James

Major extra credit for getting "these are my horse" into a New York Times crossword. Flawless victory.

Gnar is a word that has 12 zeros in the United States, but 18 basemen in the fifteenth century.

My favorite part of today's puzzle was how "rolling source of entertainment," despite showing up at my door dressed up as P__TY_US, was somehow not "platypus."

Next time someone asks if I'd prefer the red or the white, I'll respond, "blue, thanks!" and it's all because of today's puzzle. Thank you, NYT Crossword, for providing these very high quality jokes that I will use in reality.

Kept thinking of "seven-of-nine" for Borg who co-founded the Institute for Women in Technology. Turns out this clue was set in reality!

I liked that the theme answers work directly as clued, so you may not notice the theme til you hit the revealer. Lots of pleasant word choices too, especially "bring to bear" for exert.

What a fun puzzle. I don't know if the constructor's notes were implying that answers like "atones" and "enjoy" are dull, but to me it was a relief to have some easily recognizable answers among the more unique stuff. "Certain frat guy, informally" was funny to me, because nicknames seem to come with the territory (of frat culture) so the answer could have been essentially anything. You could have told me that a certain frat guy was informally known as GTO, or TTF, and I wouldn't have reason to doubt it. It was Sig! Which is probably short for sigma. Which is probably short for sigma followed by two other letters. Which...well are those letters short for anything?

Why are the playground retorts always with "so"?My playground retorts used "too." Am too! Are too! Did too! Is this a regionalism? Was I surrounded by grammar heretics? I'm looking for some crossword representation.

Enjoyed this! Many questions that *seemed* unfair at first, but clicked on the second or third look. In particular, jail Jedi Eunice. Helps that the words themselves are interesting. And, although I also grew up hearing "freezing rain," ice rain sounds cooler and is more accurate, so will try to adopt it.

Soo...you want to talk about race?

House calls/shocker was also my last square, except I had "ales" and "eleopener." Shockingly, the app didn't ACCEPT that spelling of ... eye-opener.

No one has made any puns relating 55D to the name of the puzzle's author, but there they are, just waiting, in the eye of the storm.

Loved it! Difficult enough that the theme answers didn't act as a shortcut to completion. But "tight" enough that I wasn't tempted to second-guess the theme. At the end, I was looking for a connection between the theme answers and couldn't pin one down. "Peer review" seemed related to "et al" and "domain name" seemed related to ".org" Was there more to find...

As with many rebuses, this one started to fall into place when multiple answers I really liked were suspiciously all one letter too long, and started with N. Still, I ended up semi-cheating when I had the grid filled in and was staring at "TOTT," the fictional dog that seemed a little... too fictional. Googling "TOTT" didn't give me the answer. It just showed me that TOTT is an alternate spelling of the last name Thott. But knowing I was wrong cleared out enough space for the penny to finally drop.

I use Secret Whole Body Deodorant on my clock, because my clock has a Secret Whole Body.