Roland Huget is a retired nuclear engineer living in Kitchener, Ontario. He started creating crossword puzzles in 2012. His first published puzzle appeared in 2015 in the
New York Times. Huget's crossword today includes the clue "Agreed!" The answer is ITSADEAL and "deal" can be added to the first word of each of these answers:
Defensible alibi: GOODEXCUSE
Grand scheme of things: BIGPICTURE
Boot camp newbie: RAWRECRUIT
It may be rational, in math: REALNUMBER
Almost any number you can think of is a "real number." A real number can be a whole number such as 1, 2, 3 or 10; a rational number such as ½, ¾ or 0.5; or an irrational number such as n, x or √2. A real number can be positive or negative. Zero is also a real number. What is
not a real number is "infinity" or any imaginary number which can not exist, such as √−1 (the square root of minus 1).
"Not fer" is AGIN, which is awkward. "Pre-college, briefly" is ELHI, a word which seldom appears anywhere except in crossword puzzles. It's in the same category as ALER, NLER, ASEA and AROAR. "Those, in Mexico" is ESOS, which is not used in English. "Parlez-___ français" is VOUS, which is not used in English.
The clues and grid include several product names, names which used to be taboo in puzzles: VISA ("MasterCard rival"), AVIA ("Sports shoe brand") AVEO ("Fuel-efficient Chevy"), CARTIRE ("Michelin product"), MERC ("Defunct Ford division, for short") and STAX ("Lay's chips-in-a-can brand").
"Vanishing ski lift" is TBAR. The first T-Bar ski lift was installed in 1940 at the Pico Mountain ski resort in Vermont. I am unaware that T-bars are "vanishing." Perhaps they are. I'm not a skier. Here is information about the various types of ski lifts:
http://snow.guide/ski-lift-beginners/"Overly long and generally unproductive activity" is TIMESINK. In multi-player online role-playing games, a time sink is a feature which requires players to spend an inordinately lengthy amount of time to complete a task. Many online games require the payment of a fee. For the game companies, time sinks = profits. The term has come to mean any activity which is considered to be a waste of time.
Before anyone asks, reading the above was definitely
not a waste of time. At least I
hope nobody thinks it was.
