Jennifer

I'll have to check my receipt, but I distinctly remember ordering my country neat!

365-day streak! 🥳

I feel like I need to apologize to my late father for not realizing that "Red State?" was a baseball, not a political, reference. (I had a major 🤦‍♀️ moment when I got it.) He grew up in Ohio, and he passed both his love of baseball and his Reds fandom on to me. (While I am still a huge baseball fan, I was wooed away from the Reds by the family I married into.)

I had mixed feelings as I finished today's puzzle and read the Wordplay column: A 500-day streak: YAY! 🥳 Deb's last day: BOO! 😔 I have been reading the column for a relatively short period of time, and yet I feel like I am losing a dear friend. BUT, as someone else pointed out, I can continue to enjoy your column as I do puzzles in the archives! (YAY! 🥳) Enjoy every moment of your retirement, Deb! I hope our paths cross again in some fashion.

I, like others, was glad to use my Wordle experience from yesterday to get 6D. I think I was one of many who got the right answer yesterday only by guessing. Rest assured, I'm unlikely to forget that particular primate any time soon!

I met my husband, Tim, in the mid-'90s while working in the University of Maryland music library. One of the highlights of Tim's experience at the university (other than meeting me, of course 😉) was studying jazz performance with Chris Vadala, the sax player on "Feels So Good."

Did 21D make anyone else think of "Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH?" (Young me was very excited to learn that NIMH was not made up.)

Loved the puzzle, including the anagrams. So many great clues, including 31A (although I was bummed that it didn't turn out to be tailor-made for Andrezj). My late father, as an alum, would have loved 51A. As much as I loved the clues and the anagrams, though, I think I'm perhaps most impressed by the fact that there have been (as I'm typing this) almost no negative comments! That is a huge accomplishment, so congratulations, Sam! I'm looking forward to solving more of your puzzles.

I really enjoyed today's theme! As usual, it took a bit for me to realize that my first thoughts on some of the answers were actually correct, and that they were part of the theme! (For instance, thinking "Born again" for 17A, rejecting it, then realizing that it was actually right.) I definitely laughed out loud when I figured it out. Fun puzzle.

Play ball! ⚾️ 🧢 🏟️ YAAAAAAAY Opening Day (tomorrow)! Go O's!

A challenging puzzle, for sure, and one of the very few in recent memory where my time was higher than my average for that day. I was impressed when I got the gold star without having to change any letters. I didn't look anything up, but I did make a couple of guesses! I loved 9D, and enjoyed the puns.

Today's puzzle made me fear for my streak (which is four days shy of one year). Imagine my surprise and delight when I got the gold star with no lookups or corrections required!

When I took pre-calculus (in the mid-eighties), I used to crack up a friend in the class with my factorial impressions. If, for instance, it was 5!, I would say "FIVE!" while gesturing to indicate joy/excitement/whatever. Every factorial was a celebration! 🥳 Also...in our family, before the term zoomies was a thing, we would say "loco kitty!!" when one of our cats got the zoomies. Fun times. 😃

When I looked at 16A, my psychotherapist brain very helpfully piped up and said "you know this one, because you were taught decades ago that 'agoraphobia' translates to 'fear of the marketplace!'"

I discovered the joys of cryptograms as a kid, and remember one of my books listing letters from the most-used to the least-used in English. I've since seen lists that varied from that one, so I can't attest to its complete accuracy, but it started with: E T A O N R I S H D L F How amazing is it that John Kugelman constructed a puzzle with no Ts other than the ones that were part of the theme?!? I am truly in awe. 🤯

I loved many of today's entries, but my favorite was 52A. Almost inevitably, when I tell someone that I have a master's degree in ETHNOmusicology, they'll ask "what's that?" When I explain, their response is generally some variation of "oh, that sounds really interesting!"

Did I find it easy for a Friday? Yes. (Personal best for a Friday.) Did I enjoy it anyway? Also yes! I like challenging puzzles, but I enjoy the easier ones, too!

