"Having Nothing On," 4/9/17

I must say, I highly recommend puzzling at your local brewery. A tasty puzzle for a tasting flight! Milo came along in the stroller and we had a grand old time.

Time to finish/time I gave up: 48:27. We had to check the puzzle again this week after getting the dreaded "you're wrong" message around 36 minutes and spending 10 minutes failing to correct the problem. We had 2 mistakes--1, we had BEAT for 72D Overcome instead of BEST, leading to the "duh" moment that Elizabeth with some memoir was EDWARDS, not EDWARDA...whoops.
I feel less guilty about mistake #2, where we had ACTS for 50A Parliamentary procedures and VACUS for 31D Empty spaces...granted that "vacus" is not really a thing, but "vacua" is not a word that I use often either. We were already guessing on LARUSSA and AEREO so that whole section was a mess. (We also tried LAROSSA, LARUSSO, and various other combinations. Aereo seemed the most likely--I assume this is airmail-related?--but you never know with these dang foreign languages. Speak American, crossword.*)
*This is a joke.

Commentary:
It took reading Wordplay  column for me to really understand that "nothing on" means OON. We got the pattern within solving a few of the themers but the "nothing" = O part escaped me...I kept trying for "having no thin goon" as the key to the puzzle. That said, I thought the themers were pretty funny, for the most part. My favorite is probably SAUSAGEFESTOON.

Another funny mistake I made: for a little while I had TBJ for the Toronto Blue Jays instead of TOR (don't ask me why...probably those beers...) which led to the 2D Sign of spring being BLOB_. Ah, let us herald the return of the spring blobs.

Clues I especially liked! Yay!

• 22A Home for Bilbo Baggins HOBBITHOLE. What, not Bag End? #nerdalert
• Shout-out to Frances Bavier, Aunt Bee of The Andy Griffith Show. I spent many a half-hour watching reruns with my dad, who also taught me crosswording, so this was a happy confluence.
• OTOH, if this were any other tv show of its era, I would probably not know the answer and file this under the following category.

I'm too young for this $h*t

• Rene Clement is a French director whose famous movies are from the 50s-70s. I'm not sure if I'm too young for this or if it's just the puzzle reminding me of my lack of highbrow cinema knowledge.

Really?

• 10A Blood enemy? CRIP. I mean damn, NYT.
• SPLEENY! What is this delightful word?
• What is the cross-section of people who do the crossword and people who listen to shock jocks? Especially OPIE? If it's not Howard Stern, I'm out of ideas. Besides, if you have another Andy Griffith clue in the same section, why not go for the one-two punch?

Things I learned today:

• I did not know that My Gal Sal is a musical. Via my father and my husband, I think of myself as knowing more than the average bear about musicals, but not this time. This oversight made me think the themer might be punning at the sentence "My gal's a loon," which would have made me mad (don't call a woman crazy, hypothetical speaker!) so I'm glad for the existence of My Gal Sal.
• Romain de Tirtoff was a Russian-born French artist and designer known by the pseudonym Erté, from the French pronunciation of his initials.
• That is a great fun fact! Go French!
• Confession: sometimes I mix up Belgrade and Belfast. Thanks for stopping me before I destroyed a corner of the puzzle with "eire" or something instead of SERB, Jamie.
• Jean Adair is an actress from Arsenic and Old Lace. I haven't seen the movie, but I saw our high school's version of the play and even that was hilarious.
• Selma is the "butterfly capital of Alabama." Glad they have another claim to fame down there.
• Polo has "chukkers" instead of quarters/periods/halves/etc. 
• Apparently there are usually six of them and they last 7.5 minutes each.
• Polo, you're ridiculous.

Times I got to use my French major this week 

• Not a ton of French in this week's puzzle, besides La Loire, but we did have acht and ocho, so that was cute.

Fritz out!