Feel like I just got shod in the urano
It's pretty obvious why Joe DiPietro didn't include YELLOW in his puzzle. Can YOU think of any words that embed the phrase SPEEDUPANDGOLIKEHELLTOGETTHROUGHBEFOREITTURNSRED? And if you can, will it fit into a 15x15 grid?
@John Sutton LOL! Nice! I don't think that could fit in a Sunday grid.
@John Sutton Maybe it's that way in Thailand, but over here we *obey* the law, boy howdy. We don't stand for no law breakers in our midst.
@John Sutton From my observation, here is what the traffic signal colors really mean: RED - go YELLOW - go GREEN - go, but proceed with caution
@John Sutton, the only thing I can think of for YELLOW would be [What one might do after stubbing one’s toe]. :-)
@John Sutton this made me think about the movie STARMAN for the first time in ages. <a href="https://youtu.be/g3WtvzmKCQQ?t=65" target="_blank">https://youtu.be/g3WtvzmKCQQ?t=65</a>
@John Sutton Don't you mean a PINK light?
You know what other country is 7 letters and only uses 1 point tiles, and also starts with E? ERITREA
@Rick Box That's what I had, too. But I found two more 7-letter, 1-point countries: TUNISIA and AUSTRIA. And they share the IA ending with ESTONIA.
@Rick Box I had that in at first, as well
I appreciate having a new type of rebus to dislike.
A transportation engineer works in traffic design. (I dated one once: she kept sending me mixed signals.)
@Mike It was probably her way or the highway. Sounds like you found the off ramp.
@Mike You were wise to stop in the name of love!
@Mike Guess you didn't know which way to turn.
@Mike Wine & Dine, didn't = green light?
I would not call this puzzle a rebus.
@Steve L I guess it is a rebus in the non-xword sense, where a picture stands for a syllable or other part of a word. But here I think of a rebus as ">1 letter in a square" -- as enabled by the Rebus tool in this app -- which this is not.
@Steve L I think it is a rebus, because it's a substitution of a described image (green or red traffic signals) with the words GO or STOP. So it's a rebus in the classic sense, not in typical crossword use. The revealer is important in this case.
Wasn’t really in the mood for this one, found it a tad clunky. As always, in awe of a constructor’s talent, just not feeling it today. With what’s going on in Davos/the World I’m finding it harder and harder to keep searching for the light. I see no happy end, even once the villain is removed. Relationships in tatters take a long time to mend. Hopefully that’s obscure enough for an emu pass.
@Helen Wright I am feeling very much the same way these days. I am afraid I can offer no comfort, only company.
@Helen Wright We are so very embarrassed. That, along with fear, sadness, and impotent rage, is the primary mood. It is hard to be in any way proud now. Apologies. (This puzzle on the other hand I found good and a worthy Thursday.)
@Helen Wright There are not only damaged relationships between formerly-friendly countries, but also damaged relationships within American families that as you said, won't be healed for years.
@Helen Wright I can no longer deal with the"news." The murder of Renee Goode; the attempts to "buy" other countries; and that crazy Maria Machado giving a her Nobel Prize to Trump have just broken me and and I have retreated into obsessively watching a British TV show set in a busy hospital emergency room. They manage to deal with very lethal situations in an hour and with good humor. Mentioning this only because you are in the UK.
I liked the theme. It wasn't hard to figure out but I've never seen one like it so infound it fresh. The fill gave me some trouble but unusually all my guesses of problematic squares turned out to be correct. I was not familiar with zombie the drink (or its ingredients), MGMT, the EVERLY brothers, the prefix URANO, MEOW Mix (is it a catfood brand? Snacks for people that look like cats? Something else entirely?), NOODGE, and DYNASTY (I have no idea whatsoever what the clue means). I've never played scrabble, so I needed to rely solely on crosses to get nearby ESTONIA. There are endless ways to clue US colleges, aren't there... Is STETTED pure crosswordese or do real people use the term? I get stet, but stetted...
