Matt

"WERENAUTICALWORTHY" is a "comICAL/ICLE mutation" of "We're not worthy?" "LYRICALJET" is meant to funny up "Lear jet?" I won't bother with the others. I'm calling "no clothes" on this theme. Sorry. These aren't even "dad joke" funny. Have I missed something?

never saw the game. never played it. likely never will. tipped off by his eminence, solved the puzzle with no inkling of the theme. then wikipediaed minesweeper to learn about a thing i never knew and thought: cool game. and then i thought: very cool puzzle. especially retroactively sussing out its use of 1s and 2s. and then i thought: this is why the times crosswords are so cool.

Another endorphin-releasing, moderately disorienting instance of seemingly randomly filling two or three small gimmes on the first pass, embracing the enervating fact that this one will be the one to break my streak, pickaxing my way anyway through a corner off one of the initial little fills, painstakingly following a vein or two as bigger flakes fall with a couple of well placed taps which reveals a spot or two to place an explosive charge and after 45 minutes the entire lode is glitteringly revealed. All of which makes me a bit richer and a little dizzy.

when in order to get fill you have to physically twiddle your thumbs with a stupid grin on your face after futilely trying to rotate them around each other like tiny sausage heavenly bodies managing only half orbits you know youre standing in the shadow of a fine puzzle.

OT's are not doctors.

i cant remember the last time a thursday made me smile this much. thanks, mr brody. to someone like me who has never dipped a toe into the pool of crossword construction, todays offering fills me with an inchoate and fraught sense of how deep the pool is.

Sorry Sam, but I think you've got things wrong here. In my experience, the recent spate of excessively easy grids has only very rarely explicitly sparked ire toward or attacks on the setters. And when it has, the commenter has almost always been quickly corrected. Indeed, most of us bend over backwards while lamenting the state of affairs to express our appreciation for the cleverness of the construction of the grids. Our disquiet is with the editors and with what seems to many of us a very obvious and intentional trend on the Times' part to simplify the solutions with much easier clueing over the last many months. I found your comments essentially exhorting us to be kinder in general, and to the setters in particular, patronizing in their deflection from what is actually being expressed here. "Today's puzzle was too easy" and all variations thereof have absolutely nothng to do with the constructors or their efforts. The final product we see and solve is determined by you guys. I think you must know this. I am a big fan of your columns and would like to state that my objection to today's is proferred with respect and admiration for your work here.

im gonna call iffy on 56D. the force cannot be taught. it is the chi of the star wars universe. it simply is and abides in all things. now...teaching how to USE the force? great. MANIPULATE it? fine. CORRUPT it, even? groovy. but teach the force itself? doesnt work.

@Deb my crossword addiction here began a year ago. youve been a superb enabler. thank you.

almost a year x-wording and i fear im getting in too deep. im beginning to recognize constructor names. do i need a support group? a 12-step program? i guess thats what you guys are for...

the top three non-sexual/food-related sensual experiences in precisely this order: 3. expertly manipulating a pen/curette/crab fork handle/other long, thin, not-too-sharp object to scratch and relieve the maddening itch deep inside your ear without puncturing your tympanic membrane 2. finally managing to find, corral and detonate the sneeze which has already brought you to the edge and then left you bereft and in frustration three times 1. going over the crossword five times, still having 10-or-so unfilled words all over the grid and connected to each other by the slimmest of tendrils, going to get some coffee, suddenly remembering that meat loaf played the biker who was called eddie in the rocky horror film, returning to the puzzle, filling in that one stupid little clue and then watching as the rest of the words fall like dominos to complete the solve

When I first began xwording it never occurred to me that the puzzles could teach me loads about myself. When I grok a rebus theme I am usually wont to think: How devilishly clever are we, the puzzle builder and I! And when I don't I incline to pout and declare: How dopey and maudlin this meager effort from the puzzler and how rightly affronted am I! I no longer can discern clearly where the puzzle characteristics end and mine begin.

TOTALLYDOABLE

Agree with Barry. A Saturday solve should not take me fewer than 20 minutes. And yet, the clueing was downright delectable...dare I say Weintraubian...and made both my hemispheres very happy.

initial fear of a bout of snow blindness on a bleak tundra of too-uniform white soon gave way to a wonderful walk in a lush and cleverly landscaped garden. thank you, alex, for a delightful debut.

Holy cow! Constructor Notes never choked me up before today! Right out of left field, that was...

all this fuss about themeless vs themed sundays. sometimes i feel like a ripple drinker at a sommelier convention when i read the comments. but to paraphrase duke ellington: if it solves good, it is good.

im new here. and perhaps its already been done. but id like to lift my glass and propose a toast to sam ezersky and his mini co-elves. who are frequently responsible for the often delightful petits fours they provide in the minis while im still digesting the maxis. i suspect that he and the other mini constructors do not get enough credit for their efforts. just today, for example, mr ezersky crammed "elision" into the tiny morsel. no small feat on such a small beat. bravo.

if you didnt get tonearm youre just not old enough to be up this late.

