Andrzej

This was completely beyond me, and not in an enjoyable way. I found the theme inscrutable - and the excessive amount of trivia was not fun to deal with for me - I usually need so many lookups only on some Sundays, and only because the grid is larger. I know this was a hard puzzle to construct, and somebody surely loved it and considers it the best puzzle of the year, but personally it reminded me of why I used to dislike Thursdays before I learned how to deal with them - not all of them though, apparently.

Not two days ago I wrote in these comments that I'm never impressed by puzzles. Well, today proved me wrong. I enjoyed this puzzle greatly, and for many reasons. First, the construction was impressive. I was amazed by the themed entries being actual words when arranged both ways - I can remember a puzzle from a few weeks ago where some of the themers were gibberish when read this way or that. No such clunky problems today. Truly awesome 🤩 Second, the theme was sport-based, and American sport, too, yet I dealt with it 💪🏾!Obviously I had no idea what the revealer might be right off the bat (please appreciate the baseball idiom. Soon I'll be an Ameircan. Too bad I couldn't think of a football expression to better match the grid). However, crosses gave me what could only have been the word REVERSE, and everything clicked into place. The theme helped me with the fill, which happens rarely for me and was most enjoyable. Third, there wasn't as much trivia as there sometimes is on Thursday, and what little of it there was I mostly knew. Finally I remembered KOTB and IDA without Googling! I did lookup the Greek letter and that Latin term for the thing under your nose though. Fourth, RUNUP ties in nicely with today's article in The Guardian on UK terms in US English: <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/science/2024/sep/26/other-british-invasion-how-uk-language-conquered-the-us?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other" target="_blank">https://www.theguardian.com/science/2024/sep/26/other-british-invasion-how-uk-language-conquered-the-us?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other</a> Who knew Thursdays could be as great as this. Wow. Respect to the constructor! 🏅

Ha! It took almost an hour of combined efforts of me and my wife but we managed to complete the puzzle unaided. That does not often happen on a Saturday. Now when I scroll down I will probably find multiple comments along the lines of: "Why did we get a Monday puzzle on a Saturday? I am cancelling my subscription" 🤣

I find it a bit funny that some posters complain about POLYPHEMUS being too niche, even esoteric. He's part of one of Europe's oldest and best known stories, one at the foundations of a shared European and American heritage. I found the whole theme a gimme, which was a nice surprise in a puzzle which otherwise required me to know some wrestler and a regional brand.

This was great - fresh and funny. I loved it.

Nice - I did not need autocheck today, which is rare on a Saturday, and I only had to look up four trivia clues. I actually realized Panthers related to a sports team, and given how long the answer was, and with no indication that it would be an acronym or familiar name, I guessed it would be just a regular state or city name, rather than some college, so I waited for a few crosses, and I got CAROLINA. That was quite an achievement for me, since American sports clues are usually the hardest ones for me in these puzzles. To not have to look one up feels great 🤩. I ended up looking up ELKS LODGE - I got Lodge from crosses, but I had no idea what EL_S could be, and here the cross was not helping me. I also googled the composer, King Lear's daughter (Shakespeare is largely not included in highschool curricula over here - we only studied Macbeth and Hamlet, in Polish, obviously - and I am not a theatre afficionado) and TBS - I have never watched any American tv channels (I had better things to do when I was in the US on holiday, and most US tv channels are not available in Europe), and even though TBS often features in NYT puzzles, I have no idea what kind of channel it is. I enjoyed the clueing, which was inventive and misleading enough without being obnoxiously arcane, and the fact trivia was limited to an absolute minimum. A brilliant puzzle, one of the most enjoyable Saturdays I have ever solved 👍🏾.

KIL for kilometer... Seriously? I have never once in my life seen kilometer abbreviated to anything else than KM. Is this something Americans actually use? Or is it just unfortunate crosswordese that misled everybody, and not just solvers from metric system countries? Coming next week - CTR (centimeter), LR (liter), and possibly ME (mile) and IH (inch).