@Andrzej in the 70 s the ny islanders won multiple Stanley cups in the nhl. Hence a sports dynasty
@Andrzej The Everly Brothers: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lTYe9eDqxe8" target="_blank">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lTYe9eDqxe8</a>
@Andrzej MEOW Mix is a dry cat food. A NOODGE (pronounce the "oo" as in "hood") is a pest or nuisance. STETTED is used by real people. But they're mostly editors.
@Andrzej Islanders won 4 cups straiight 1980 to 1983. I feel the same way about STETTED.
@Andrzej, You don’t know the Everly Brothers? You don’t know what you been a-missin’, Oh boy …
@Andrzej As Steve L noted, MEOW Mix is a cat food. It used to have a catchy tv jingle, where all the lyrics were “meow,” that got stuck in my head when I filled in that entry. I also thought about the NYC lesbian bar Meow Mix, which was down on Houston St in the East Village/Lower East Side. I wonder how many local solvers would remember it; the bar was one of the casualties of gentrification in that atea and closed in the early 2000s.
Thank you all 😀 Btw, GET UP STEAM was yet another unknown for me today. @Rachel I love that. I opt to believe the lesbian bar is actually what the constructor had in mind today 😃. On that note: I'd rather learn about a local NYC institution than forget yet another corporate brand...
@Andrzej I very quickly solved and was happy for ages with Romania, later Numibia, thought about Narnia (6 only)... yep, Dynasty would have to be an obscurity by now... lol, I thought it meant a soap opera.
@Andrzej As a longtime employee of a large book publisher, yes, we use both stet and stetted, but the latter is basically only used when we’re questioning why a change wasn’t made during an author’s review of their copyedited and/or proofread manuscript. Example: Editor: “Why is this adjective used three times in the same sentence? The copyeditor deleted two instances to avoid repetition.” Production Editor: “The author stetted it during his review. Apparently it’s his favorite word and he can’t bear cutting it.” Hope that helps 🙂
@Andrzej Re: zombie. I've found that a 3-letter answer to a drink question is almost always one of ginger or RUM. (Occasionally you'll get a 'rye' mix, but not very often). After a short moment's thought, I figured it was going to be RUM, because both RUM and zombies are associated with the Carribean. Eventually the crosses proved me right. Of course it helps if you at least know that 'zombie' is the name of a cocktail, but the word 'ingredient' in the clue points that way regardless.
Sam Corbin's comment about "NOODGE (pronounced like "book")" was very confusing to me. She means just the vowel sound, correct? For some reason, I just was not on the constructor's wavelength at all. It didn't help that GREEN and GO both start with G, with GO only adding one more letter to that G. Didn't love STETTED or GET UP STEAM or URANO or XINGOUT or DATS or that the clue for TRAFFIC SIGNAL explicitly says, "stop and go"; why give it all away like that? Didn't like that the duplication of UP in ATEITUP and WOKENUP were only four down clues apart. NOEND and its clue, "unceasingly," seem like they don't completely match in terms of parts of speech. This was my longest Thursday time in quite a while.
@DJ You are correct that Sam was just talking about the vowel sound in NOODGE. I had a similar confusion re:the G starting both GREEN and GO and also didn’t love some of the fill that you have pointed out, though I think that my experience was not quite as negative. Just not one of my favorite puzzles/a little chore-like. Usually coming to the comments helps me build up my appreciation for an unsatisfying grid after the fact but today I’m still feeling kind of meh about it.
@DJ I agree about “no end”. Does that clue actually work?
@DJ Agreed. Didn't like it much for all the reasons you mentioned, plus the five random phrases that solved to equally random phrases, and then some lame fill-in-the-blank clues, the lowest form of puzzle life. Steve L's pronunciation aid for NOODGE was clearer than that in the column. The Yiddish word was the one fun thing about today's puzzle!
@DJ "NO END" and "UNCEASINGLY" can both be used aa adverbs, e.g. "We worked no end/unceasingly until the job was done".
@logical Me too. There were a few others. This is my least favorite puzzle in quite some time.
