Like Children - August 2017

Hola, Dear Readers! We're late on this. We're going to try a drastically dieted down write up of just Theme and Tacky and that's it. There's a lot going on in our life. And we're going to see Stevie Nicks, the California witch, perform tonite. Naturally, that involves all-day prep. Six years ago we just wrote short little shorties. Then we got really into Reviewing Practicly Evry Clue, 2000-2500 word megaposts, which was fun and then is now not fun. And having fun is our main goal, along with being super hot and super cool (Turandot).

The Theme!

Could not, for the lurf of us, parse these instructs. “condition for No. 16” ?? What dat mean? Condition for 16 of the answers?

Letters in the gray squares of the fill also get copied over to the outlier gray square in that same row. We only figured this out with the help of Sweet V, after the instructions were so opaque to us that we'd closed our hearts to them entirely so as to be able to Start Already. No letter count on the clues because of the psuper psecret variety pack trickery this time which was that silent Ps were omitted from the fill. And then you can read that [children should be] SEEN BUT NOT HEARD. Seen *and* not heard? Anyway.

We think there's a fun pee joke to be made, rather than a fun fantasy about quiet children hahaha, what a hilarious fantastical notion from the kind of personality who not only hates hearing children, hates seeing them as&nsbp;well.

Peaking of, Sweet V was our co-babysitter the other week for a visit from the nieces. “How was that?” people asked.

“They each have the maturity of a three year old. One of them is two,” we said.

But that's not fair to the big one. She's brilliant and and when her energy is directed constructively, she's a blast and super emotionally resilient. Like: she was taking a bath and we were making up songs together about unicorn poo poo farts, you know, just aunt and neice stuff, and the little one dumped a bottle of soapy water on the big one's head. But the big one was in a good mode, and instead of winding up retaliation or a tantrum she said with flat affect, ”don't do that,” and the little one said sorry, and it was great, we were so proud of both of them.

When they wouldn't fall asleep, we sang lullabyes about peepee and poopoo (the forbidden words!). They giggled and fell right to sleep. Here's what we drew about it in a letter to their great‑grandfather:

The Tacky

• 18A) Sitting with a singular Cabinet member?
  singular (Cabinet member = [Jeff] SESSIONS) = SESSION

K we don't rank this tacky per se for invoking the buttface Attorney General. Here he is looking like an evil Keebler Elf about to announce the imminent threat from jackbooted militarized immigration authorities posed to a million law‑abiding tax‑paying young people:

We ask you: is the singular of Chris a Chri? Is the singular of Thomas one Thoma? Can you celebrate a Christma?

You cannot. So what is this nonsense about a single Session? Gross. We say this, even as a person willfully and gleefully playing with grammatical number. But that's in this freewheeling writing style of this blog. We would never! do such a thing in a puzzle. We would never abandon rule of puzzle law like that.

If we are in error on this pun, Dear Readers, we 'xpect to hear from you on the Comments!

Comments are fuel for blogs.