Kurt Weller’s New York Times puzzle – Sophia’s write-up

Happy holidays people! It’s gonna be a brief write up in the present day since I’ve acquired again to get again to being round my household 🙂

New York Times, 12 26 2022, By Kurt Weller

Theme solutions:

• 20a [Stick your tongue out, say] – MAKE A FACE
• 34a [Move onto a new topic of conversation, metaphorically] – SWTICH GEARS
• 43a [Pass to a different owner, as a business] – CHANGE HANDS
• 59a [Epitome of precision … or a description of 20-, 34- and 43-Across?] – CLOCKWORK

So every of the idioms relate to issues that make a CLOCK WORK. Do the primary phrases of the theme solutions matter? I assume that the fingers of a clock make the FACE, and so they CHANGE with the them, and the GEARS transfer…. however perhaps it’s less complicated than that and I’m simply supposed to consider the final phrase. Either means, it’s a reasonably tight theme, which is sweet.

There’s some very nice fill in in the present day’s puzzle! ROCK OPERA and ANTITOXIN are each nice, and I’d have preferred MNEMONIC if I knew the best way to spell it (I additionally didn’t know the mnemonic talked about within the clue, [Memory device like “How I wish I could calculate pi,” e.g.]). There’s additionally some issues that had been much less nice, like URIS, COE, ELY, PEN IN, and perhaps even GREER and ESSEX. I may need preferred to see barely cleaner fill even on the expense of an extended reply or two or a few of the rarer letters like X or Z.