I am really - and I mean REALLY - proud of myself. I just finished this puzzle in reasonable time and with an absolute minimum of lookups! I tried to do it without any lookups at all, but the mix of trivia and not knowing the poem meant that was impossible, no matter my efforts. So I googled some proper names and the poem itself - I only knew the final verse (from a Charles Bronson spy thriller I watched ages ago on TCM on satellite TV, of all things), and voila, here we are, with a quite legitimate, Thursday gold star 😃 - legitimate for a Polish guy only semi-literate in US culture, anyway 😉. I can only imagine how enjoyable this puzzle must have been to those who knew the poem - I liked it even though I had to look it up. A very nice Thursday.

This was just impossibly hard for me, and not in a personally enjoyable way. I can do a hard puzzle, sometimes, but today the clueing was not on my wavelength, I did not know most of the trivia (proper names, quotes), and some of the non-trivia answers were completely alien to me, too (STUNT DOGS? Is that a thing? Apparently so. But how do you get that from the clue?). My being Polish fairly played a huge part in not knowing most of this stuff (I mean, you may be shocked but I don't really know who Robert Frost was, just as you probably don't know Cyprian Kamil Norwid) so I'm sure the intended audience had it much easier. Saturdays are supposed to be hard, so I'm OK with my failure (at first I resorted to lookups and autocheck, but then I gave up and revealed the puzzle when I was left with a few crossing mysteries in the middle - so a huge failure it was indeed), but being OK with it does not mean I enjoyed the experience.

I enjoyed this puzzle for the most part. The clueing was on my wavelength, and I understood the "crossed a bear" part of the theme, but the "sounds like" feature was lost on me (and, really, having read the column - those answers and expressions they supposedly sound like don't actually sound the same, do they?). Sadly, there was a lot of trivia, and much of it was of the worst kind for a foreigner like me - American sports teams, sports organizations, universities and a guy from SNL. As always though, that is on me, as nobody is forcing me to solve American crosswords. And this puzzle still felt easier than this week's Monday!

I liked the theme but personally found the fill to be unpleasant in places, especially for a non-American solver (GRAD gift and INSTA cart were inscrutable for poor European me, among others). But at least two people liked the puzzle so it was great 🤣

Garden GNOME reminded me of the horror of travelling west out of Poland in the 1990s. There were no autostradas then (autostrada is what a wide, multi-lane fast-traffic road is called in Polish, from the Italian), so all traffic travelled on narrow roads through fields and forests. On the sides of those roads and at roadside rest areas there were hundreds of stalls where Polish people sold wildly painted plaster garden ornaments, mostly gnomes, bit also deer, windmills etc. It was so horribly tacky it made my eyes hurt. All those pointed hats, dead, painted eyes, grinning faces, mooning buttocks... It was the stuff of nightmares. So why all of the gnomes, and why in Western Poland specifically? Because the Germans loved their gnomes back then, and they flocked to Poland to buy them dirt cheap. Ruddy-cheeked Frauen and bemulletted Herren loaded Zwerge by the dozen into the trunks of their shiny Mercedes, Audi and BMW cars, exchanging valuable Deitschmarks for plaster... The 90s were a crazy time over here.

I liked the inclusion of ENIGMA, as a close family member of mine worked tirelessly to remind the world of the invaluable involvement of Polish cryptologists in cracking its code. You have heard of Alan Turing, but have you heard of Rejewski? For the whole story, click the link to the Polish Intelligence Agency website: <a href="https://aw.gov.pl/en/history/enigma-decryption/183,Enigma-decryption.html" target="_blank">https://aw.gov.pl/en/history/enigma-decryption/183,Enigma-decryption.html</a>

