Puzzle #5-#7, 2011

It's Sunday, 11am, and I'm feeling morally bound to report on puzzles 5 and 6, which we did late Saturday, even though we just finished puzzle 7 this morning.

Here's one: "Puzzle #5, considered in its full historic, ethnographic, and moral context" (8 letters).
TRAVESTY.

The theme was "Crossover Hits," and the long clues were, for example,
1967 hit for the Turtles (11 letters)
1980 hit for Bette Midler (5 letters), which should be "The Rose," but that's 7 letters
1977 hit for Barbra Streisand (7 letters).

The first problem was that I had no idea what songs these were (I'm more a fan of Reel Big Fish, The Jam, and Elvis Costello, not necessarily at the same time). The second problem was that it turns out that the last two letters of each answer gets entered as the first two letters of the next answer (which is another song), and the first two letters of the second song are entered as the last two letters of the first answer. That's a little hard to visualize, but it's doable, IF YOU KNOW THE G-DD-MN-D SONGS!!! Which apparently the very pleasant woman on our left did know, and so even though I was just crushing her on every other puzzle (by 5-8 minutes per), she happily cruised through puzzle 5 (I imagine she was cheerfully whistling the melody to each song as she entered it into the grid), while I gnashed my teeth and rent my garment. (This morning I rented my garment, to scare up some extra cash, but that's another story.)

Well, as they say in poker, the only thing worse than taking a bad beat is hearing about yours, so it's time to soldier on and be stoical about it. We came back this morning and had a few more interesting cross(word)-dressing sightings (photos above). And then settled down to puzzle #7, which had some real gems--the clue for each long answer was "See highlighted letters," meaning the answer contains its own clue. Let's do one for warmup:
israELiAirLine was the first answer. So the letters I have capitalized and bolded were in highlighted cells in the grid. And EL AL is an Israeli airline. Get it? Here are a few more:

TWitteErusErsupdaTe
SaTellITeofsAturN
PuRpleraINComposEr. This one I liked particularly, because I first put "Purple rain coat user," which fit and seemed to make sense to me (maybe Prince would need to use a coat to protect him from the purple rain?).
CircLedsqUarES.

If you think about it, it's a minor miracle that someone could construct a crossword puzzle with 8 long answers that contain their own clues IN ORDER. To me, that's magic. So we'll be back again next year for a little more magic....