Only Kugelman could get away with nonsense like "Dessert" leading to "tressed" and thence to HAIRYBACK. Like "hairy"...BACKwards...cause the clue is BACKwards? And "Taps" = "spat" leads to COUNTERARGUMENT? Seriously? Will someone explain to me how "COUNTER" is synonymous with backwards or reversed or out of order or...? It's gotten to the point, for me, where confronting a Kugelman is much less like doing a crossword and more like completing a psychological profile of a crucigrammatic criminal. And he is endlessly enabled here. If only Stan Lee had imagined a super-villain whose power was dad puns/jokes/humor he might have come up with Kugelman-man. Just...no. Enough already.
@Matt LOL! I can't disagree with a single word you said. This puzzle gave me a brain sprain. Can't wait for Andrzej to comment on his favorite constructor.
@Matt i will counter your whiny rant with this: this puzzle was brilliant and your lack of ability to understand it does not bespeak any deficiency in terms the quality of the puzzle.
@Matt Very difficult puzzle, but surely you've heard of Counter-clockwise.
@Matt The easiest way to explain COUNTER is to think of clocks. COUNTERclockwise is the opposite direction of clockwise. Also, if something is running COUNTER to something else, it's going against it.
@Matt you're taking this the wrong way - the answers for those italic clues were well worth the obfuscation that Rachel and John presented to us today. it's a Thursday puzzle it's Suppose to be like this Matt. it's not suppose to be easy and upon reflection you cannot tell me the answers in the puzzle especially the reverse italicized clue answers are not AMAZING. its a beautiful puzzle.
@Matt Think of a COUNTER argument or chess move as one intended to reverse or undo the effect of the opponent's gambit.
Matt, It's a crossword. You have to do words.
@Matt COUNTERpoise COUNTERpiece COUNTERact COUNTERforce COUNTERpoint COUNTERfactual COUNTERtenor COUNTERclaim... I'm getting bored, so I'll stop. No, wait! One more. Of course, all by itself, the verb COUNTER, which means to oppose or to reverse.
@Matt LOL Matt. You know I’m a fan and you know I’ll always have your (hairy?) back but this is an example of you reap what you sow. If you want to be at the vanguard of those who complain about too easy puzzles, then you are going to take heat if you complain it’s too tricky. If I ever complained about a puzzle that was too hard COUNTER to other’’ opinions, I’d have to swallow my medicine too. (Record for trite cliches in one post? Oh well).
@Matt I don't agree with you on the puzzle, but "crucigrammatic criminal" is a simply brilliant turn of phrase. Bravo!
Sorry people, i hate to be a naysayer, but this was an *outstanding* puzzle. It had a brilliant gimmick, wonderful clues (Meteor shower? Time to go fast and more), only a couple of potential naticks (VIEIRA, OLAF, RATSO) and no junk fill. HAIRYBACK? RETROCHIC? Genius! I loved it, whatever you all say.
I have hated this week's puzzles, but this one I despise. There's no fun in saying WT# over and over, even after solving it. Easily the worst puzzle of the past year.
@ScottM this puzzle was clever and brilliant and your inability to understand it does not make it a bad one. I'm going to say this as slowly and clearly as I possibly can: a hard puzzle is not a bad puzzle.
@ScottM Me too. And despite the other snippy, bad-faith reply, I finished it just fine; I just didn't like the construction. I thought the tricks were fun, actually, but RATSO, BLUTO, SIVA crossing VIEIRA and LIDAR? Some satisfying moments (I liked DRINKSALLAROUND a lot), but the puzzle as a whole needed more time in the oven.
@ScottM I also think this was the worst puzzle of the year. I hope NYT does not publish any more puzzles by this person.
@ScottM Agreed, one of the worst puzzles ever. I'm letting my sub lapse because of the recent downward spiral of quality. This one's the straw that broke the camel's back for me.
Alas, meteors are pretty much the one thing in the night sky you don’t use a telescope to view. I know, picking nits…..
@Steve C I came here just to say that, though I do admire the wordplay.
@Steve C - I came to comments to make the exact same point! The way to watch meteors is with a blanket over yourself in a chaise longue with your bare eyes.
@Steve C Indeed. It didn't make my diatribe, above, but it was a bad one. The word play is cute, but a telescope sees at best only a couple of square degrees of the sky, and a meteor can show up in any of over 20,000 square degrees, in a hemisphere. So your chance of seeing a meteor with a telescope is like 10,000 less likely with a telescope as with the naked eye.
