Cas

LAHR x ARABY was a bit of a Natick for me. There were honestly a few clues here that I had to Google, which feels like cheating for me. Not really a satisfying solve!

CROCHET very specifically does not use a needle. Like. That's kind of its defining characteristic. C'MON now.

This was a fun, quick solve, but I must admit I cringed at 65A. The account of Sojourner Truth's speech from which "ain't I a woman" is taken was published over a decade after the fact, and is written in a dialect that Sojourner herself did not speak. Contemporary reports recount a very different script. Imagine someone quoting JFK as having said, "We gon git ourselves up to that there moon in the next ten years or so, and a whole lot more besides, not on account of how it's like shooting fish in a barrel, but on account of how it's like herding cats." It's just straight up not what he said. Likewise, Sojourner Truth, who grew up in New York, did not speak in an exaggerated Southern accent. Her speech is well worth quoting, but only if you're going to use the words she actually said. The relevant line is "I am a woman's rights," which seems to me like a much more powerful quote anyhow.

Come on now, NYT. The singular is Inuk. The plural is Inuit. "Inuits" is no more a word than "Maoris" was the last time we had this conversation.

I spent way too long agonising over what I had wrong in the centre of the puzzle before finally googling and discovering that ELHI is indeed a word, and that my mistake was actually putting CFa/WaNG in the northeast corner instead of CFO/WONG. There's what I get for not learning my Hollywood history.

This was frustratingly naticky for me. I figured out the rebus pretty quickly (just had to look up what the original 13 were) but the density of the trivia together with a lot of pop cultural references from before my time made it a difficult solve. I didn't particularly enjoy it, but then I'm not the target audience for this one so I guess that's okay.

I flyspecked this whole puzzle twice before I thought to check Beau GESTa and Mount aLBERT. Ouch. Loved the theme, though!

My jaw dropped when I saw the constructor's age. Well done, Mr Matz. Well done. I will admit there were a couple clues here that I solved by crosses and still didn't get - I assume TDPASS is something from either American slang or sports? (Or both?) - and some factoids that I had to Google to check, which made the solve just a little bit less satisfying, but overall this was a nice Friday. I did love those long spanners. And "needle on a thread" made me chuckle.

I finished the puzzle, frowned at the themed entries for a solid thirty seconds, and then groaned when I finally got it. I'm sure I would have gotten the revealer, even if not the application of it, much sooner had it been better clued – "forgo" means to do without, but the connotation is of necessity, not rejection. Renouncing implies a level of intentionality. You forgo something because you can't have it all and something has to give. You renounce something because you have chosen to distance yourself from it. Also, no animation here either.

I sent myself on a frustrating ten-minute detour on both sides of the grid by entering PLEADS InNOceNCE and THROb. The rest came easily once I figured out my mistakes there! I do wish to lodge one objection, though: the Brothers GIBB continued to produce top-ten hits through the 90s, and their last album came out in 2001. I ended up getting that answer by crosses because a clue looking for a 60s-80s act immediately ruled them out in my mind!

I really made this one hard for myself by misremembering the quote as "... an obvious fake". Made the whole northwest corner much more of a headscratcher than it needed to be! I do love the clueing of ELLIOT PAGE with reference to the Umbrella Academy. That show was probably the best project he could have been involved with at such a crucial moment in his life.

A really nice balance of some obvious answers and others solvable with crosses. But what on this fresh earth is GORP??

40D made me do a double take when I solved it. I was not familiar with the German usage of this word - in Danish it's what you say when someone sneezes!

Near, far, wherever you are, I believe that the hot dogs go on...

Perhaps the themed entries would have been more noticeable had that theme not been shoehorned into every single clue. It took me a couple of passes to notice the mistake I'd made with rats instead of MICE in the southwest corner, because the distracting formatting of the clues had numbed me to the significance of the letter M. I'm glad this one was a quick solve, because it was not an experience I wanted to linger over. The puzzle itself was fine, more or less, but the gimmick got old REAL fast. Easily my least favourite crossword in the archives.

Solved in 6:13. Barely even had to think about the answers - the ones I didn't get the first run through the list I got as soon as I had a cross or two. This Friday felt more like a Tuesday.

The crossing of MELLON and ROHE was a Natick for me. Having never heard of either of them, it took me a solid five minutes of flyspecking before, having tried every vowel in that spot and still not gotten a solve, I took to googling every single answer in the puzzle to make extra sure I had my basic trivia right and discovered his name was not Andrew rELLON. Oh well. I did my DArNDEST.

I must protest the wording of 39A. Moa were never found Down Under. They were endemic to Aotearoa New Zealand, which is down under Down Under.