Jeff

RELO, TIGONS, SEGO, RIRI, TOSCA. I'm just repeating these to myself so I know them for next time.

I felt like the Home Alone villains walking into every trap Sid set with this one. Some favorite misdirects: STAIR STEPS for flight segments. CARAFE for port container; GAS HEAT for house warming; HATERADE for boos-y drink. I took the bait every time and then smacked my forehead after figuring them out. Tougher were the cases when i fit in a miscue for a while: GRID instead of APPS; COME IN for GO ON IN; DERRIERE for PATOOTIE; INTEL for DATUM; KITES for TIDES; RECEIPTS for REVENUES; SEAL SHARK for SAND SHARK. Happy to have learned PONE from another puzzle this week! New (to me) words and phrases his time were SCRIM, ATTAR, ENOKI and SAW LOGS.

Very fun quick puzzle for Monday. I even learned a new one from the crosses: AIDA. As for the italicized words people are asking about in the theme clues, I thought laying the emphasis on those adverbs was just a way to make the descriptions drip with sarcasm, to match the tone of the keystone theme answer.

Phew. That was a workout! The SE corner bedeviled me for the longest time, as I tried SLAW before caving to look up PONE (never heard of it) and DOLL in place of TOYS along the right side, while the clues for DONEZO and SNEEZY felt like they could have been anything. I appreciate the current pop culture references like POKE BALL, DIAZ and DOJA (although that nickname for Tay took me way too long to sort out). The only "never heard of 'ems" for me this week were HEP, OLAV, and, I guess, SUSHI PIZZA.

Very fun. Just the right balance for me, where the NW corner went smoothly, the SW got me stumped for a while, and then I was able to use crosses to build my way to completion. Final stumper was NE corner, between the most baffling theme (HANDHOLD), and the ? clues like top-flight destination (somehow I wanted that to be ANZAC!). But I cracked it in the end, fittingly by correcting my single letter guess in a cryptogram, from AN A to AN I!

Fun theme. I appreciated the little twist that while Santa doesn't ring the doorbell, he and his Salvation Army lookalikes do ring some other kinds of bells. I got stumped in the NE corner long enough to set this apart from a Monday puzzle, with my brain stuck on EARFLAPS and CHURRO, neither of which fit!

Very fun! I'm still stumped by the RSVP convenience answer though. I assumed "SASE" meant I had made an error in the crosses and planned to re-check, but then it said I completed it. Googling just shows some computer acronym, secure access service edge. And I figured I'd see it in this article as a tricky clue, but no! I can't even find it searching the comments here. Is it just me? What is SASE??

Did anyone else convince themselves the cool young kids are doing "SHOT X" on a night out, because they'd figured some Altos mints would follow a breakfast of everything bagels with LOX? 😅

Got myself into some trouble by imagining a Mickey Mouse degree might go to someone filling in some CELS with other cartoons on their EASEL. Never heard it used as shorthand for an easy major, but the RAY cross saved me. My last mystery: COCOAB_C_, which somehow just kept reading in my mind as "COCOABECCA", like some sort of chocolate Wookiee treat. Eventually the idea of Florida brought the word BEACH into my head, to help solve those NATICK-level proper names of URI_H and SPA_N. And like many commenters the NW corner foiled me for a while since I put in GAITERS for A1. At least that's what I call the waterproof overshoes I use to keep my shoes dry biking and hiking in the rain here! The TGIF cross was a quick exit from that mistake, and ultimately the OH, FUDGE recipe got me to MILKsop.

This was just a delight, start to finish! Somehow I made trouble for myself in SW by assuming "COURT" [TV] was the network with gavel to gavel coverage. Didn't help that I forgot a baby ram would be a lamb. Oh well, nice to have a little mixup to untangle on a Tuesday, and this theme was just hilarious to me And cheers to you on one year, Sam! I love your commentary.

Delightful theme, delightful light Monday puzzle! I've only got myself to blame for a slow solve time by writing BIN for where a baby's food often ends up, maybe because I was taking out our food waste bin today full of uneaten kids' meal components, and I'm a year removed from bothering with bibs. Anyway it left me saying "Sure, ADUNA sounds about right!" And then I forgot to revisit that while scanning for typos at the end. Good lesson to always check names I inferred from crosses!