@Steve C Not really nit-picking. The clue crew didn't use their noggins on that one. It's hard to track a meteor with your eyes, and using a TELESCOPE would doom your endeavor completely.
@Steve C I'm no astronomer, but it seems to me that a good way to detect... or show...faint meteors would be with a timelapse photo through a low- power TELESCOPE. Yeah, I'm trying for charitable. It's a stretch.
@Steve C big difference between meteors and meteorites. I loved that clue.
@Steve C Meteoroid would have been a better choice of word. They are the objects that move through space, becoming meteors when they enter the atmosphere and meteorites if they survive the entry and land on the ground. A number of land and space-based telescopes are constantly searching for meteoroids that might one day encounter earth with catastrophic results, a worthy effort if you ask any dinosaur.
I just disagree. I don’t think these are the right clues for these definitions. I completely get that in crosswords we stretch what a synonym is, but these are too much and they pulled my brain muscles.
@Jesse R. Sorry you had to use your “brain muscles” today. Never fear, Monday will be back before you know it!
@Jesse R. I hear your frustration and we all have those days, but is there a chance that this was just one you found to be challenging, and not that the clues are wrong? Once the trick clicked for me halfway through, I loved this one! Other days, not so much.
Faraday is the unit for capacitance. Electric charge unit is Coulomb
@M Yeah, I had coulomb in there too, at first. Same number of letters…. But capacitance is measured in farads. I taught physics for decades and never came across the faraday as measuring charge. Turns out it is an obsolete unit from electrochemistry.
@M Faraday is the total electric charge of a mole of electrons, a little less than 100000 coulombs.
@M - No, Farad is the unit of capacitance. A FARADAY is, indeed, an obsolete unit of electric charge. FARAD ≠ FARADAY.
@M , I had COULOMBS at first, too, then asssumed the clue must be a tricksy reference to topping up laptop batteries and tried ADAPTERS. What a drag that made this puzzle. There are far better ways to clue FARADAY, jeez!
Sooooooo many stretches. Hated this one. Glad others enjoyed it!
The computer question is wrong. The correct answer is null not nil. Nil is zero to an English person. In computer lingo, when the code returns nothing or a zero, that is a null value, not a nil value. The answers related very poorly to the clues. In fact, I still do not see many of the connections.
@Jeff As a former programmer NIL also looked wrong to me however some computer languages use it, but I never used any of them.
@Jeff Exactly. NULL is the word they were looking for. NIL means the same things but is never used in any computer language I've ever known.
@Jeff You're mistaken. If you read Wordplay, you will see that the constructor is an engineer who worked in tech, so she has some bona fides on the subject. I have little (although more than none), so I looked it up. Unfortunately NIL is an actual language, so lots of links on the language, but I easily found a reference to NIL as a programming word. "As far as I'm concerned, null, nil, none and nothing are common names for the same concept: a value which represents the “absence of a value”, and which is present in many different types (called nullable types)." This is followed by a bunch of examples in different languages. <a href="https://cs.stackexchange.com/questions/44422/what-is-the-purpose-of-using-nil-for-representing-null-nodes" target="_blank">https://cs.stackexchange.com/questions/44422/what-is-the-purpose-of-using-nil-for-representing-null-nodes</a>
@Jeff I guess the clue should have used “some” instead of “many”. It seems uncommon to this programmer - and clearly to others on this thread.
@Jeff As a computer programmer of over 30 years familiar with C, Pascal, Basic, RPG, Fortran, and COBOL languages, NULL is the term I am familiar with. Even so I thought it was close enough for crosswords.
@Jeff I have a vague memory of seeing "nil" in textbooks, and searching shows that some languages actually use it as a keyword. They tend to be what I'd call the more "academic" languages, as opposed to the languages that dominate the industry (with some exceptions). But I thought it was NULL, so I tentatively filled in NUL. That's the spelling used for the ASCII "null character", which is not quite the same thing, but the only three-letter option that came to mind at first! All that being said, as a computer programmer myself, I'm happy to see the entry clued as programming trivia rather than the usual football/soccer trivia. :-)
@Jeff I’m Team Null and a jaded know-it-all software engineer type, but after seeing that ‘nil’ is a reserved word in languages like Go, Lua, Ruby, and Lisp I consider myself happy to be slightly more edumacated.
