Friday nights stretch long for me. If I didn't do the puzzle Thursday night, it might not get done until tomorrow, which is the reason I've skipped Friday posts the last couple of weeks. Other things to do become unlocked Friday nights, like the Wall Street Journal variety puzzle. I just hope it's not an Acrostic. I don't hate the NY Times Acrostics, but mostly because the Times has a sweet HTML app to do them with. They are tedious as fuck on paper, and harder to edit if you get a clue wrong. I lean pretty heavily on the "check puzzle" button, but I feel ok about it. I also dropped by the library and got the March Harper's puzzle. I was doing reasonably well, but when Magic started, I just flipped it over to keep score with. And then I obviously threw it away, forgetting there was a puzzle on it. Oh well. It's easy enough to reconstruct, as the clues are hard enough to be memorable if you solve them. When I was on a diagramless kick, I did all the ones in the Times archive, dating back to 1997. I did one of those old ones again yesterday, and while some clues rang a bell, I didn't remember anything about the theme or the grid shape (which is the hard part anyway). My recall on cryptic clues is much, much better.

To make art, topless isn't incorrect. (5)

PAINT (to make art) - P (topless) = AIN'T (isn't incorrect)

I solved this backwards, of course. Getting to "paint" from just "to make art" is very hard, but the "isn't incorrect" is a sometimes crossword clue, often "Isn't wrong?" I've also seen "Ain't right?" for ISN'T. Question marks help those clues, to tip off the reader to something a little off about the clue, but in cryptics, you just sort of assume it's there all the time.