Didn’t like the NW corner at all. The clueing just wasn’t very crisp
@DJ That part was the last to fall for me. STETTED??? Gimme a break.
Wow, talk about totally unsatisfying. Didn't think it was possible but worst. puzzle. ever.
@jp inframan Sorry to hear that. I loved it. I had one of those ultra satisfying cliche experiences where I was at an impasse, took a break, and then an epiphany.
jp inframan, Nobody expects the worst puzzle ever!
@jp inframan Usually, people who get stuck on an uncommon* trick they've never seen before find the experience unenjoyable. Most people seem to have loved it. But unless you delineate what you found unsatisfying/didn't like, we have no way of knowing if that was your experience. * I originally had "unique," but it really wasn't. This kind of trick has been used before, even by the same constructor.
2nd try. Apparently, I can't even use the unparsed answer in a comment. 18 A sounds like a call from a baboon during mating season.
@Nancy J., Good one! 😂😂😂
@Nancy J. 😂😂😂 Okay, then... If that means what I think it means, then my mental image of you just underwent a paradigm shift.
@Nancy J. 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣 that was seriously funny!!! I’m still giggling over here 🤣
STOP what you're doing! This is your GREEN LIGHT to vote for the best puzzles of 2025 in The Griddies! Ballot is here, and anyone can vote: <a href="https://form.jotform.com/260176984868173" target="_blank">https://form.jotform.com/260176984868173</a> Ballot now has the top five in each category: vote for ONE in each and press submit...and you're done. No personal info or emails are needed, it's completely anonymous. A lot of people have voted but we want to hear from the lurkers, the loners, the crack solvers, the crackerjacks, the sad Estonian with the pierced ear, Come all ye red a$$es, we want a GLUT of voters!
@john ezra I voted yesterday. Not sure which category I fit, but I'm not an Estonian with a pierced ear. Maybe I'm a VSOP ANTIC.
The way I confidently wrote ERITREA and moved right on…
The correct answer was the only one (so far) that featured 7 different one point tiles. I suppose the clue could have reflected that, but this puzzle didn't need any more easyish clues.
@Max Puzzle clue featuring Scrabble tiles just as NYT premieres new Scrabble-type game...coincidence? You decide.
Sorry. I didn’t care for this puzzle today. Many of the clues were very obscure, and there were strange answers. I have enjoyed most puzzles, but sorry, this one missed the mark.
I should have STOPPED earlier, but I kept GOing. That's 16 minutes of my life I'll never get back.
its comical observing solvers who can't figure it out then call the puzzle 'worst puzzle ever' its a grown up puzzle for adults figure it out!
@acjones as ever, there is a contingent of people who very much want to be the *kind of person* who does the NYT crossword, but they don’t want it to be hard in any way. They forget that if it were easy, it would not be a prestige puzzle, and they would therefore have no desire to be the kind of person who does the NYT crossword.
While filling this in, I: • Tried hard to imagine a tool that took two people to use, and finally pictured the SAW. That felt good. • Chuckled at [Sporting flats, say] for SHOD. • Liked the funny-sounding SHOD, GLUT, and NOODGE. • Let out a spontaneous inner “Hah!” when I saw the trick. • Shook my head in shame for not getting INSECTS from [Bees, but not birds] sooner. • Smiled at “sotto VOCE”, whose comments beautify this forum. • Imagined scenes from “The Studio” after filling in ROGEN. That series made me laugh. • Felt a flash of embarrassment from having no idea where ESTONIA is, looked it up, and now it’s a TIL. Nice to see you, Joe, after a 2.5-year absence, and congratulations on your 142nd NYT puzzle. Thank you for a rich outing!
@Lewis One aspect of this puzzle I enjoyed was how the {RED} strings resolved to longer ones, while the {GREEN} strings to much shorter ones. Made for an interesting "texture," if you know what I mean.