@Jeff The first language I was given formal training in was Lisp (back in 1980), where there are two fundamental atomic things. One of them is "t", which is interpreted as TRUE, and the other is "nil", which is interpreted as FALSE, but also means an empty list, which is in turn the marker for the end of a list, and it's usually written "()". In my college days, nerdy wags would ask and answer questions in Lisp style: "Dinnerp?" "t!" "Chinesep?" "nil!". So for those who know Lisp (and some related languages, at least), this is absolutely not wrong.
@Jeff Your comment is wrong. Two mainstream programming languages that use “nil”: Go and Ruby. I’ll just never understand comments that contain a supremely confident pronouncement regarding a topic the commenter is clearly ignorant or confused about…
@Jeff I had NaN for quite a while before landing on NIL (???).
I really disliked this puzzle. I’ve never commented before, but today seemed like a good day to chime in with my disdain of this theme and many of the clues. Hoping for better next Thursday.
"Can't we prepare food on the stove?" "Well, here's my counter argument." ("Let's table this discussion.")
@Mike You need to line up all your twee baubles to get your kitsch in sync
@Mike This opens a whole new range of comments…just food for thought.
@Mike While you're doing that, I'm taking a CAB to the bar, or am I already BLUTO?
@Mike You have the skillet takes to avoid getting panned every day. I guess when you look at the puzzle, you figure the griddle give you some good material to work with.
@Mike When I read your puns, I have a burning desire to leave scorching reviews....
@Mike Chefs are known to mix it up. You can always get a rise out of them, and they're always egging each other on. Beats me how they ever get anything done.
Rachel and John used obfuscation to make the italics near undecipherable which is WHY we do puzzles - to try and figure out what the creators are up to - after solving I looked back and it's actually really funny how they got such glorious crosses with those italic clues. I loved the answers they're pretty rare in puzzling - bravo!
For me, the best part was John Kugelman’s comment of how the puzzle started — I’m STILL cracking up! (And I really needed a laugh today.) Thanks!
What a relentlessly horrible puzzle. The theme clues required layers of very specific lateral interpretation, and even with the theme explained, they are tenuous at best. Coupled with late-week-level crosses, if you’re not on the very specific wavelength that gets the theme, it renders the puzzle impenetrable. Poor show. I usually don’t comment if I don’t enjoy a puzzle, assuming it to be against my own preferences. But I think this was just a bad puzzle.
@James well i got it and I’m not that good so… sorry for you
@James When I first started solving NYT crosswords I found a lot more of them impenetrable than I do now.
i liked it! it was weird and hard! it's good for us to have to think differently sometimes!
I may just quit doing Thursday puzzles after this mess of puzzle. This puzzle is the exact opposite of what I want from a crossword...
@Jeff P. This is so wild to me because I thought this was a super fun Thursday but to each their own I guess!
Wordplay and riddles galore – my kind of puzzle. At some point, because there were a couple of areas I kept chipping away at without breaking open, I felt myself bearing down and going into full determination mode -- a faith solve. That's exactly where I want a puzzle to take me. Things I don’t know, elusive clues, and it becomes Brain Day, equivalent to, say, Leg or Chest Day at the gym. Brain Day: When a puzzle becomes a Puzzle. A Puzzle brings sweet rewards. For instance, the cross of CAB and ALA, two simple answers whose clues – [Something inside or outside a wine bar?] and [In the way of] – were absolutely opaque to me. When they finally filled in, it felt like New Year’s Eve. The concept was so Thursday and so well executed – finding common phrases that included “backwards” synonyms, clued by backward words, and making it all fit symmetry. Wow! Thank you, John and Rachel, for a splendid outing, and congratulations on your debut, Rachel – more like this please!
@Lewis Just a little thing which I thought you'd appreciate --NON crossing ONO.
@Lewis, “A faith solve” — that’s a perfect description. My favorite kind of puzzle, because the answers aren’t all gimmes that you put in without having to really think. This is one where you wonder how the heck you’re going to figure this out, not knowing if you really can or not, then seeing the trick and knowing it’s just a matter of time. It’s where I want a puzzle to take me, too.
Whewf! Got it, but without getting it.
@Joe PI agree, same. To me, that's a fail. To muddle through a puzzle and solve it without ever having the glorious "aha!" moment when you understand the theme is....meh. Whomp whomp.
