1ACGridfest – Grid 12 – “3 Cheers!” – Solutions, Annotations & Stats

Stats -21 people managed to submit the completed grid for this puzzle. Of those who submitted, 9 managed to get  the full score of 32. The following is the list of people who had full scores, in alphabetical order..

1. Akshay Bhandarkar
2. Ashit Hegde
3. Ganesh Nayak
4. Mona Sogal
5. Narayan Mandyam
6. Sridhar Vedantham
7. Supriya Mithal
8. Vasant Srinivasan
9. Venkatraghavan S.

Congrats to all of you.

Here’s the Solution grid

Questions asked at the end of the puzzle included Annotations for Clues 13A, 25A and 22D

Here are the Annotations..

Across:

1. Fry, adding oil in the end, to make toast (6) SAUTE << (-oi)L 4. It's a puzzle. Jack, originally, was going around with one girl earlier (6) J I G <> EE
12. Home, a middle easterner has, on the French type of soil (8) IN ARAB LE
13. Spooner says sweetheart pesters for ballroom dances (5,4) Spoonerism HONEY BUGS
15. Satisfaction from power trip (5) P ride
16. Some manic rowdy spectators (5) T
18. Cat zoning out became conscious (9) (CAT ZONING)*
21. Slam worthless patchy horse (4,4) BUM PINTO
22. Revolutionary track car race demonstrates ‘the Spirit of the East’ (6) Rev T
24. Praise site made for a cake shop (10) PRAISE SITE*
25. A couple of questions – Life expectancy, by all conclusions, is a little lower in Scotland? (4) QU E Y
26. Beat and add egg at first to the mixture instead of margarine essentially (6) BATTER + E-A
27. Well, nothing heard anew (2,4) O HEARD*

Down:

1. Second hiatus arranged for a spa treatment (7) S (HIATUS)*
2. Relax! Become more lenient (5) (RELAX)*
3. Taking top off, let her dance to a number (5) {(-L)ET HER}*
5. Sort of, at home, elsewhere (2,1,3) IN AWAY
6. The man in a red suit is on a voyage, so we hear, to a Californian city (5,4) SANTA CRUZ(hp cruise)
7. Contrived and rounded up cattle right away (7) WRANGLED – R
8. Success from surfing coolly (6,7) (SURFING COOLLY)*
14. N-bound publication (9) NEW(N), SPRINT(bound, verb)
17. Run! Nasty bar hub altercation (7) R (BAR HUB)*
19. Mean kind of weapons (7) DD
20. In actuality, Sensei went to pieces (2,4) SENSEI*
22. The one Beth follows, brew noodle soup, without onions, for starters (5) ALE PHO-O
23. Game played with mallets in Cairo, Queensland (5) T