KRB

I enjoyed this one very much. It felt breezy (except for GUMMO, who was totally unfamiliar to me), but not so easy that I didn’t have to work for it. My personal preference is for entries/cluing that are challenging enough to require multiple passes, but which I can solve by thinking or remembering and not looking up, and that was this puzzle for me today. I’ve had 2.5 years of fun with the Mini, and just passed my 6-month mark of solving the full NYT crosswords (and nearly that same amount of time perusing these daily columns and comments). I think I’m hooked!

“Something’s Amiss,” said the notification when I dropped the last letter into the grid. I started scanning the puzzle and everything looked reasonable to me. But it turns out that Ray Charles’ first #1 R&B single wasn’t “I Got A Do, Man” ✂️ but “I Got A Woman” 👩🏾🩵 hahahahahaaa Whoops! 😅

A delightful companion to my jasmine green tea this morning. The pun was fun :) Favorite entry: 68A ERIC, as in “Children’s author Carle who wrote ‘The Very Hungry Caterpillar.’” 🐛 I’ve read that book in English and in Spanish many, many times to my niñas, and it is the most perfect book for the 1-3yo in your life. Also, I’ve learned that Carle was inspired to embrace his colorful approach to illustration when, as a teenager in Nazi Germany, a high school teacher secretly introduced him to banned art and he beheld with shock the “Blue Horse” of expressionist Franz Marc. Carle later wrote a children’s book inspired by the experience, but his whole life’s work bears the imprint of that clandestine art showing.

Fave entries: ONCD audiobooks and the very genius XII for “Top of the hour?” But better than any individual entry or the delightful theme is the backstory of the constructor’s 20-year quest to get a puzzle before us. Big congratulations, Jonathan! You’re inspiring.

This puzzle offered me an enjoyable mix of instantaneous fill (eg, “It’s GARY, Indiana, obviously” and EDIT IN) and real head-scratchers (MIEN? RILL? THORA? LATTO? and my favorite, CORPORATE GREED). —But this clearly reflects that I’m married to a video editor and we lived for years in Chicago, and that I’m not whatever it is that knows those other words 😂

Dashing! I enjoyed this one, and I had a relieved EXHALE when I finished because I was intimidated knowing it was Sam who constructed it. AND YET it didn’t have any devious elements; jolly all the way through. This is a busy week for someone in my line of work, but I’m happy to have had a sweet family time Wednesday night decking the halls with my husband and children, placing the presents under the tree, and watching “How the Grinch Stole Christmas” (26 minutes is the right length of time for my kiddos). Being alive is so magical. I wish you EACH a lovely holiday time, a PERIOD of togetherness and tradition and coziness.

A no-look-ups solve and a lot faster than my usual Tuesday, so I’m feeling good :) I enjoyed the theme, and found extra delight in mentally recalling Degas’ work for 14A, and his beautiful TUTU-clad dancers. Thank you to the constructors!

This just felt fun, in an easy but clever way. I wasn’t chewing down my finger nails going over and over all the clues, I wasn’t looking up the info. I was playing, in the “flow,” and thankful for this new crossword way of thinking I seem to have developed over the last six months. As usual I learned some words (ODEON, SED), and some trivia (the TITANS lost to the Olympians, WISHBONE FORMATION is a thing, RHOS are the symbols for density in physics…. but since I passed Physics 101, did I know this 25 years ago?) My favorite clue was 60A, “Checks someone’s checks?”

I spent quite a long time missing that BEaT was actually BEST, which made it GIRLS instead of GIRL A (but I don’t know a thing about Elvis movies, so it missed me). I had fun in this “conversation” :) Fave entry: NTH for “Advanced degree?”

A fun and breezy Wednesday with a cleverly constructed theme. I’m so impressed! (And proud of myself that the only thing I had to look up was how to spell SRIRACHA.) As usual I learned quite a bit of trivia in the course of solving the puzzle. There was once a beer called BUD ICE? Justin Bieber is called “the BIEB”? The patron saint of sailors is ST ELMO? And more. As an aside, I find it especially satisfying to get an answer from some niche that I’ve occupied at one time or another. My Greek studies clued me in to CASE in this puzzle, which was delightful (my Greek is no longer regularly exercised and enjoyed the outing), but in previous puzzles it’s been ballet or religious studies or PNW geography or some such piece of life experience that makes me who I am. Do others get delighted by this??

