Malcolm

Spectacular! This reminds me of a dreadful joke that my mother utterly loved, you need some deep Shakespeare to get this: A trucker gets a job driving through the Australian outback but finds he can't stay awake for the whole 15-hour drive. It seems many other truckers can't either, because right in the middle of nowhere is a truck-stop in a small two-horse town named with the hard Australian sarcasm as "Mercy Truckstop". Arriving at midnight, he asks for some tea to keep himself awake. Instead of a pot they bring out a huge pan, filled with tea, and laying in the middle of it is a dead koala bear - fur, face, and all. He is shocked and asks what the deal is. The server smiles and says, "just try it, hon." So he takes out a spoon, tastes just a bit and it's not only utterly delicious, it's got the caffeine kick of a thousand mules. The pan is so deep, he not only can have two cups at the counter, he can fill his entire thermos. Canisters in hand, he heads off on his route, wide awake and happy. On the return trip, he pulls into the truckstop, feeling tired but happy because he knows he will be able to do this run indefinitely because of the truckstop. He walks in and asks for the tea, the server nods knowingly and turns to leave, but he calls out... "Listen, would it be possible for you to just bring the pan, but leave the bear out?" To which she turns back and replies with a smile, "I'm sorry sir, the koala tea of mercy is not strained."

Repetitive, but enjoyable. But crossing orris and sisi creates a "dead zone" - an area that cannot be "figured out" via word knowledge, and requires SPECIFIC recovery of SPECIFIC names, blocking out the set of all people who do not know that name or in this case, names - it turns the crossword into a trivia puzzle. Having TWO squares affected this way creates an impossible 26 x 26 variant range, or at best only vowels with Y, so 36 guessing pairs. Bad design. Watch out for those deadpools, kids - they make Ryan unhappy.

So very well done! Layer upon layer of self-reference - and tying yourselves up in only one "c" is commendable as well! My only wish is that the gray square had turned into a star automatically in the online version - then we would have been truly Breakout Stars :) Kudos ... sometimes these complex puzzles end up with tortured clues and cutesy half-measures -- yours didn't! Great great puzzle.

This was tedious. Being so clever that only the voices in your head know what you mean doesn't make you a good puzzle builder. PS - I believe it can also be two Ss in B-Plusses. PPS - DDay is not a proper word - so there could have been a clue that it would be "short for" When the majority of people don't like your puzzle - consider that you aren't doing it well. Being difficult isn't any harder than being contrary ... bad clues = bad reviews. Try harder.

This was not good. - The "product" game was fine - but there is also a 16-bit sega - so two possible answers that create a "hole" - Amend and Emend are ambiguous, another "hole" - LED and RED for lights is another hole Do that, AND add number games and you end up with end-users who are not sure which part is wrong. if the clues in all the words had been solid (yenned, really?) the numbers would have been fun - instead, it was a "forced game" that amused some and annoyed most, I'm sure.

I appreciate the desire to let a past contributor submit again - but editing is about considering the end user, not the writer. Strange clues will not ush an answer from our minds, which may bring about a roister of idiosyncratic confusion. Famous Potatoes was neither timely, current, nor accessible. Tortured. Disappointing. Kudos to the writer for submitting a last gasp puzzle and the loving energy to allow it - but please, do your paid job and offer clues that align with the audiences sensibilities and time. Nair, Pete's Dragon, and Slackers are dusty references from a bygone era.

I also note that the wheels join to form BIOPSY, SCI/ART, and LITMUS. AMAZING multidimensional puzzle, and nary a "bad square" in the grid. Well done, Kareem Ayas! Well done!

A flaw of this grid is that if you have not read "Davinci Code" or watched "Black Panther" or care about hockey or think about Yale - you are trapped inside two squares that require knowledge and can't be figured out in any way besides letter guessing - which leaves you with (26x26) potential combinations (676 options). Grim.

Too many unique names, sadly. It would be nice if the editors would enforce not allowing corners that are two names of people or places (trivia, in other words). When that happens, there's no way to work backwards - a cross of two names especially names that are spelled uniquely, leaves the players with no alternatives, especially with two places. TKO vs ANNIKA and ETERNE vs TYRONE creates two "death squares" on the K and the E (ANNITA and ETERNA, e.g.) So playing online, you can, at best, guess at the two letters and hope - which means, in theory, you have 26 squared (676) combinations to raw guess. Death squares - when two unique names are crossed. Dual death squares - a guessing game.