@Lewis I'm moved by the high compliment coming from you the one and only true beautifier of this forum! Thank you. 💕
what in the world was that? what an abomination. changing GREEN to GO is clunky - changing a 'G' to a 'G' is... weird, unsatisfying, not obvious? also, still recovering from STETTED x PITSAWS x TSKTSK x VOCE x SHOD x OHM x NOM x COSEC x URANO x DATS x NOODGE ... can we get back to the majority of puzzles not being trivia and words with 1% usage? this is just another absolute slog that doesn't want to be solved
"this is just another absolute slog that doesn't want to be solved." By you.
@Charles This seemed pretty typical to me for a Thursday, both word and clue wise.
Parsed the obvious way, COMEREDASS sounds like a call from a baboon during mating season.
@Nancy J. Sorry for the repeat. I posted this many hours ago.
@Nancy J. LOL I had the same image and (almost) posted it
Nancy J., I saw it earlier...
@Nancy J. glad the emus finally released this. ;)
As we learned from the movie Starman back in the ‘80s: Red means stop Green means go Yellow means go faster!
@Mike but on a banana it's just the opposite. Green means 'hold on,' yellow means 'go ahead,' and red means, 'where did you get that banana at?'" ~ Mitch Hedberg
Having just been to the Met’s blockbuster show “Divine Egypt” twice in the last month (I live across the park, lucky me :)) I might as well try to share some of that esoteric knowledge here. Cow horns were most closely associated with the goddess Hathor,m; over time (and we are talking about millennia so there’s lots of time!) depictions of ISIS also took on cow horns, in line with the general syncretic practice of Egyptian religious iconography. Of course, the clue is not wrong per se; indeed the reference to cow horns can be read as the hint that we are looking for an ancient Egyptian deity. And the answer to “Egyptian goddess, four letters” is always going to be ISIS. I didn’t spend a lot of time trying to use a rebus to fit “Hathor” in there. Now, this being the NYXW comments there is probably a world-class Egyptologist among us who will either correct me or add much more erudition …
@Nat I’m no Egyptologist, I thought it was Hera at first because she’s sometimes depicted as a cow. Working around that error gave me Isis.
@Nat K "Egyptian goddess, four letters" could also be Bast or Neit. But that might be too esoteric, except for Saturday? Lucky you, to have seen that exhibition twice. I at least have the wonderful catalog from "Divine Egypt". I'm just a basic fairly studied Egyptophile, and can confirm you are correct.
@Nat K That threw me as well. I know Hathor as the cow goddess, and I suspect most people familiar with Egyptology do too. I'm no expert, but everything I've read on the subject associates Hathor, not ISIS, with cows. The word "sometimes" might have made it a better clue; as it is, it just sounds wrong.
The clue for 14 Across might be correct, but it all depends on what the meaning of Isis is.
Maybe not meaning of Isis but incarnation of Isis
@Fact Boy Brilliant! I can still remember hearing him say that on live TV and not believing my ears. As some (sadly not me) said, it raised sentence parsing to a new height. Oh, for those more innocent times ...
@Fact Boy That may be true. Depends what your definition of "depends" is.
Coincidental that Seth Rogen should be here, the star of Zack and Miri Make a P0RN0? 2008 movie set in Pittsburgh and suburbs, directed by Kevin Smith. Unfunny and juvenile, which meant I enjoyed it. I think this is a fun theme, but seems a little undercooked and un-thursday to simply have red and green repeated -- the swapped replacement of STOP and GO was really well done, rbut ather predictable after you get them the first time: would have been enhanced by elements that might fit only in a Sunday grid: yellow, "walk," left/right turn only, with words that turn left or right - why not? Pet peeve. The increasingly scarcity of intersections where you can turn right on read. When the right-on-red law passed, decades ago, you could practically turn right on red at any given intersection, and that freedom has slowly been curtailed, intersection by intersection. It's a violation of my civil rights on red! It's even in the Constitution: haven't you read the Bill of Rights on Red? There was no x-ing out of that law; it was stetted in!
Pardon all the typos, I got a little excited.
@john ezra 😀 I have noticed the "No Right on Red" is becoming more common. And if you actually obey such a sign, you'll get honked at if anyone is behind you. Because nobody sees those signs. The one thing I've heard in opposition to Right on Red is that it can be dangerous for pedestrians. If the walker has a walk signal in the same direction a car is going, the car will see the red light, but maybe not the pedestrian.
