With amazement the instructor in a marine biology class I was in told us that human blood and seawater have the same salinity level. I learned that day that there are remarkable interconnections in our cosmos. In Sunday’s acrostic, we learned that those interconnections extend to our sweat and tears.
Of course, drinking that seawater is a problem as Coleridge's Ancient Mariner pointed out:
Water, water everywhere,
And all the boards did shrink;
Water, water everywhere
Nor any drop to drink.
And all the boards did shrink;
Water, water everywhere
Nor any drop to drink.
A moment of reflection on her first fill-in Mother Earth later provided some incite into the quote. We think perhaps Em and Henry place clues related to the quote at specific places within the puzzle, but that analysis we’ll do another day.
Ha, of course the damage was not colossal but the Colossus of Rhodes. Nice play on words. Often such carefully parsing of a clue, leads to discovering the right word. Several other answers came quickly. Remembering the double-r of Mitterrand and 10 more letters were known. I wonder what the Star Trek episode would have been like if William Shatner had answered yes. 
Playing poker, even if you’re not in the hand, it is at the showdown that valuable information about one’s opponents is learned – do they bluff a lot, how loose are they playing. If everyone folds before that climatic moment, one can only guess (and listen to the post-hand chatter!) what everyone really had.
While I find cheating at card games abhorrent, I must say that I’ve often found myself in conflict with Hoyle because we played variations of games different from the official rules. Imagine if Hoyle, in a new draft of his work, had rewritten the rules of Monopoly, would we really feel like we were cheating by taking collected fines when we landed on Free Parking?
While answers like the Greek-origin ogdoad and even guttate were surprising and interesting, the answer identikit, which we finally got as we honed in on the entire quote, was just annoying. – not an obscure word just a made-up one.
Perhaps the next time I cry, thinking at that moment “it’s just seawater” may arrest the tears. As we finished the puzzle, we wondered what Aphrodite’s salinity level is if she was borne of ocean foam.
