Barbara

I rarely post, so I hope Josh is reading this. This is hands-down one of the best puzzles I have experienced, and my most favorite Saturday puzzles of all time. It was a rightful Saturday, IMO - one where you at first feel the puzzle is disjointed and unwieldy, with very little filled in. Then, when you stick with it, and discover also that the Shortz editing wand has bestowed its wizardry, it all magically comes together. Thank you, Josh, for restoring my faith in the Saturday puzzle. You (and Will) have created a masterpiece.

Obscure, to say the least. Fridays usually sit empty for awhile and then fill, because of the multi-worded answers and requirement for deep thinking. It's my favorite puzzle day of the week. This puzzle? This was an absurd overuse of random names to fill a grid, requiring knowledge of abstruse trivia - and certainly not contemplation. I'll go back to the archives for my Friday fix.

OK, here I go posting again, when I usually lurk. I am not nearly as adept as the cruciverbalists on this chat, but I am enjoying (and solving!) the difficult Fridays and Saturdays of late. Admittedly, I think my streak of 74 is due to so many of the prior Fridays and Saturdays of the last months being so easy. But this week's Fri and Sat and last week's have made the solving so challenging and wonderful. A prior poster, @SP put it best: "I didn’t see a lot of unusual proper nouns, obscure trivia, or questionable pop culture references everyone complains about here." No Cheats, as I call them. And so fun! I did have SUSHI CHEF for 1A as another solver did. That threw me. Then I had ETHNO for -centric (16A) for the longest time until I deleted almost everything in that block and found HELIO. And someone else mentioned that for the first 10 minutes, nothing was filled in. Me too! I did say to myself, "You had a good run, so if this is the one that blows your streak, at least it's a deservedly challenging, well-edited one." So thank you, Fritz (and Will!), for reverting back to brain-stretching status in creating worthy Friday and Saturday puzzles. I know from these posts that I'm in good company.

I think Will does an excellent job ensuring the easier clues balance with the difficulty of the theme to make a worthy Sunday puzzle. I personally don't like timing the puzzles, because I try to stretch them out as long as I can. Even stretching them out, a Sunday usually takes me 35 minutes, and it was nice to see that today took 57. Thanks for the extended treat!