My favorite clues were 14A (for WORK ETHIC) and 37A (for VENUS FLY TRAP); my least favorite was 50D (“Locked horns” for AT IT). I finished the puzzle listening to ART TATUM, who I first heard of while solving 35A :) Thank you to the constructor for the introduction.

Oh, this theme was delightful and so clever! The revealer clue didn’t help me at all (lol) but I actually don’t mind when the revealer only makes sense after I’ve filled in the clues. I can tell I especially liked this one because I repeatedly revisited the theme entries to see the trick. “BOOK - FAIRPLAY - BOOK!” “BOOK - SMARTPHONE- BOOK!” and chuckled amusedly to myself. Happy Tuesday from this BUSYBEE! 🐝〰️

This puzzle on this day satisfied my particular wishes for challenge and ease, misdirects and redos, quick fill and guesses, solvable spans, and TILs. A delight! My favorite entry was LODE for “A miner celebration?” ⛏️

Perfectly Monday ☺️ and I solved it faster than my usual, but no thanks to the NE corner. I didn’t know 10D, 11D, or 12D, and sat puzzling over 19A for minutes. G _ _ _ E… could be ?? GloveE, as in the box? No, that can’t be it. GratE? No. GearE? That’s not even a word. Could this person’s name be EVA or EVe? EVy? So I went for EVA, guessed it must be a vowel in that third position in NAURU, filled in GAUGE and finally understood “DIG IN” as the sought-for synonym to “Dinner is served!” And TIL that a rhea is a flightless South American bird, but also Rhea is the name of a goddess in Greek mythology (apparently a “Titanis” or mother of the gods).

This was hard and took me 23 minutes longer than average. That said, I enjoyed doing it for most of those 23 extra minutes 😅 My fave clues were “One in a cage” for RIB, “That’s a wrap!” for SARAN, and “What ‘it’s not,” they say” for ROCKET SCIENCE. 👏 👏 👏 Well done!

Today my work picks up the pace again after several weeks of feeling spacious and flexible, so I appreciate that I got to start the day with a fun NYT crossword, and learn a few words I had never heard before, including ETERNE, REÚNE, and NEONATE, of course, but also EDDA. And I learned it’s Olive OYL, not like the oil!

I camped out (no YURTS) for what felt like a long, long time in the NE corner, stymied by crosses I couldn’t guess and deflated in that specifically crosswordian way when one’s cherished answer isn’t correct: “Spare things?”was PINS and not “lend,” as I really wanted it to be. But as a former bantam-league bowler, I acknowledge it as a perfectly wonderful clue-answer duo. There were several lines in here that truly delighted me, and I thank the constructor for her work. Brava! One of my can’t-live-without possessions is my Thermophore HEATING PAD, so please receive the thanks from both me and my Thermophore, who solved it together today :)

For crossword reasons I’m always grateful that Monday comes after Saturday and Sunday :) especially after yesterday’s puzzle gave me a run for my money. And today’s puzzle was fun and light and gave me several moments of wordplay-induced delight. (My favorite was JACKSON FIVE.)

I liked this one :) I am predisposed to liking crossword puzzles now, and this was fun for me, even though I was stuck for 20+ minutes in the NW corner. SOP and TECHS had me bemused. I ran through geeks, nerds, even dells (as in Dell, the computer maker), when the answer was much more straightforward. As for the AI in this puzzle, it seems to me to be a perfect task for a computer program to do.

TIP-IN, not TaP-IN ! 🤦 I was thinking tap-in sounded viable, maybe for golf? Now I’m guessing maybe …basketball? I was on-track for a better-than-average Friday time until I spent several minutes searching for the error in the filled grid.

Ooowee! Fun fun fun. Definitely got hung up on a few answers (I could hear LAGUNITAS in my head, but could I spell it? No. Do I know what YE_TAS are? No, I’ll search for it shortly,), but thanks to the commenters I got those two straightened out. Thank you, M + Z for the very fun puzzle that had me chuckling aloud with the theme. It was clever and satisfying!