What I liked best about this puzzle was the challenge; it was demanding and fair as Saturday puzzles usually are. (Though I don't like uncommon foreign words in English puzzles:
nict is okay;
nie is not.) There were two clever entries:
Place were customers are taken CLIPJOINT [taken has two meanings]
Some small suits SPEEDOS [bathing suits, that is]
And there were many that I found tough:
Tops BETTERS [I was thinking tee shirts maybe because it intersects an "apparel" clue]
Peels ZESTS [I wasn't thinking
types of peels]
ConAgra spray PAM [a brand name for greasing; I never heard of ConAgra]
Hood of "Our Gang" fame DARLA [not famous to me]
Pakistani president ZIA [never heard of him]
Internet annoyance LAG [never thought of that, but it is annoying]
Product of a fault QUAKE [I was thinking tennis]
Test in a chem lab TITRATE [I knew of titer tests but not the verb form]
Apparel with insignias BLAZERS [I was thinking Izod shirts, etc.]
Units of magnetic flux WEBERS [I knew the scientist but not the term]
Filmmaker Clair RENE [who?]
Haggis ingredient OATMEAL [didn't know
haggis]
Symbol seen in viola music CCLEF [didn't know that either]
Least substantial AIRIEST [makes sense but not immediately apparent]
Beyond stereo QUAD [my surround sound system has five speakers;
quad for a four-speaker system is new to me]
Nuremberg negative NIE [I don't know German]
One of the "big four" record labels EMI [I was unaware there were four and didn't know EMI]
Given what I didn't know, that I did this puzzle perfectly in ink with no write-overs shows that in Xwords it's not what you know but where you know.