@john ezra Steve is correct - the rule is posted on roads into NYC. And there are exception signs posted. (I don't believe this is limited to Staten Island.)
32 Across has a mismatch between clue and answer. “Unceasingly” and “to no end” are both complete adverb phrases. “No end” is a noun phrase.
@Russell This nit bothers me no end. Or not.
@Russell See my earlier comment. There's always pushback when this appears. Some solvers don't see the equivalency, but it's there.
ingenious puzzle thanks Joe - love you have to obey the commands of the traffic signals and figure out the rebus in your head that's really cool!
8-Down "Approximately 84% of American women have at least one" - Had PIER, and thought to myself, "Pie recipes? Really? That many American women, in 2026, have a pie recipe locked and loaded?" The correct answer made much more sense.
@GTrees This made me laugh out loud. Thank you! 😄
This puzzle was subtle to the point of obscurity and even perversity. Going beyond the use of red and green for go stop, calling some of its clues tortured would be charitable. Clues like "Left in" would have been more kindly expressed as "Left in?", and I'm sorry but my web search of weather whether pitsaw is ever used is a synonym for a whipsaw comes up with that it never is, although sometimes the worksite arrangement that a whip saw is used in is called a sawpit. Given that, at least in my mind, a crossword puzzle is a diversion and not a waste of time, I would call this one the latter.
@John I agree entirely. Clues that solve to words that are inaccurate or don't exist should have question marks. Several clues and answers here failed that basic rule. It was an unsatisfying solve realizing that some of the full was just sticking letters in. No aha moment, just a slog to the music.
PITSAW <a href="https://emuseum.colonialwilliamsburg.org/objects/50015/pit-saw?ctx=d0ca4423fe087c8909948a991fefd0f956c90fae&idx=362" target="_blank">https://emuseum.colonialwilliamsburg.org/objects/50015/pit-saw?ctx=d0ca4423fe087c8909948a991fefd0f956c90fae&idx=362</a>#
@John — I’m still struggling with this puzzle. I thought I had it figured out, but no. Complete waste of time. I’m resorting to hints with zero guilt.
@John Of course another big IF is whether Denmark will go along with this. It sounds like at least at this moment they have been excluded from the negotiations between NATO Sect'y Gen'l Rutte and whatever Machiavellian functionaries of Trump are negotiating this: Denmark Bristles at Idea of Giving Up Any Sovereignty in Greenland - The New York Times <a href="https://share.google/88w4s6Dv9oLkpmyV3" target="_blank">https://share.google/88w4s6Dv9oLkpmyV3</a>
@John I agree. The hardest Thursday puzzle in my memory. A combination of an odd trick and obscure clues/fills.
64A, MEOW, reminded me of one of my programming stints. I worked with a guy, a Java developer, who is probably as close to genius as I can tolerate. He was also a quite devoted curmudgeon, bringing all his intelligence and skill to being as much of a Richard as he could possibly be. It was an art form for him. But he was also incredibly funny. Anyway, occasionally he'd sing "meow, meow, meow, meow, meow, meow, meow, meow....", the commercial for Meow Mix. The first time I heard it I was nonplussed. Rarely a dull moment at that gig.
@Francis. I would often break out with “Dude looks like a lady” at work. No reason. Hope none of my coworkers read these comments.
@Francis I'm definitely going to steal the phrase "probably as close to genius as I can tolerate"!
@Francis I worked with an IT guy for whom the Meow Mix jingle was his default refrain when the spinny wheel hold-your-horses icon was spinning. Must be a techie thing.
I’m becoming tired of the near constant use of tricks like rebuses. There seems to an arms race of constructors vying to outdo one another with convoluted entries. Sometimes, I just want to do a crossword. Occasional clever themes and rebuses are fun, but overuse is making me less interested. And I say this as someone who has faithfully done the Times crossword for 40+ years.