Mid-solve, I had _ R E O for 20A and, being a faithful NYT crossword solver, assumed it had to be OREO until I looked at the clue again and realized that it was TREO. 😂

So often I figure out the answers to the themed entries, but don't figure out the theme until after I'm done. This theme, strangely (given the number of people who have commented that they didn't figure out the theme till they were done or never figured it out at all) I got immediately! Also, you all have that part of your brain that doesn't tell you how it knows answers, right? Well, that part of MY brain went "Psssst! The answer to 1D is MOET!" and so it was!

Whew! More than double my average Friday time, when these days I usually come in well under my average for the day (because I've gotten better at solving). I sincerely hope that I don't find tomorrow's puzzle harder! So many times I wasn't on the same wavelength as the constructor, or not quite. For instance, 55A. Pretty early on, it occurred to me that "litter" might refer to puppies or kittens, but I came up with NECK instead of NAPE. It has been quite a while since I've needed to look up any answers to finish a puzzle. I was afraid that today might have been my undoing! In the end, though, I prevailed, lookup-free. 😮‍💨

I made a point of carefully going through the puzzle before reading the column to make sure I hadn't missed an aspect of the theme (which I often do). I was happy to discover that I had fully sussed it out. It took me a LONG time to get 51A, but I very much appreciated it once I did. 109D was bittersweet for me (as is the Lilo & Stitch remake), because our beloved rescue dog Lilo died of cancer about a month ago.

The NE corner had me hung up for quite a while. I got NINA SIMONE right away; she helped me realize I had one of the crosses wrong. Unrelated to its usage in the puzzle, but does anyone else often find FRIENDLY REMINDERs to be passive aggressive?

The fact that this fabulous puzzle was constructed by a 14-year-old makes me think about a grad school music history class in which one of my classmates made fun of how simple Mozart's first symphony was. I wanted to ask him to show me the symphony HE wrote when HE was eight years old! I don't think he would have made fun of this puzzle, though. I'm looking forward to more from you, Bryan!

Thank you, Caitlin, for the "Meerkat Manor" reference! My family and I loved that show, and became very attached to the members of the Whiskers family. I still remember the episode in which Flower, the matriarch of the clan, was bitten by a snake and died. I had to teach a flute lesson immediately after watching the episode, and I thought "How am I supposed to teach a flute lesson? Flower just died!!"

Coincidentally, I was asked just yesterday if I knew how to spell GESUNDHEIT! (Luckily for me, the answer was yes.) Also...I grew up in south central Pennsylvania, so I'm well familiar with UTZ.

This was one of those puzzles where it looked like I wasn't going to be able to fill much of anything in, but then it started to flow. I ended up finishing in less than half of my average time for a Friday puzzle. I think the clue that stumped me the longest was TIP ROAST. I don't eat steak, and from reading the comments, it seems it was even difficult for some people who DO eat steak! All in all, an enjoyable puzzle for me. Of course, YMMV. (I've been glad to see "your mileage may vary" in the comments at various points. I remember mentioning it to my husband and daughter a while back; when I got blank looks from both of them, I wondered if it wasn't a thing anymore!)

Fun puzzle, and, as many others did, I loved ONION RINGS and CEMENT MIXER. (CEMENT MIXER makes me think of James Taylor singing "I'm a CEment mixer.") I was glad to see 3D. One of my biggest grammatical pet peeves is people being unable to correctly use lie and lay and their conjugations. In my experience, people often avoid saying (and writing) "I LAID it down." I'm guessing that's because they've heard so many people incorrectly saying "I LAID down" that they've gotten the idea that "laid" is never correct!

Am I the only one who started with WING and DING instead of WINE and DINE? 🤪 🤣 I was proud of myself for not having to look anything up, given all of the words I didn't know. I had to change one letter to get the happy music. (I, like some others, started with TeRA ROAD and eRIE. Tara Road made more sense to me, but Arie made less, and I picked the wrong one the first time.) I kept wondering what the theme was and how it related to the title. I figured I'd find out when I read the column. Nope! TIL that Sunday puzzles don't have to have themes!

