Bruce

Just a note about the planned change to the way your comment is displayed when it's a reply to another post: Currently, you see the original post plus ALL the subsequent replies. Now, though, all you're going to see is the original post, followed only by your reply and nobody else's. This is spoken of as an "improvement." It sure doesn't seem like an improvement to me! I want to see the whole thread! I already know what MY reply was. I'm not so egocentric that it's the only one I want to see. If I get to the point where that's all that matters to me I might as well just hang it up and retire from human contact altogether. PLEASE DON'T MAKE THIS CHANGE.

So there I was, in the northwest corner. I've read "The Catcher in the Rye" (read it in my twenties after walking the streets of a city for hours, depressed, and picked it up in a bookstore knowing nothing about it but the title, thinking it might cheer me up), and "Franny and Zoey," but had never encountered ESME. I've been a vegetarian for about fifty years, so chicken recipes, much less Japanese chicken recipes, are not part of my life. I've never encountered the phrase ICE IT before today. I've never memorized the motto of the United Farm Workers. I was left trying to figure out one across strictly from the mysterious clue, because I had none of the crosses. It didn't help that I don't think of KITEs as toys. Hobbies, scientific tools, jury-rigged propulsion methods for boats, an art form...sure. But not toys. I know the argument can be made for it...it's just not how I see them. So now I'm all bitter and frustrated about my ignorance, and I'm going to deal with it by blaming the totally innocent constructor and the entire staff of the New York Times, and finish with some idle lies about cancelling subscriptions, and stomp off somewhere and sulk until tomorrow. I'm fine with rebus puzzles, though.

13-year-old me, along wirh the rest of my seventh-grade English class, got an assignment: memorize a poem, and then recite it in front of the class. Now, most of the boys in the class figured out a way to fufill the requirement: memorize these lines...actually a small part of a larger poem, but presented as a complete poem...slouch up to the podium, drone this out: "Your little hands, Your little feet, Your little mouth — Oh, God, how sweet!" ...and plop back down at the desk. But not me. Oh, no. I was a Poe fan, and I was going to do this right. So I memorized "The Bells." The whole...damned...thing. And I walked up, stood at the podium and remembered: Oh yeah...I'm an acne-covered 13-year-old with paralyzing stage fright. By th time I got towards the end, and my final repetition of "of the bells, bells, bells, bells, bells, bells, bells, of the bells, bells, bells, bells, bells, bells, bells.. " there were several kids with their heads on their desks, moaning loudly. Anyway, THE BELLS was a gimme for me.

A small nit to pick: Although most people interpret Occam's razor to mean "the simplest explanation is the most likely to be correct," it actually says that the explanation with the fewest assumptions is probably the best one. And yes, the explanation with the fewest assumptions can also be the simplest one...but not necessarily.

I have to wonder what the people who were complaining about the difficulty of Thursday's puzzle thought about this one. I'm picturing phones flying across rooms, cursing, angry letters and cancelled subscriptions. Somewhere in the world there is probably someone who solved this easily, without lookups and without frustration, but I have to wonder if a person with abilities like that hasn't just transcended what it is to be human and gone on to some higher plane. I absolutely couldn't do this one. I looked up maybe 70% of it.

I happen to know that a screwdriver is usually garnished with an orange slice rather than a rind (it even shows that in the recipe linked in the commentary), so now I can get all huffy and entitled to indulge in self-righteous solver indignation.

I almost looked up 52 across. I think that counts as irony.

My younger sister was idly singing the national anthem to herself when she was about 13 years old, which is how I found out she thought the opening line started with: "OK, can you see..." I kind of like it, though. It seems more American.

The crossword equivalant of a killer dungeon. If there's anyone out there who solved this cleanly, my hat's off to you, because you are so far beyond my skills that you probably qualify as a different species than me.

I was mentally composing a complaint about the injustice of crossing the name of a French holding company with a subdivision of a currency I knew nothing about when I realized that, somehow, I knew the answer. I had to look up the rapper, and even after I got the music ACUNIT had me staring at it baffled me for a while (yes, I did eventually figure it out). Running two words together always throws my pattern recognition for a loop. You'd think I'd watch for it, but no...it trips me up like Lucy holding the football, every time.

I am studying classical guitar. I've just moved beyond the more basic pieces and am currently working on Tárrega's "Adelita." The infamous twelveth measure that has a barre chord and an ornament that asks for an impossible (for me, at this stage) reach has me really discouraged. My lesson is at two o'clock, and one again I will show up having made zero progress. I was seriously thinking of just giving up the guitar. I just did this puzzle and read the commentary, which includes the phrase "has a good beat and you can dance to it," which is a link. I hit the link; it links to an article which talks about the phrase as used on the TV show "American Bandstand." But... I continued to the rest of the article. IT'S ABOUT THE DIFFICULTY OF PLAYING BARRE CHORDS ON THE GUITAR, AND CONTAINS THE PHRASE "DON'T GIVE UP." What are the odds? So, OK...I'll go see my world-class instructor today, tell her what's going on, bring her my copy of Segreras exercises, and plead for help. But I won't give up.

