JMF

Nevermind the nay-sayers, I thought this puzzle was a FIVEHUNDREDLIGHT! Very enjoyable!

Fun puzzle and I have no serious complaints. But I gotta know, who actually says “holy camoly!”? I thought maybe I’d made a mondegreen with Holy Cannoli, the term I’ve used for years. So I googled camoly and got a few hits but not nearly as many as my phrasing of choice. I guess it’s working its way into usage but I’m still going to, ahem, take the cannoli.

I always loved playing Whac-A-Mole as a kid. Only TIL that there’s no “k” in the spelling. It also occurs to me that having my own personal W-A-M setup would be a great stress reliever for work! Thanks to Nathan Hasegawa for a highly enjoyable theme and likewise credit to the NYT design team, always the unsung heroes behind the scenes, for a fun online (iOS) result. Meanwhile I have MC Hammer and Mary Travers competing for airtime in my brain. Gonna need a MALLET to make that stop!

It was so enjoyable to finish a puzzle with such delighted feelings of both accomplishment and entertainment. I don’t always follow constructors by name or recognize them for past submissions, but I will have to remember Katie Hoody. Without reading every entry here, I already suspect that most of the clues have been highlighted. But let me add my respect for 62A’s meta cluing and 67A’s skirt with leaves. Some clues like 52D’s Won may have been used before (I think?) but still caught me off guard. And even though I’d be happy to never see OREO again, the clue for 33D had me thinking of newspapers, so that felt like a nice change. Meanwhile, I have to confess to the embarrassment of momentarily wondering who ARISHA PIRO is. But figured I’d give you all the same chuckle I had. (As if I haven’t been listening to NPR for thirty years…) Last, for those discussing their times this week: I was seven minutes over my average for Friday and 10 minutes under today. But this Saturday puzzle was far too clever to be dismissed as easy.

It seems ironic that the theme suddenly made sense to me at 33A, the song with the nonsense title. Instead my hurdle was 25A. Like others I went with sETTLE and spent way too long trying to figure out how to say “sY MAN!” (My kids would tell you that this middle-aged mom is hopelessly uncool. Ha!) Regarding two other answers that have been discussed: — We had that yogurt shop across from my high school back in the day. If we were eating it for lunch, we’d say “I’m going to have some TCBY.” The brand was also the product to us, so with that perspective the clue made perfect sense to me. — For 61A, LOOP DE LOOPS was my first thought but stalled on adding it because I thought I was probably the only person who said it that way, instead of something like maybe “loopy.” Glad to know I’m not as crazy as I thought. Overall a great puzzle and I’m in awe of someone who can come up either way this trick. PS sorry for those who had issues with getting the circles to appear. I solved on iOS and had an alert pop up a few minutes into it, telling me to update. Don’t think I’ve had that happen before, so thanks NYT team for the notice.

I’ve been slowly working my way through the crossword archives in the app as time allows. Just today I finished the puzzle from 4/13/1995. Now tonight imagine my surprise at completing the puzzle for 4/7/2026. To avoid spoilers, I’ll let you look it up yourself if you’re so inclined. Perhaps you’ll say, “What are the ODDS?” Indeed, if we were in The Matrix, I’d be worried about what could happen to me next after such an oddly timed coincidence.

I’ll skip my grumbling thoughts about the formatting issues because so many others have already said it for me. But I have to ask: has there really not ever been an option for underlining in the app? Or am I making up that memory like Sinbad in Shazam?