@Susan C I hear you. “Oh to solve this crossword replace all the ‘M’s’ with ‘T’s’ and then turn it upside down.” Feels frustrating because we’re all meant to understand the basic “rules” of crosswords, but they seem to break the rules and call it a “trick.” Next we’ll have letters going outside the borders of the puzzle!!
@Susan C At first as I read your comment, I thought you might be a "newbie". But 40+ years makes you seasoned, indeed! Given that tricky puzzles are only published on Thursdays and some Sundays, what makes it seem more constant to you? Is it more about the clues – the wordplay – or the answers with gimmicks? As a daily solver for the past few years, there are plenty of puzzles that feel less interesting to me. I'm wondering if it's because of a similar feeling as you – overuse leads to less sparkle. I dunno!
I am surprised by the number of people who didn’t like this puzzle. I am not saying they don’t have a right to feel that way…as my father used to say, de gustibus non est disputandum. It’s just that I feel as if it hits the right notes for a Thursday…a theme that I had to work to get, along with some challenging and even very challenging clues. One of my favorite puzzles in a long while. Finished about five percent under my average. So, thank you, Joe DiPietro.
@Joe I liked it, but I think the fill is a little polarizing. Also I feel like the theme was spoon fed a bit. As soon as I saw the revealer (which was right away since it was an early down) I filled it in and immediately guessed to fill in RED and GREEN with stop and go in my mind. After that it was just like a themeless to me, and I found that decent enough but as I said there was some fill which could be off-putting. Also as someone else pointed out, the fact that GREEN and GO both start with G is a bit problematic. On the plus side I don’t see this mentioned but it’s a lot of theme to stuff in with 4 long theme entries and a long double revealer which had to intersect with the theme, which is a bit of a feat. But yes I can understand folks who didn’t enjoy this for a variety of reasons.
I thought I needed to come on and say that I thought today was a fine puzzle. Clues were a bit tough, but very doable. The theme made sense and was helpful once you got the gimmick. A lot of people complained about today, so I thought I needed to counterbalance by saying I thought it was decent. Not spectacular, but certainly not deserving of all the flak it’s getting.
@Michael Exactly! Some of these whiners need to find another puzzle!
Well OK, Joe. A lot of stop and go, but I got there.
@Barry Ancona Lol! (If the studies are right, you've just added hours – or days, or something like that – to my life.) :-D
Well, the trick is totally given away by having “stop and go” in the clue for 11D. It would have been easy enough to figure out without that, IMHO. A clever idea, although I wish the entries prior to the trick being implemented could have been valid phrases. Fun fact for PIERCED EAR and I love the word NOODGE. But if we go another 28 years before seeing STETTED again I won't be upset.
Count me in as one of the few (perhaps if looking at the comments) who loves to be continually challenged in different ways (good for the brain!). I thought it was going to be a tough nut to track, but just kept picking away at it. I had to do a few lookups but I got there eventually. Keep 'em coming, keep us guessing!
There’s a practice I wish would COME TO PASS, a real LOST OPPORTUNITY for motorists. Is anyone WORKING ON IT? Nope, the traffic gods are XING OUT all attempts at progress! What practice? That, when a line of cars is stopped as the light turns from RED to GREEN, all the cars should simultaneously begin to move. No more waiting for car 2 to notice car 1 moving, then car 3 waiting to notice car 2, etc. Yeah, pet peeve. Next week’s topic: the zipper merge.
@Cat Lady Margaret Me, too. It shouldn't be a chain reaction, but it is. It always is.
@Cat Lady Margaret We don't drive down the street bumper to bumper. The "staggered start" just restores the spacing the cars had before they had to stop at the light. Think about trying to maintain a distance of a foot or two between your car and the ones ahead and behind in moving traffic. Expert NASCAR drivers do that sort of thing for drafting purposes and many of them get crashed out in every race. Even without cross traffic and red lights.
