Ed Sessa lives in Florida and has been a crossword puzzle enthusiast for 40 years. He has been a crossword puzzle
creator for the past nine of those years. Today he invites us to "Say Cheese!" The theme answers are puns involving various types of cheese:
Real cheese? TILSITLIKEITIS
Cheese graters? ROQUEFORTFILES
Cheese-growing plot? GARDENOFEDAM
Cheese factory supplies? CHEDDARBOXES
Cheese tray displays? BRIEARRANGEMENTS
Cheesehead's accessory? FETAINONESCAP
Highland cheese? LOCHNESSMUENSTER
"Roquefort Files" is a clever pun, referring to the 1974-80 NBC-TV series
The Rockford Files, which starred James Garner as private detective Jim Rockford. But "Brie arrangements" for "pre-arrangements"? Not so clever. Perhaps I feel that way because I consider the word "pre-arrange" to be a redundancy, same as "pre-plan." "Cheddarboxes" for "chatterboxes" is also not overly clever.
Edam is a semi-hard cheese that originated in the Netherlands and is named after the town of Edam. Tilsit cheese, also known as Tilsiter, is a light yellow semihard cheese originally manufactured in the town of Tilsit in the former German province of East Prussia. The town is now Sovetsk, Russia. Feta is a crumbly cheese made from sheep's milk. The name comes from φέτα, the Greek word for "slice." Muenster is a pale yellow semi-soft cheese made in the United States. It has no relation to the strong-tasting Munster cheese named for the French town of Munster. And I probably do not need to point out that the 1960s tv series
The Munsters had nothing to do with cheese.
"Paris pronoun" is VOUS, which is not used in English. "Other, to Quixote" is OTRO, which is not used in English. "Bunch of clowns in a circus stunt, say" is CARLOAD -- and in May of this year, the Ringling Brothers Barnum & Bailey Circus will give its final performances, ending a 146-year run. Over the past few years, the circus has been plagued with declining attendance, rising operating costs, changing public tastes and legal battles with animal-rights organizations.
"Heated dispute" is RHUBARB. Rhubarb is a plant of the dock family with poisonous leaves and edible stalks. The name comes from the Greek
Rha, the ancient Scythian name of the Volga River where the plants were grown, and
Barbaros, which means "foreign." In 1938, Garry Schumacher, the New York Giants' press agent and a
New York Globe sports writer, began using the word "rhubarb" to describe an onfield brawl or scuffle, explaining that a brawl is "an untidy mess, a disheveled tangle of loose ends like the fibers of stewed rhubarb." After Brooklyn Dodgers radio announcer Red Barber being using the term, it gained widespread usage.
As for the crossword puzzle's title, it comes from the command given by photographers just before they take a photograph of someone. Supposedly no one can say "cheese" without smiling. Other words are used in other countries. In Latin America, for instance, photographers instruct their subjects to say "whiskey." Well, okay, whatever works.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Say_cheese
