Sunday, 12/11/6

Time to finish/time I gave up: 25:09
Did I finish it without help? Yes!
Did I check puzzle? If yes, how many letters were wrong? N/A

Commentary:

This was certainly the easiest of the 3 Sunday puzzles that I have written about so far. The theme clues were easy to crack, and there weren't too many places we got tripped up. 25 minutes! Not bad for when you are also watching football at the same time. (Shout-out to everyone who is in their fantasy playoffs! My team made it, but we're facing Le'Veon Bell, who has 24.5 points at halftime. Bite me, Le'Veon Bell.)

I'm too young for this $h*t

• 29A "Fernando" band ABBA. It's not that I had trouble figuring out a 4-letter band ending in __BA, it's just that I don't know the song "Fernando." [listens to song] Verdict: not bad. Better than I expected for an ABBA song.
• Thing I am just the right age for: 101D "____even" ICANT. Arguably, I'm even too old for this one. Way to keep up with your millennials, Tom McCoy. Here's a joke for your Sunday: Why do teenage girls travel in groups of 3, 5, or 7? Because they can't even!

Really?

• 54A Skimobile, informally SLED. First of all, when you look up "skimobile," the first thing that comes up is the definition: snowmobile. Wouldn't we normally just say snowmobile then? Second, do people informally refer to their snowmobiles? As sleds? "Hey, watch me ride my tricked-out sled, brah." I dunno, maybe they do.
• Side note: when I clicked on the dictionary definition of skimobile, it suggested that I look up "words that rhyme with skimobile." Intrigued, I did. Some highlights are: bearded seal, glockenspiel, orange peel, pimpmobile, stainless steel. (Now I am watching "Peeno Noir" from Kimmy Schmidt.)
• 55A "Tell me how you really feel!" SAYIT SAY IT
• 49D Target demographic for Hot Wheels BOYS. Boooo to gender-typing toys. There are approximately 8,000 other ways you could have clued "boys."

Things I learned today:

• A newt is called an EFT in its terrestrial juvenile phase. 
• OBOLS are Coins that pay for passage over the River Styx. I also learned, while googling this, that 6 obols make a drachma, 70 drachmae make a mina, and 60 minae make one Athenian talent. This makes slightly more mathematical sense than Harry Potter currency (29 knuts in a sickle, 17 sickles in a galleon. Why would you possibly pick those numbers, J.K.?)
• Isadora Duncan was a famous and maybe racist dancer from the 1800s.
• Ipse dixit is a dogmatic and unproven statement. Wikipedia encourages one to see also "truthiness." 
• Jean Arp was a German-French sculptor, painter, poet, and abstract artist in other media such as torn and pasted paper. Bet he features in the new section below at some point.
• ALGAL is the adjectival form of alga/algae, and also the answer to ____ bloom (result of fertilizer pollution.)

A new section! Things I learned in other weeks that came back today: a jab at crosswordese. [This section sponsored by the Otoe.]

• 11D "Rosy-fingered" Greek goddess EOS. She's back! I did know that the dawn is always rosy-fingered thanks to my 12th grade English teacher, who shouted about it repeatedly. I kept a list of funny Mr. Duffy quotes, which I found while cleaning out my childhood bedroom recently. Example: "We didn't have any soccer camps. We had violence!" Unfortunately, the rosy-fingered dawn did not make it into any of the funny quotes.

Fritz out.

PS: Now that I have finished writing this post, Le'Veon Bell has 45.3 points, and there are still 7 minutes left in the game. I can't even.