Are people here to learn? How can you finish a puzzle, not understand it, and not be curious enough to read the column, the comments and xwordinfo to try to figure out what you missed? That knowledge will help you the next time you come across something similar, so to ignore the resources just sets you up to fail again and again and again. Also, why are people so angry when they don't solve successfully? There are puzzles in other venues that I can't always complete. My first thought is "Oof, they got me!", not "It's not fair!". Sounds like a bunch of whining to me.
@Nancy J. It’s like a bad joke. You can explain it as many times as you want, but if it’s not funny it’s just not funny. That doesn’t mean everyone will think the joke wasn’t funny, but when a large portion of people feel a certain way, perhaps the problem is not the people.
@Nancy J. Most of us are actually not here primarily to learn. We are here to solve puzzles. It is possible to think a puzzle is bad not just because it's hard. You can not understand why someone doesn't like a puzzle. That doesn't mean they're just complaining that it's hard.
@Nancy J. I personally believe a puzzle should be able to stand on its own, that's why it's a puzzle. One should not have to have "instructions" to solve it. I don't necessarily mind gimmicks but I agree with others that there were stretches on a number of clues in order to make the gimmick work. That's where it starts to fail for me. As I have said before, not all can be winners in the (paying) public eye. This was not the worst puzzle this year but I personally didn't enjoy it.
I like to give the creators kudos most of the time (I couldn't do what they do) but this is just too far reaching. Pretty bad puzzle, kinda sucked the fun right out of solving...
@MInnieA I don't understand this take ? What was bad about it? What was far reaching?
Although I am out of the moderation biz, mostly, and glad of it, I still feel the obligation to give a pat on the back to a new constructor when needed. (John doesn’t need it, he knows how polarizing he is already, I’m sure). Rachel you co-constructed a witty, difficult and clever theme and did it well and expertly. I get it, it was too opaque, convoluted and/or contrived for many solvers out there. That’s all right, that happens. But it was still a remarkable accomplishment and worthy of recognition. You clearly have talent and skill and I’m excited to see you pursue it further. Don’t take it personally, and for those who said “don’t quit your day job” remember this is nobody’s day job. Rachel did this because she loves puzzles and had a fun idea she wanted to share with all of us. I for one am grateful.
A really dishonest puzzle — not because of its “read backwards” gimmick, though that is too gimmicky for my taste — but because the answers don’t fit the backward-read clues. An example: tressed does not mean hairy back, but simply long hair (tresses) hanging from one’s head. Another: “counterargument” is not a synonym for argument (spat) but merely a component of a spat— A argues one thing, and B disagrees via B’s counterargument. And so on, it’s a disappointing, unfair puzzle.
@Sam I didn't enjoy this puzzle either but to your point, the answers have two parts and one of of them is a nod to the backward nature of the clue... BACK, RETRO, FLIP, etc. Its still an eye roll of a gimmick though.
@Sam Not a critique of your opinion on the puzzle, just a clarification if it would help. Parts of the entries are just signals for the reversal. So TRESSED isn’t supposed to mean “hairy back” it’s supposed to mean “hairy” back (ie backwards). And SPAT isn’t supposed to mean “counterargument” it’s supposed to mean counter “argument” (ie counter to the usual direction). To those of us who are familiar with cryptics, this is second nature, and I thought I’ve seen plenty of themes with wordplay like this in the past. But apparently this is a bridge too far for a lot of folks, which is a perfectly fair assessment. Just wanted to make sure you understood at least what the intent was.
@Sam - When I had long tresses, they were down my back. Therefore, I had a "hairy back", a back showing hair. It's a play on what we usually think of as a hairy back.
What a fun puzzle! I loved the theme! Even though – or maybe because – I didn't get it until the grid was completely filled. Almost ashamed to admit that, as this puzzle felt like having a good helping of inspiration from cryptic crosswords – and and cryptics are a big part of my preferred puzzle diet. This level of cryptic-style cluing was unexpected in the regular NYT crossword, especially without a helpful revealer, but that made it even more delightful when the penny finally dropped. The clue for 14A had a dose of cryptic-style misdirection at the level that a question mark easily unlocks. But the way the theme clues work is an example of what in cryptic crosswords would be called a rebus clue (not to be confused with what rebus would mean in a regular crossword like this) – and that is a pretty advanced type of cryptic clue. Wordplay at its best! Keep 'em coming...