The crossing of AFI_IONADO and SA_HA got me, initially - I corrected the crossing in the end, but I was annoyed to do so. Why annoyed? AFISIONADO looked OK, and those of us us Slavs who spell the diminutive/nickname with an"a" at the end style it Sasza/Саша (that strange letter in Russian is a "sz" sound to us) - the clue clearly indicated the spelling used in Slavic cultures was meant, so SACHA is wrong: that is the French/English spelling of the Slavic name. In fact, I am not overly sensitive, but I see some racist undertones in the clue. All us Slavs were lumped together, even though we are diverse people with strong national identities, varied histories and different languages. Historically, those who treated us as a homogenous group did it not out of the goodness of their hearts but to murder us and turn us into slaves. Some of us know your "Sacha" as Sasza, sure, but to some us it is Sasho (Bulgarian) and Sasze (Macedonian). I would have preferred the clue to refer to *some* Slavic cultures, or simply to a specific Slavic culture: Ukrainian, say. Even then though th spelling with a C would be wrong. And yes, I know this is an English puzzle, but the clue literally says "in Slavic cultures". Other than that it was an enjoyable puzzle, not very hard once I looked up some personally exotic American trivia.

I did not get the theme, but silly Polish me rarely does, because understanding puns is much more difficult than mastering the grammar, syntax and vocabulary of a foreign language. Today I was confused by the theme because I saw no connection between a PIGSTY and a hole - which is strange, in a way, because in Polish the word hole (dziura) is also used to describe an unpleasant place (however in Polish the meaning is usually quite narrow, and reserved for a small, drab and dreary town or village, where nothing exciting ever happens). Still, I enjoyed the puzzle and solved it in nigh-record time without any lookups.

I finished the puzzle with a few trivia lookups (the mystery writer, the sushi - now I remember ALASKA ROLL from another puzzle, but generally only Japanese names come to mind when I think of sushi. Also, I asked google what an Alaska roll looks like - I've never seen one of those in Poland. The salmon on top of the maki looks so superfluous...). I tried to understand the theme, I really did, but i failed. I saw the second word had something to do with close relationships between people or things, and that helped me a little in getting letters for the down answers, but that's it. Could somebody please explain "Bills might pass in this, for short" solving to NFL? My wife speculates it has to do with the team Buffalo Bills and the action of passing (she actually knows something about American football, the madwoman). Is that it?

You have no idea how frustrating this puzzle was for me, personally - as a non-native speaker I never understand themes revolving around "sounds like" concepts. My English is very good in writing and in speech, yet tricks like this always elude me, and probably always will (and today some of the clues were very hard for me because of cultural differences, too - in Poland a "no parking" sign is a pictogram, a round sign with a border and one or two diagonal bars across it, so "N sign" would have meant nothing to me even had I understood the theme). Then there were clue/answer combos like copacetic/JAKE - impossibly hard for a foreigner (and this one crossed with the enigmatic JAPE, too), with an icing of US-specific trivia (NBA DRAFT is probably well known to a hundred million people, if not more, but I would never have figured it out). Other than that the puzzle was very easy, and I enjoyed many clues - the one for LAVA was brilliant and I got it instantly. So basically, being who I am was my undoing today, and it felt rotten (which as always in such cases is on me, but it still sucks). I understand why many people liked this puzzle, but it was one of the least enjoyable for me in a long time.

This was an otherwise easy puzzle with ridiculously hard spots. I usually take care to make it clear my complaints are subjective, but today I will risk it and say that the naticky N section with several proper names crossing was just unfair. I knew CAMILLA but not any of the other names, so I was forced to look stuff up. That did not feel great. I was confused by ZIN. Now I see below that it was short for zinfandel... Jesus, I would never have come up with that, and it's not like I don't drink wine. Do you really shorten every other word to something unrecognizable to non-Americans? Or was this just crosswordese? That part of the puzzle was hard for me also because even though I think I had once known skinny could mean INFO, today I could not come up with that for the life of me, and the quite arcane clueing of INS did not help in that general area, either. I needed the column to get IST for "Natural finish?" I know I will probably be crucified for this, but it was an annoying puzzle (if it was a wonder if construction, that helped little with what the fill was, in places).