I had SUN TsU, and CUs seemed plausible for a few seconds.

My first impulse for 25 across was NOPE.

It was one of those puzzles that seems impossible, then allows you a tiny bit of traction, like a tiny crack in a dam almost imperceptibly lengthening, but at the end you get the deluge.

Got the trick fairly early on, and went through it fairly fast until I was left with mostly the northwest corner. I hadn't heard of SEA NETTLES or IMPANEL or the infused water, so I cheated until I got it. Last letter to get filled in in this puzzle was also the very last letter in the southeast corner, so the last word I filled in was DIE, which pretty much put a stake in its evil heart. A clever puzzle, but tough for me.

I have the complete works of Edith Wharton on my Kindle, and am sbout three books into it. I've read a bit about her life, including her long-term friendship with Henry James. I've seen photos of the house she lived in, exterior and interior. I know that at one point she bailed out Henry James financially, and that he never knew who did it. But when this puzzle asked me for her first name, I drew a blank for several minutes and had to wait until I got three crossing entries before it finally came to me.

For those of you not familiar with "Tilted Arc:" it was a huge metal arc that blocked foot traffic in a formerly open square, forcing pedestrians to walk around it. New Yorkers don't tend to appreciate people or things that block their way when they're trying to get somewhere.

I just completed this puzzle from the back seat of a car driving down bumpy roads in Puerto Rico with unmarked speed bumps, while looking at lots of chickens, dogs, cats, and the occasional horse. It took a bit longer than usual.

The diagram of imperial measurements looks weirdly like The Tree of Life from the Kabalah, I feel like I should be either disturbed, enlightened, or having it printed on a t-shirt. Maybe some or all of those options simultaneously.

There was a moment, after being stuck for quite a while, when I said to myself: "Wait a minute...is it possible that "pomelo" has only one "l?" It was kind of like that moment in "2001: A Space Odyssey" when the ape starts looking intensely at the bone in his hand.

Per 103 down: Sometimes dad jokes are mom jokes. I had to become a dad to understand why dads tell dad jokes. Here's the process: You discover, when you have preschool-aged kids, that really corny jokes will crack them up, but you fail to take into account how quickly your kids develop...within a few months they aren't laughing so much, and shortly thereafter you catch them rolling their eyes. Of course, if you enjoy making them roll their eyes, you can continue right on into their teens.

Doing this puzzle made me feel like I'd been given a pile of tiny gears and parts, and, with a few false starts, managed to reassemble them into a working watch. It was a pleasure to set the last letter in place.

"Dark Academia" as a style, a pose, and a decor? I guess it's fun and harmless, but it gives me the creeps. I learned about Antoni Gaudi when I was still in my teens. I was reading William Gibson's book "Count Zero" and got to the scene that takes place on a bench in a computer simulation of Park Güell, was curious about the place, and since I was in a library at the time, found a book that included many illustrations of Gaudi's architecture and became a little obsessed. So, fifty years or so later, I finally made it to Barcelona, and was actually sitting on that very bench. And about ten feet away from me was a perfectly coiffed, perfectly dressed young woman. She set up her ring light, attached her phone to her selfie stick, got her shot, then left. She got her proof that she was there, although in a sense she never really was. I never thought I would live in a time when narcissism is seen as a virtue.

It seems like a lot of people struggled with this, so I'm inserting an explanation. State Troopers are called "bears" in CB slang because many of them wear wide, flat-brimmed hats similar to the one worn by Smokey Bear, the fire-prevention mascot of the US Forestry Service; he consistently ended public service announcements with the phrase "Only you can prevent forest fires!" By extension, a State Trooper was sometimes called "Smokey." A little aside here... Forest fire prevention in postwar America was seen as best accomplished by making sure that fires never started. At the time, the fact that fire is a necessary element in maintaining a healthy forest wasn't understood; it burns away underbrush, and the ash contributes to the soil. There are also some tree seeds that need exposure to the heat of a fire as part of their life cycle. The efforts of the Forestry Service were successful in that they did prevent fires from starting for long periods. Unfortunately, this caused large buildups of underbrush. When a fire did eventually start, that buildup caused more intense fires, which caused large trees to burn that normally would have survived the fires. So Smokey, for all his good intentions, was making matters worse. The Forestry Service conducts periodic controlled burns now in order to maintain forests and keep underbrush from accumulating to dangerous levels.

This might have been a record time for me if I hadn't received a text with a two-part validation code generated by yet another attempt to use my credit card by some unknown person out there. Clever of them to attempt it in the early hours of the morning before my bank opens and when most people are asleep, but I was able to shut down my cards via my phone before any harm was done. All of my personal information has been exposed by so many data breaches that I could put it all up on a billboard by the interstate without making it much worse. My credit will remain frozen for the rest of my life. Anyway, it added about ten minutes to what would have otherwise been a very short solve time.