I cast an aspersion at your natick, but cherish the power to be one.

This was SO GOOD! Thanks!

What a nice Christmas gift! Thanks Mr. AJ! Good puzzle, great clues, fun fun fun!

TOOT, MACS, SET TO, and a natick. Try harder, maybe.

THANK YOU Adrian Johnson! You surely already know you are a Master Puzzler - but wow. A Times first (WHALESONG), the teleological beauty of 51A, block after block of words without mercy and near misses (BeachOre?, Analogy_Art?, and was Ringo Irish?! Put in British, it fits.) You monster. Yay for a wonderful, wonderful Saturday puzzle - a standard by which others should be measured; (and go Giants!)

Well, I tried to get ChatGPT to make a palindrome response to this spectacular experience -- and it failed. Tell all your friends - a clever puzzle defeats AI.

Phlox... not obvi. Awesome puzzle!

The tech for the online version was broken, it solved FOR us - we had a wrong answer and it fixed it. Our last square was HI/AK ... but we were still figuring it out. We were struggling with "IMNOTA[CHILD]ANYMORE" and realized that the cross of ENOUG[HI]SENOUGH was Hawaii ... so we cleaned our noise out of the rebus to figure out the second state and put just HI in ... hey! Presto - automatically solved for us, we LEARNED that AK was the right answer! The answer is actually IMNOT[AK]IDANYMORE. It was also unclear online whether to write in the across and then the down or the down and then the across ... disquieting. The clues were cute, but likely not "Sunday" grade on their own except for this fiddly Rebus. Sorry, not a good puzzle, fun clues, but not a good overall unit. Please do try again.

So hard ... SO GOOD! Burning Desires and Moral Bankruptcy ... layers upon layers.

I am often disappointed by Saturday puzzles that end up only amusing the constructor. I wish ALL Saturday puzzles could be like this one - doable, teaching (what are agoutis?!? oh!), and with extra layers in the commentary (ha! dueling Foleys, nice). Well done, good sir! Well done!

Brilliant. Phonetics? The 4th dimension for sure. I'm leery that there are secrets inside the loo, hooky, and even "double-U" answers like wee, and woe. You have me jumping at ghosts. SO GOOD!!!!

17A x 9D: NATICK. Fun ones in there, though.

Meh.

ST. (dot) is an abbreviation. no hint for that -- mistake.

Being obtuse is not art. Being repetitively so is not clever. Being a name that is recognized while being neither artistic nor clever is, oddly, banal. Enjoy my self-amusing secret puzzle.

SOME of these are a bit much, but well ... if your puzzle is enough fun, you might just yoink the crowd's approval anyway.

As a curmudgeon, I want to say I really liked this puzzle! Well made, great clues, glad I didn't have to draw the creature ... and the Seth/Dark combination spot made my eye roll just the right amount. Thanks @Brad and @Nicole!!! Yay!

Seriously - do you know how broken my brain is after looking at "SHIPLANES" (and not knowing Bil's last name), then learning it's SKIPLANES ... what's a skip lane?!?!?! it's not ... it's a flying headache, that's what it is! Since there are elves and mulled wines and things hidden in there, let me be a bit of a grinch and grumble that KEANE/ANIL is a bit of a natick ... but then again - I'm still looking for every other lane ... so what do I know?

This was just bad. Thanks.

No.

That was a really cute grid. Thanks!

Kudos to the super spanner count - but I have to complain about apercu ... granted, you were likely forced to that wedge, but the clue at least could have been more descriptive of being French? Lovely all the same - quite a few heavy hitters in there, congrats.

Easy to be difficult when you violate the common rules. 1 - a large edifice which holds wires, in the US, is a transmission tower, or an electrical tower (tower), not the British "pylon" - which are generally cones or uprights used as barriers for ships. Since New York is in the US, the clue is incomplete. 2 - ENNEAD/TNIA is a natick. Period. 3 - opinion - T'NIA feels like some sort of reference to the apostrophe should have been mentioned 4 - the phrases are "oldie but goodie" OR "AN oldie but a goodie" ... there is no vernacular for "oldie but a goodie" 5 - "at sea" is generally "lost or confused", not "conned" or "cheated" vis. bamboozled Being difficult is not the same as being clever. Finished it without help - but was frustrated at the poorly clued bits, as well as the corner sections with few leadouts, creating potential "deadzones" M'eh.

BREASTPINS and TBA ... alas. CUFFLINKS to start, I'd tell you how I got from one to another, but that's TBD ... as most people say.