Variety: Puns and Anagrams

Tris Speaker was an All-Star baseball player in the early part of the last century. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tris_Speaker

While I enjoy these a lot, I was dissatisfied with some of the cluing. I think a good clue should give some indication of the meaning of the answer, otherwise it could just be any word in the dictionary. For example the clue for "omelets" is good because the omelets are eaten at brunch. But the clue for "sten", "clears up", I didn't like. For one, "sten", an English gun, has nothing to do with clear or up. For two it is a pretty obscure word. I don't mind a hard clue, but in this instance I can't even tell if the answer I came up with was right. (Actually in my case it was totally filled in by crosses.) So that's not very satisfying. Every clue should have an "aha moment" in my book. Or, it occurs to me that maybe I missed something with that one. If so let me know! Hmm, thought there were more I didn't like, but that may be the only one. On another note, had to mention that I had "neat one" for "a teen no!", which caused a lot of problems for a while. Is there an unsaid rule that an anagram has to yield a single word?

Loved this. Had to use check/reveal a few times. But a lot of fun and great write-up from Caitlin.

Found it crunchier than recent P & As. Slow start at the top and then it began to flow better. Very enjoyable even though there were several answers that I got via crosses that took some time to understand via clues after I finished. I hope we see more from Mr. Taub someday.

Neat puzzle. Do have a question, tho: how does 34A work? I know the fill sounds like "hail" -- is that all there is to it?

I'm with Caitlin in admiring the the cluing for SCARES and CLASSY.. And I would also give props to 20D, "Foreign (but not Ger.) news", which made sense after removing the abbreviation "ger" from Foreign to get INFO. And 26D Hob KNOB was cute, too. Thank you Jerrold for explaining TRIS!

got everything except March 4th for CEE...any help?

In the regular puzzle, my name walked on the moon twice. In the PandA, it's a cousin of Lana. Still, that's two namesake entries the same weekend. Nice. I also enjoyed the Making Waves puzzle (middle of the LIttle Variety). Very similar to Hex Nuts, where letters are used in two entries depending which direction you read.

I just now realized that in 23A, "18 on" becomes "Ar on", which anagrams to ARNO. (At least I think so.)

TO CAITLIN: Tris Speaker was a professional baseball player.

The PandAs and Cryptics never cease to fascinate me, even though I absolutely cannot do them. This time I only got LIDS, DEM and STEP. For 46A I tried SEE (as in C, the first letter in “Cher”). It was wrong. Then, after some minutes I gave up and “Revealed” the puzzle. I had searched for which element had the atomic number 18 (argon), but I still never would have gotten ARNO from Ar. Yes, it’s a river in Italy. I am not an opera fan, but isn’t there some famous aria in which a young woman is threatening to throw herself into it? Maybe she tried to do a PandA or Cryptic and it drove her insane.