And the Times puzzle editor said unto them, Fear not: for, behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people. For unto you is born this day a Thursday puzzle worthy of Thursday. Big shout out to Mr. Snow for (at least temporarily) restoring my faith in the quality here. And a big shout out to Sam for referencing Bartleby, my vote for the finest short story ever written. Ah, Sam! Ah, humanity!

ive only been addicted to the times crosswords for nine months or so but heres what i loved about this puzzle: whether you love or hate rebi and word splitting/sandwiching/doohickying, anagrams and the fifty other types of word frippery that appear on thursdays, here is the first such puzzle ive encountered whose solution entirely hinges on the trick. no prospect of working around or ignoring the trick in order to solve by crosses. all in. totally rad. more of these, please.

yet another precocious setter to shoo off my lawn. just kidding. mostly. very good sunday. please do more.

someone recently suggested here that i make early-week puzzles more challenging for myself by solving them using only across or down clues. which i did today. but an unanticipated problem with this is that i only understand half the comments.

i havent been doing this very long, but i cannot recall another puzzle whose constructors cluing wavelength was so subtly and perfectly out of phase with my own logic circuits as to cause nothing but stupid grins, smiling head shakes and internal exclamations of "huh!" from my delighted self over the course of 35 minutes or so. absolutely perfect start to my friday. thank you, ms keller.

Much sprightlier clueing than the average Monday, I must say. Cheers, Mr. Stock and editors.

this saturday bactrian fought me, spat and grunted at me and im pretty sure even sat on me at one point. finally got to the oasis after a grueling hour.

thought the theme was kinda meh, myself.

Bottom half warm and welcoming and top half icy and inhospitable (but in a clever, griddy way). Always an invigoratingly disorienting experience when a puzzle has such strikingly divergent levels of geographic difficulty. I wonder how often it's by design.

this bronco kicked my derriere from here to...sunday? finally managed to break it after an hour and a bit. 14D almost made my coffee come out my nose. top 5 clue of the year, imo. i must say im a bit jealous of all you veteran fanboys/girls who see the puzzle creators names and immediately know not only how to gird yourselves for whats to come but also board shuttles for trips down memory lane. "i was doing my third sam ezersky puzzle back in aught 9 when i got my first bank foreclosure notice....ah, those were the days...", e.g.

time for my end-of-week quibble: "cipro" is an abbreviation. the name of the antibiotic is "ciprofloxacin." that abbreviated fill was required should have been indicated or implied in the clue.

If ever there was a Tuesday of a Monday, this was it. Thanks for the non-sleepwalking solve, Jamey.

coming up on a year as a prodigal x-worder (wandered for 40 years or so in the quotidian desert) and just love the way every few weeks finds my crucigram esthetic subtly altered. when i first (re)started out i found clever symmetries, tricks and themes which were at best tangential to, and at worst utterly unrelated to the solve - often revealed to me post-puzzle either in the wordplay column or the comments - to be mere frippery. why bother? its just showing off. such a wasted effort. but then i got to thinking about how great painters from michelangelo to kahlo do the very same thing: add little flourishes and fillips and inside jokes and obscure references to some of their most smashing works, which have very little to do with the meat of the painting and can impart unique little after-quivers of pleasure after theyre pointed out by others or discovered upon subsequent viewings or prolonged gazing. another incidental insight for me of how crosswords are not mere puzzles. this medium is art.

im becoming increasingly fond of puzzlers who create layers within layers, mostly to amuse themselves, which are entirely unnecessary for solving the puzzle. had the anagrammatic definitions based on the language names not been anagrams at all, the puzzle would have been just as zippy and clever. as ive noted before, for me its an amuse-bouche reminiscent of the artists who included (and, i suppose, still include) obscure personal fillips in their canvases primarily for their own pleasure. except here, in my dim-witted case, the morsel usually delights after the meal rather than before.

absolutely pierre-less puzzle today...

delightful

You'd think the story of Circe and Odysseus and his crew would be more of a cautionary tale and less a meetcute. Sure she turned his crew into swine when they behaved drunkenly and boorishly. But in her passion for the louts' commander (he tried to resist with Hermes's help but her charms were too powerful and he ended up betraying his fair Penelope) she ended up turning them back and everyone had a grand old time on her island (Aeaea...by the way, killer fill if it hasn't yet been used) for a year. It's a man's world, I tell ya.