Dang, surprised to see the vitriol on this one! Everyone complains that NYT puzzles are too easy or that rebuses are circled or there are too many hints to the theme, and then when there's an actual hard theme that you have to figure out for yourself, everyone complains! For the record it took me until I was almost finished to figure out the theme, but once I did I thought it was clever.
Wow, Rachel, and John, please don't take these comments to heart. There is a lot of harshness out there today. Many of us enjoyed your puzzle. The cluing was right up my alley. It was nice to see Yoko take a rest for ONO. I didn't know LID_R or SIV_ - but I guessed the A correctly for the gold star.
Y'all are always complaining about the crossword getting too easy, but as soon as it's a bit of a challenge, everyone's mad.
@Josh Two wild generalizations in one sentence.
@Josh nobody is complaining about the difficulty in my world... speak for yourself! loved the puzzle
@Josh There are challenges and there are challenges. I think most of us enjoy the challenge of clever wordplay, misdirection and fun trivia. I'm not sure as many of us are fans of the cruciverbal EEG spikes/puzzle fills of Kugelman's neuronal misfires.
@Josh I’m not mad. The people who are complaining today are not the same people who complain that the puzzle has become too easy. You do understand that multiple people post here, not some single hive-minded creature, right?
@Josh A close look would show that different people are complaining. Neophytes get very upset when harder puzzles show up from time to time because they've been spoonfed for the last few years on most days. Old-timers realize that most of the puzzles have gotten much easier recently, and bemoan this regularly. You'll see that a number of them have expressed gladness that this puzzle was a challenge. You, on the other hand, are complaining that people are complaining. How meta!
Terrible puzzle. Hopefully she either gets better or isn't invited back
@Brian I loved this one and hope we see more from them! You’re totally welcome to skip those days if lightening up is not an option.
@Brian First of all, it's not just a "she". It was a joint construction. And second, please don't wish ill on the constructor(s).
@Brian take your skill issue elsewhere if you don’t like a puzzle.
One of those puzzles that was probably more fun to create than to solve. Not my jam today.
Wow, the vehemence of this puzzle's haters is wild and weird to me. For once, 'haters' does not seem like hyperbole. Folks. Just a freakin puzzle. You didn't care for it? For reasons? OK. Fine. You have an opinion. So what? That does not mean the puzzle was [objectively] terrible, or even bad; it certainly does not deserve a rating of zero. I can't see that it should result in cancelling of subscriptions, much less calls for banishment of the constructors. Bunch of egos. Lighten up. It's only a puzzle. (A perfectly fine one, if a bit on the quick & easy side for Thursday, is MY opinion. YMMV!!!)
@Charles Peterson OK. Fine. You have an opinion on their opinions. So what?
I was in the dark on this one for quite awhile, until with the FLIPOFASWITCH the gimmick was illuminated. A good puzzle and a great Thursday sideshow. Figuring out the trick was a nice bonus.
@Marshall Walthew I confess I didn't figure out the trick, just got the italicized clue words from the crosses (and wiki look ups, and dictionary look ups and one Wordplay for the last word (somehow I was clueless about 'bluewall'). Fun puzzle in spite of it all.
YIKES! For the first time ever, if I recall correctly, I got a puzzle but could not decode the theme, even with Wordplay, even now. The clues are backwards? So [Dessert] becomes [Tressed], which I guess has *something* to do with hair, but I have no idea why it's the back that is hairy. And [Paws] becomes [Swap]...so, I guess the swap is the switch, and the going backward makes it a "flip of the"? I guess I'm slowly working it out as I write about it, but, ye gods and little fishes, even knowing the trick I don't think I would have gotten this without the crosses. And let's talk about the crosses. BALLSY...I am so lucky that came to me. And DABAT for [Take a hankie to, say], same thing, I stretched and stretched and stretched, and finally got there. Units of charge...c'mon man... "coulombs" fits, and it actually is the overwhelmingly used unit of electrical charge. Faradays are only for nineteenth century electrochemists, who are either dead or at least 126 years old. CAB is, I guess, a cabaret, which is both inside and outside a wine bar. (By the way, the inside of something plus the outside of something = everything). SNOWS for [Flakes out]...I could go on and on. So Barry and I are back to disagreeing on the difficulty of a puzzle. I thought this was a Friday, not a Wednesday. Still I defer to his judgement. I'm not saying the puzzle was unfair--just very, very tricky, in my view.