@Cat Lady Margaret For no obvious reason, your comment reminded me of a gruesome phenomenon once described by my trigonometry teacher in high school. Not sure why; perhaps an illustration of an infinite series? He was postulating a scenario of a miles (kilometres?)-long line of desert nomads, each following at a fixed distance behind the person in front, moving at the same pace. If the person at the front of the line stops, the next person would presumably take an extra step before reacting to the person in front, as would the person next in line who would also have seen the first person stop. However, the persons far in the rear would not realize the person at the front had stopped and continue walking at the same pace. The inevitable result? People in the middle being crushed to death by the forward momentum of all those advancing from behind.
@Cat Lady Margaret That reminds me. Years ago, I was driving to Hilton Head in a rain storm with my wife, our 15 year old niece, and our two dogs in the far back of our Volvo wagon. As I got onto the island, I was stopped at a red light behind another car. When the light turned green, the car ahead didn’t go, but the one behind decided it was too long a wait and just rammed into us. No one was hurt, but the back hatch was destroyed. That woman would not get out in the rain so I had to stand there getting soaked as we exchanged insurance and registration. I was seething. When I finally got back in our car and drove away, my wife was chewing my ear off with a bunch of questions but I was still in shock and just trying to drive. I finally lost it, told her to give it a rest and dropped some really nasty words. Got real quiet. Good times.
@Cat Lady Margaret Aah, the zipper merge. And I assume you’re not talking about the 16A actors putting their jeans back on. The drivers I hate the most are the ones who know their lane is ending, see everyone else merging, yet decide they are special enough to race up to the front of the line and bully their way in at the last second. I am the one who straddles the line in an effort to stop this savagery. Sometimes it works (you’re welcome), sometimes they just go to the shoulder and whip around me anyway. But at least they can’t claim they didn’t see the merge. @Francis Do what I do. Insist on driving. It’s much less stressful that way. (And as for the rest of your comment: what SBK said.)
@Cat Lady Margaret Well, it needs to be a chain reaction to be safe. But in recent years the speed of that reaction has slowed tremendously, which I always assume is due to people finsihing a text before hitting the gas.
@Cat Lady Margaret I have thought the same thing re. the cars but, alas, you know it can’t work in the age of cell phones. It would take a line of Waymo cars to work, or having all the cars clamped to an under-street cable like in San Francisco.
Got it, finally but very painful for this dyslexic. My first and last cat, a former feral, would eat only that particular cat food. He would come and sit in my lap and loudly purr, but if I tried to pet him he'd rake me viciously. I loved him anyway. He may have liked me somewhat.
@McT Hats off to you for tackling crossword puzzles. It must be a bit more challenging than for non-dyslexics. I'd like to hear from more people with this or other challenges related to word-based games and activities.
"WHICH PRICELESS MEMBER OF THIS COMMUNITY WAS REFERENCED IN TODAY'S PUZZLE?" "sotto voce" "which priceless member of this community was referenced in today's puzzle?" That would work better if I knew how to adjust font size. Still I think it was an apt Jim Ignatowski rip-off given today's theme. Or inapt considering the color. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rK5tJnV4Zr4" target="_blank">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rK5tJnV4Zr4</a>
@ad absurdum Never gets old! Hilarious!
@ad absurdum That's so nice of you! Thank you! 💕 And what a great clip! :-D
Enjoyed being puzzled. That’s why I’m here. A few oddities but nothing out of bounds for a Thursday. Theme was fun and puzzling for a minute, and my brain had to work a bit to see the replaced letters.
I pulled a muscle trying to follow the reasoning for this rebus. 3/10.
Apparently not all rebus puzzles are created equally. Really fun solve and I was quite surprised to get the music figuring I still had much work left to do. I was lucky in solving the crosses, because the themed answers had me scratching my head. Very cleverly done, and one of the few where I actually understood the theme before reading the comments.
Sotto Voce in da house! Way to needle us right in the soft spot...
@CCNY Aw, thank you for the shout-out. 💕
Really annoying. I'm not a huge fan of rebuses and other gimmickry, but this was too much.
