Lucy

As a rebus admirer, but someone who is terrible at solving them myself, I couldn’t have been happier with this puzzle. I got to have my cake and eat it too! Many thanks to the Katzes for one of the first Thursdays in a while I’ve felt confident (though definitely challenged) solving.

Wow, as a frequent abandoner of Saturday puzzles (because I find them too difficult), seeing some of the unhappy comments here was surprising! Definitely a same-wavelength puzzle for me, with the entire bottom half finished in less than 10 minutes. The NW corner had me struggling til the end, especially since I felt so confident about MPH for 1A. Also lovely to see the Inti and Viracocha clue since my recent hyperfixation on the Incan Empire. Sometimes things just line up! Really needed an easy solve this week, a great confidence boost.

I had a lot of fun with this one!! Frost is a far less common name in schools outside of the US, so I assumed this was the “two roads diverged…” for a long time before I gave up and Googled the poem. I enjoyed that after looking up the poem the solve still wasn’t immediately apparent to me, made me feel less guilty than if I’d simply searched up the answer. Also got a chuckle out of RASSLE, since I completed the puzzle while my boyfriend played his wrestling video game in the room with me.

Had a lot of fun with this! Enjoyed the theme, and it's always nice to see a collection of Q's, X's and K's. My Tuesday avergage was destroyed a while ago when I accidentally left a crossword open on my laptop for almost 24hrs, but from recollection this one only took me a couple minutes longer than usual. However, I don't know if I have ever found an answer I loathe more than CUKE. I have never heard the word before. Is it more common in the states? Especially with the JFK crossing (a bit of a shot-in-the-dark for me), I sat for almost five minutes at the end of my solve trying to see where I'd went wrong, trying to squeeze every four letter vegetable I knew of into the space. It couldn't be CoKE and it couldn't be CaKE.... God knows why CUKE never entered my head — maybe I should wait until my coffee has had time to actually start working on me. Overall I'm willing to forgive the CUKE clue for all of the fun letters in this one. It was a good solve!

This was an excellent solve! I can’t remember the last time I’ve had as much fun figuring out a theme. As always the more US-centric clues were a struggle (especially SCHLEP, which I have never heard used in the UK (Google tells me it’s exclusively North American)) but the cross sections helped me get there in the end. SECOND-TO-NONE NUN, as others have said, was a favourite today. Well done on the brilliant debut!!

Today's theme has got to be one of my favourites, had me kicking my feet and smiling every time I got a clue. Funnily enough, just yesterday I was sat in the car and considering the work MUCK in the horse context — I had a brief horse girl phase as a child, and was trying to remember if the word meant what I thought it did after years of not thinking about it. Seeing 59D left a massive grin on my face. I'm still absolutely baffled by the coincidence. Thanks for a great puzzle!!

Had so much fun with this one! Definitely quite an easy fill, but it felt more like a same-wavelength type of ease rather than a „not hard enough for a Thursday“. Thank god for my boyfriends baseball obsession which has me collecting baseballer names which I find unusual or amusing (Bo Bichette, Dansby Swanson and STIEB), and for four years of film school which is unlikely to get me a job but does occasionally help with my crossword-solving endeavours. The NW corner was a struggle til the end (had me trying for so long to fit HORROR or VAMPIRE in there somewhere, despite my inklings about DAB and ATE). Despite seeing the clue so many times before, I spent forever trying to fit MP3 into 3D for some reason. A reminder not to start a post-Wednesday crossword before my morning coffee. Thank you Kathleen, great debut in my opinion!

What a delight! Not my fastest Friday puzzle, but the first where I didn't have any look-ups. Very grateful for the baseball centric questions here (and my boyfriend's inexplicable love of a sport that doesn't even exist in our country)—usually it's the US-centric questions that catch me out. Thank you Boaz and Jacob!

had so much fun with this one!!! it’s not often that a saturday comes easy to me, usually i’m looking up clues from the very start to get me going, but today felt like i was on the right wavelength from the get-go. i did have lots of trouble with 27A 24D crossing though—started out with SEBASTIAN, but changed it to SaBASTIAN to get MEaT, since MEET made no sense to me at all until checking these comments. Added a good five minutes to my finishing time after checking every entry for spelling mistakes. had good fun with 34A and 49A, and was happy to see my guess for 1D was correct!