While I got ready for work and drove in, I racked my brain for other possibilities. Think about how hard this had to have been. Find a fifth themer that runs down the middle and crosses with two other themers. Change the second word of the phrase to create a wacky new phrase. Find common phrases that work with above words. Find last names of famous people that are homophones for regular words. Just think about what, ahem, Herre, has done. THOREAU FAIR was next, and as the magnitude of the conceit slowly became apparent, I was floored. The first themer that fell for me was BELLE HEIR, and I loved it. They did add some difficulty to the solve. No harm done there, as those big corners are cleanly filled. Grid is strangely built, with giant corners and ultra-choppy middle. All I want to say is "Jerome" … it's "Graham"). I think he's from a generation before mine. People don't have anything in common besides being reasonably well known (again, for the third time, HERR KERR is an outlier-I had no idea what that guy's name was. The non-people words are all different parts of speech, and one of them comes first ( HERR KERR), where every other time they come second. The people involved aren't even all people. I like its wacky spirit, but despite the "-air" rhyme thing, it's got virtually nothing holding it together. But the theme … it doesn't hold together well at all. Fill is pretty clean, which, as you know, I like. ![]() I found it hard, despite the fact that when I look over the grid now, there's nothing hard-seeming about it, except that theme, which is bizarre. Seventeen elements are generally classified as nonmetals most are gases (hydrogen, helium, nitrogen, oxygen, fluorine, neon, chlorine, argon, krypton, xenon and radon) one is a liquid (bromine) and a few are solids (carbon, phosphorus, sulfur, selenium, and iodine). Physically, nonmetals tend to be highly volatile (easily vaporised), have low elasticity, and are good insulators of heat and electricity chemically, they tend to have high ionization energy and electronegativity values, and gain or share electrons when they react with other elements or compounds. In chemistry, a nonmetal (or non-metal ) is a chemical element that mostly lacks metallic attributes. ![]() Word of the Day: NON-METAL ( 41D: Any of about 18 elements on the periodic table). Was that the goal? - I don't really know if that's an accurate description, but it's the best I got. Looks like all the (alleged) "-air" sounds are spelled differently. Oh, and they all rhyme with "air" (again, HERR KERR seems like an outlier here, but I guess "KERR" = "CARE," which I would never have guessed). THEME: Famous people (or, once, a fictional character) + other word (except in the case of HERR KERR, where the pattern's reversed for some reason) = wacky phrase that sounds like actual phrase.
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