Whoa, I love Thursdays and I love a rebus, and I also know that rebuses take forms other than squeezing several letters into one square. I loved the challenge of this amazing puzzle but I admit that I needed a lot of help to finish it. Some lookups, and eventually to reading what Sam had to tell us. I think I may have used all her tricky clues and I know I needed to have the theme explained to me. And that’s okay, especially for late week puzzles. Thanks for the challenge Joe DiPietro. I will be girding my loins in future when I see your name on a puzzle. I know there is scary cold weather arriving in some parts of the country, so please stay safe y’all.
I had a very hard time figuring out how today’s puzzle worked. In the end, I loved it for that reason. Once a week, we get meta-puzzles: puzzles that require broadening your thinking to include the puzzle itself as well as its clues. I enjoy these intricate puzzles, and many others here do as well. When I read comments trashing the constructors or the Times for creating, editing, and publishing these puzzle-box challenges, I’m reminded of TripAdvisor reviews dismissing the Louvre for having too few vending machines, or panning Popeye’s for not offering more salads. They really just miss the point.
The thing I found most surprising about this puzzle was the factoid (assuming it's true) that 16% of American women don't have any ear piercings! I would've guessed the number to be in the single digits.
@Grumpy I wondered where that number came from. I've never been asked if I have pierced ears! I queried online and the top hit was a 2017 survey where people were asked about piercings and tattoos. This survey got the 84% for female ear piercing. Number of respondents:345. 'Nuff said.
@Grumpy I would have guessed use much higher.
Joe Pietro's byline always sets off my Spidey sense, though this turned out to be not so bad. I had no problem with the trick, but after the fact the column confused the heck out of me. Compliments of Jim Horne over at xwordinfo.com here's how to interpret the theme entries. GREEN means GO and RED means STOP, so: WORKINGREENNIT → WORKINGONIT COMEREDASS → COMESTOPASS LOREDPORTUNITY → LOSTOPPORTUNITY XINGREENUT → XINGOUT
@Vaer I rarely notice the constructor's name, but I did this time, and I recognized it. That was a bad sign, because I figured I'd recognized it due to an unhappy experience. I thought this one was great. I'm loving it more, the more I look at it.
@Vaer Unfortunately the Bolding doesn't come through, which makes it a bit trickier to see.
@Francis Go back and look at his May 9, 2024 puzzle
@Vaer oh ta, I was misfollowing the write up on comredass and thought they are saying it should be comestopass... leading to utter confusion for 27A.
I enjoyed this but more like a themeless than for the theme. The theme was clever and well executed, no doubt—although I suspect 5 or 10 years ago the editors would not have seen the need to spell it out so obviously in the clue for the revealer, and possibly not even grey out the letters. That aside, I thought this was a challenging puzzle with some great clues like “Marks successor” —and I bet I’m not the only one who wrote CHEC before MEOW. I loved the NW corner with its three colloquial down phrases, PITSAWS, and I didn’t even mind STETTED because TIL it’s a verb too—it had me stumped for a long while. I don’t want to have a LOREDPORTUNITY to recommend Natan Last’s new book about crossword puzzles “Across the Universe” which I just finished. Not just a history or an homage to crosswords (although it’s that too) it gets into the recent trends and philosophical debates about crosswords that we wrestle with all the time in this forum. I highly recommend it, anyone who is interested enough to comment here would be interested to read it.
@SP Chex before MEOW here 😆 I will have to get that book. Thanks for the rec.
@SP I had LUKE as Mark's successor.
@SP I just recently read about the book in this interview with Nathan Last, which might be of interest to you and fellow puzzlers: <a href="https://www.the-independent.com/news/world/americas/us-politics/daily-crossword-politics-views-b2868358.html" target="_blank">https://www.the-independent.com/news/world/americas/us-politics/daily-crossword-politics-views-b2868358.html</a>
@SP thanks for the recommendation. Checking it out now.
@SP Totally agree that the theme was a bit shallow. I’m surprised it’s getting so much acclaim. I enjoyed it, and the penny didn’t drop instantly, but when it did, that was it. No slow realisation; just get on with the rest of the puzzle.