So much fun! It wasn't not possibly my favorite rebus puzzle ever!

I had a very different experience with today's puzzle than with yesterday's. Yesterday I felt like I was on a completely different wavelength than the constructor; today it felt like the opposite. There were a couple of exceptions (at first). My not-fully-awake self (who is a fan of an AL East team) started with NYY and wondered why it didn't work, before reading the clue and realizing it was the NL, not the AL. I also, for some reason, started with MAKEAcleanSTART (even though I've never in my life heard that, only "make a clean break"). Once I thought to question that, I figured out MAKEAFRESHSTART and the remaining few answers fell into place. It felt like just the amount of challenging I was looking for.

I enjoyed the theme. I figured out that the RA in GRATER needed to be changed to UT to get to GUTTER, which was the logical answer to "proverbial bad thing to have your mind in." Therefore, it made sense to read RATOUT as RA to UT. Once I got that, I was off to the races on the other sets. I was in marching band in high school, so PARADEREST was a gimme for me. I didn't know PERETTI or TAIO, but I reasoned my way into the correct answers and got the happy music.

I normally save the crossword for later in the day, but last night I had a dream that I'd lost my 313-day streak (now 314!) because I forgot to do today's puzzle. I was particularly frustrated (in the dream) because Monday puzzles take so little time! I thought (still in the dream) that although it was frustrating to have to start my streak over, at least I hadn't lost my Peloton streak (which will be 1895 days after I've done today's workout) or my Duolingo streak (which will be 3501 days after I do some lessons later today). I would have had a Monday PR today, but it took about thirty seconds for me to go through the puzzle (after not getting the happy music) and realize I had aHYES instead of OHYES. 🤦‍♀️

"...but then again, I’m not really a word person" says Deb. 🤦‍♀️

Great puzzle, and a fun solve. The first answer I confidently filled in was 36A, and I thought "Oh, no, here we go!" But I worked on it steadily and ended up with a solve time that wasn't much longer than my Saturday PB!

Being a former music major (and a current musician), OPERAROLE and EFLAT were right up my alley. As a baseball fan in Maryland, I was happy to see ORIOLE. My 80s teenager self was triumphant about knowing ARIGATO (and reminisced about RERUNs). My daughter is an ARTMAJOR. Having finished the Duolingo Spanish course, I was pleased to see COMOESTAS. (I'm now using Duolingo to refresh the German I learned decades ago.) I never eat SEASCALLOPs, so I'm not now worried that my dinner will be staring at me. And as I type this, one of my kitties is next to me saying [Please keep scratching me!] So, yeah, loved the puzzle!

🙋🏻‍♀️ Yep, that's me, one of the old-timers who thought ALDA and VIGODA were gimmes! I'm trying to remember if I first learned LACUNA from Commander Data in Star Trek: The Next Generation ("Interface"), or if I'd known what it was before then...

Adrianne, thank you for sharing your story! As others have said, reading about the loss of Arjun was a gut punch. I am so sorry for your loss. You have made him proud with this puzzle! 49A was my favorite clue, but 44A was right up there! I appreciate when the wordplay column includes a link to a music video from the 80s (or, in this case, the early 90s). MTV debuted two months before my twelfth birthday, so I'm theoretically part of the MTV generation. My parents didn't get cable TV till I was in college, though, so I have seen very few music videos. I always laugh when people refer to "iconic" videos from that time period that they assume everyone (of a certain age, at least) has seen. Nope, not me! 😂

This puzzle had just the right amount of Saturday chewiness for me. While there were a few answers I was confident of, 31D was the one that felt like an anchor when I was trying to figure out some of the crossing entries. My knowledge of the Marioverse comes from having watched my husband and daughter play Mariokart. 1A was pretty easy for me, but 16D took a little more mental noodling. My daughter came into the room at one point (before I'd fully filled in 16D), and I was proud of myself for not just asking her! I have an OCARINA in my (small) flute collection. 26A was fun! As others have said, I automatically thought of 80s hair bands when I got to 47A, so it took me a while (and a few crosses) to get to CELINE.