other solvers…