@Francis CAB inside is a Cabernet, and CAB outside is a taxicab
@Francis I agree that the answer to 22D is CAB, but I think that the CAB inside the wine bar is the red wine Cabernet, while the CAB outside the bar is a taxi.
@Francis it's a HAIRY BACK because "tressed" means having hair, and "back" means "back," so if you write "tressed" BACKward you get "dessert."
@Francis I've read many of your comments, and usually agree, but today my love of wordplay makes our opinions diverge! About FARADAYS specifically: I don't think it's too bad, since Faraday's singular role in the history of electromagnetism (I think most people have heard of a Faraday cage) makes it a reasonable educated guess once the crosses rule out COULOMBS, even if you don't know the (admittedly obscure) unit. I already had the F when I got there, though, so maybe my perspective is skewed.
@Francis CABS to the left of you, CABS to the right...
@Francis fwiw us 21st century electrochemists still use Faradays quite frequently haha
Loved it. To all the folks complaining about this puzzle and insisting that every clue/answer should be more literal (the “literali”?): Please go back to Monday and leave tricky Thursdays to those of us who like — gasp — _puzzles_. More like this please!
@Nat K Also loved it. Thursdays should not be easily solvable. That means some can't solve it!
@Nat K I think my main issue with it is that either the answers should make it obvious that something is reversed OR there should be a revealer. I'm not upset that it was hard (though there was too much random trivia more suited for an academic bowl than a crossword in it for my taste), I think it was just a bad puzzle with a lame theme that doesn't really work
i hated this puzzle so much. it was in no way intuitive even after i got enough clues to see some of the italicized clues. seemed far too difficult for a thursday.
Usually I’m with the big group, but count me on the side that found this a straightforward theme and approachable clues. I enjoyed it very much.
To me, they will always be semordnilap! Fun twist to have them appear in the clues. And now, to create a cocktail called the Naive Regal Gnat. Cream, Chivas and lemon juice???
@Cat Lady Margaret Cream and lemon juice seem problematic.
@Cat Lady Margaret Sub bit(t)ers for the lemon juice?
@Cat Lady Margaret -- Had never heard of "anadrome" until today. It sounds more linguistic and proper than "semordnilap" to my mind, but that is having no effect on me whatsoever. Semordnilap forever!
@Cat Lady Margaret I learned semordnipap, too! Maybe some Corona beer for the regality?
I don’t comment that often but am surprised at the level of vitriol herein. That was a fun little puzzle. I figured out the logic of the italicized clues early on but then was stumped with the last one, even after finishing the puzzle and typing the clue backwards on my phone. But after a moment of thought, it became clear. Lighten up, Francis.
@George K. I'm going to assume you're speaking to the generic brand of Francis, the one in the movie "Stripes". Not just me in particular. Although, to be fair, lightening up wouldn't be the worst advice I've ever gotten.
I enjoyed today's puzzle; figured out the theme and solved without too much difficulty. Just weighing in to counter the (sadly usual) nasty comments. Totally fine to not like a puzzle, of course, but please consider the feelings of the constructors who might be reading these comments.
Enjoyable clueing and wordplay do indeed a good puzzle make.
It's been a very, very long time since I thought a puzzle was complete garbage. Well over a year. The only reason that I persevered here was my almost 400 day streak. Nothing pleasant about this at all.
I don't think anyone has ever described the same person as being both tressed and hairy. Not a bad puzzle overall. The special clues seem a little bit like a stretch. It was one of those puzzles where I filled in what I knew was the right answer but it didn't feel good because they were such a stretch.
@Charlie I'm with you on this. For me, [tressed] is just repellent. Distressing, you should pardon the expression. It's imaginable that one might be golden-tressed, as one can be golden-haired. But one is no more 'tressed' than one is 'haired.' Let alone what the solve was – ick! Breakfast test?! This didn't even pass the diaper test.
