“August Celebration” from “Amygdala” is our fourteenth grid for this season.

Stats: 62 solvers attempted this puzzle.  33 solvers completed the puzzle and the bonus forms. 23 solvers got the full score.

Here is the Grid:
(Annotations will be visible on solving the puzzle or on clicking “Reveal Grid”. Logged in solvers can see their submissions as well)

Bonus Questions:

1. What two-word theme is provided by the extra letters in the Across clues
   
   Solution

   Ans: INDEPENDENCE DAY

   The extra letters are from the following words
    
   I-1– DOGIE-I
   N-3- MEANT-N CANTER-N  ETHNICALLY-N
   D-3 DARTS-D REDACTED-D  SUNDRIES*-D
   P-1- PRESIDENT-P
   E-4 ELICIT-E EMISSION-E  (FREE) POSTER*-E, SPARSE-E
   C-1 FLEECING-C
   A-1 TAKE APART-A 
   Y-1 PANTY-Y
   

Here’s the list of Top Scorers (For the full list, please check the Leaderboard in the Hall of Fame)

Out of 62 solvers,  33 completed fully and 23  got the full score. Each of the following scored 141 points (Grid Score – 137,  Bonus – 4).

Al Sanders
Ashit Hegde
Bhalchandra Pasupathy
Harish T K
Ian VanderSchee
Koteswar Rao
Krittibas Dasgupta
Lakshmi Prakash
Madhup Tewari
Madhusudan H
Max Jackson
Mona Sogal
Narayanan R
Paul Henderson
Prakash Arumugam
Ramesh Swaminathan
Ramki Krishnan
Rathnakumar V
Samit Kallianpur
Sparsh Sinha
Veera Raghavan
Venkatesan P.
Venkatraghavan S

Congrats to the toppers and to all the solvers who participated.

Grid Rating: The puzzle got a good rating of 8.3. It was rated a perfect 10 by 5 out of the 33 folks who voted (15%). The lowest rating was 6.

Favourite Clues:  The Top clues were

1. 4d Doctor watches disembowelled bodies leaving hospital in streams (8)- 8 votes
2. 7a Heartless woman caught in affair running away (7) – 7 votes
3. 3d Runs lost getting caught through slip in cricket, say (6) – 7 votes
4. 24a Maids regularly involved in racket over work (7) – 6 votes
5. 19d Eleven souls holding still (4,2) – 6 votes
6. 17d Backing a runner in race to computer store (4,4) – 6 votes

Thanks Amygdala for a very creative puzzle with a fitting theme. Good to see you gaining strength as a setter. Love your innovative ideas. Looking forward to more puzzles from you.

PS: The solvers comments are in the comments thread in the post.