Without reading more than the few most recent comments, I always know that people are going to be split when Mr. Kugleman's name is on a puzzle but I have work to finish up and packing to do for our vacation that starts tomorrow morning, woohoo, so I'll just chime in without checking out all the comments right now. I liked it!! It was one of my fastest Thursdays ever and it just flew by smooth as can be, but I never thought it was a BORE! The theme was fun for me even though I figured it out very quickly, I still had to work the crosses a bit to see what was going to turn the backwards thing around. Not sure what I just wrote made sense, but I'm going to keep going.... 😏 It might have come so easily to me because I have a thing, possibly some sort of disorder or something, in which I regularly see single or a few written words backwards. I mean, I see them first forwards, like normal, but my mind automatically looks to see if they make another word in reverse. I don't try to do it, it just happens. So today, I immediately saw that every single italicized clue was something legitimate backwards. I loved it!! Well, as much as one can love a puzzle.. I mean it's not up there with how much I love my husband or Star Trek... Har!! Fun and funny! Very enjoyable!!
@HeathieJ I think our brains must work similarly because Inhad no problem either. Maybe it’s the Milwaukee thing we have in common or maybe it’s a mind meld from watching Star Trek too much.
@HeathieJ Admit it--how much you love Star Trek follows closely on how much you love Patrick Stewart. I can't say as I blame you. He's one of the most compelling actors I've ever seen. How they got him for Star Trek I'll never understand. Big Shakespearean voice and temperament...just what's needed for the King of the Enterprise.
Amazingly unenjoyable, Just a dud of a theme, Hope someone liked this.
@Xword Junkie I did! Thanks.
I enjoyed solving this puzzle even though I found some of the cluing on the easier side. I liked the gathering of NYers ONO, EPHRON and RATSO in their own little niche, though maybe it would have been more apt for them to be on the west side. Then there were those sneaky clues for SIP and BUS. Did not see those coming. Congratulations on your debut, Rachel. Congratulations on your debut, Rachel.
Great debut, Rachel! I’m with Barry, this felt a little Wednesdayish, especially after yesterday’s challenge; but maybe that’s just how my brain works, theme-wise, because the minute I saw “trams”, even before I solved “taps”, I said, OK, it’s Opposite Day today. And that combined with a few more gimmes than I’d care for on Thursdays left me just a bit unfulfilled. (Andrzej, don’t go there. Just. Don’t.) On the other hand there were enough interesting clues and misdirections that I still had lots of fun; “meteor shower” was a standout, for sure, but I actually think “clear stuff at a restaurant” was my favorite. And I’m sure I’m not the first to put BATMAN before TORERO. And the anadromes (a word which, apparently, auto correct does not recognize) were all too TWEE for words especially the last one. So, DRINKSALLAROUND for our constructors. LIDAR and DABAT were almost a Natick for me, just because my my old eyes read “take a hankering to” before “take a hankie to” so I ended up running the alphabet. Those looking for another Thursday level challenge can check out my latest Crosshare. Hope you like it! <a href="https://crosshare.org/crosswords/3ltx5bRlF6bgOive4UUN/undercover-agents" target="_blank">https://crosshare.org/crosswords/3ltx5bRlF6bgOive4UUN/undercover-agents</a>
I’m surprised that so many of the regulars got bamboozled by this or at least questioned the theme. Maybe it’s my cryptic experience because this is essentially a reverse cryptic with pretty standard clues, admittedly without the second part. So for example “Counterargument for beer distribution mechanisms” would be a cryptic clue for TAPS, or “Turkish delight in hairy back” would work for DESSERT. The reversal signals can be pretty loose. Yeah it’s got that weird Kugelman flare but it’s nothing so unusual for a wordplay theme. YMMV I suppose, but I didn’t personally think it was out of line for a Thursday.
@SP Maybe I found it easier because I regularly do the Newsday Stumper (not always successfully) and it's not uncommon to find cryptic clues there. Also, I'm a Kugelman fan, so there's that. I commented on your puzzle on Crosshare but must have messed up because it never appeared. I thought it was a perfect example of what I'd like to see more of in a Thursday NYT puzzle.
@SP ....so now I don't get your Comment. (My long-ago stabs at cryptic puzzles is a gruesome memory.) Only a few of the Themers make sense to me, yet the crossings verify the entries. Bah! Humbug!
@SP, I love your examples, but never would I be able to suss that out (and is a reason I just don’t even attempt cryptics). As for this puzzle, I was more impressed with some of the fill cluing (for example, Flakes out?, Clear stuff in a restaurant, Tiny slug?, and Smolder) than with the theme cluing itself. Eventually caught onto it, and will admit it helped solve (or confirm) some of my answers - almost went with mETROCHIC, but the clue indicated the R in place of the “m”. Overall finished a bit over my avg time, so a decent Thursday puzzle IMO.