I'm rarely impressed by a puzzle's construction but damn, this was really impressive. Chapeau bas!

I needed the comments below to understand that the club a tomato is part of is a CLUB sandwich. This - and many previous puzzles - made me realize the American terminology for sandwiches is much more standardized than the Polish one. Over here sandwiches, even though they are popular breakfast and lunch items, do not have commonly or even regionally known types or names - no heros, hoagies, BLTs, lobster rolls, Italian or club sandwiches for us Polish people. Sure, each bar or restaurant usually names their sandwiches, but these names are idiosyncratic. The standard way to describe a sandwich in universally recognized term is to just list its ingredients. Also, when we visited the US, I was amazed by how much meat you stuff into your sandwiches. Slice upon slice upon slice upon slice. That was so weird compared to European standards! And the weird, soft, sweet bread...

Not a good day for me. The clueing was not on my wavelength for the most part, and the amount of trivia clues was excessive. I had to look up so much stuff that in the end I enabled autocheck just to not get a gold star, because the number of clues I googled was just too high for that star to be fairly earned (on the other hand though, after 8 months of doing these puzzles, I still consider trivia-heavy grids unfair themselves).

This was quite a nice puzzle with a fun theme, even though I only knew the Lady Gaga lyrics, and I did not remember them at first, either. The unknown lyrics were easy to figure out though once I had some crosses. As almost always, some trivia got me and I had to look it up, especially in the naticky crossing of DEAF and GIFS: naticky because I had no idea what CODA was - you Americans you and your pathological love of acronyms! - and I've never heard of Slack, so it was a cruel way to clue my beloved GIFS (I've had entire conversations consisting solely of gifs, but on Signal, the non-spying IM app). I also had to Google PIERRE (I have never read War and Peace, which is on me I guess; my mom loved 19th century Russian literature, but she always told me one has to read it in Russian to fully appreciate it, and since I never learned that language, I passed on the books; I knew from experience how much English literature lost in translation and figured the same was true of Russian) and ADWEEK (are we really supposed to know the titles of trade mags?). You'd think I could get those with crosses, but since the two unknowns were stacked, I had problems figuring out the other words in that SE corner.

Oh dang, this was hard. Still, I am quite proud of myself for filling most of it on my own: it took about 10 lookups - mostly for the proper names, and also for the meaning of lassitude - and autocheck, which helped me with alphabet runs in several places, and two or three guesses, but I prevailed (in a way, at least). After 9 months of solving these puzzles I am beginning to be able to tackle most of the hard ones, and it feels pretty good 🙂. I am sure veteran solvers enjoyed the hell out of this, and I hope one day I will be able to do puzzles like today's without any help. I'm slowly getting there. The only clue I was sort of disappointed with was 'Trace of music' - it ended up being just another proper name clue, and of the worst kind, with the capital letter obfuscated. If you know the name, you will appreciate how witty the clue was. If you don't, you just feel misled. Misdirecting trivia clues are my least favorite in NYT puzzles. Misdirecting clues about words are great, but about trivia, not so much.

This was a fun puzzle, but surprisingly difficult for me in places. I knew some of the words others seem to have struggled with (EPAULET, SPOOR, and even SKOR - I have previous NYT puzzles to thank for that, because that product is unknown in Poland, or maybe even Europe). What gave me problems were ENID (I sadly know next to nothing about either Oklahoma or Tennyson, and that corner gave me trouble in general, so I had no crosses to help me; I ended up looking ENID up - my only google search of the day) and EASTER. In the end I realized the clue referred to an Easter egg hunt, but it occured to me late because it is not a thing here, or at least nobody had heard of it when I was a child. The Polish Easter-time tradition is to go have a traditional food basket blessed by a Catholic priest at church, and given its religious nature me and my family of atheists never engaged in it. Not quite as fun as an egg hunt, eh? I once went with my then-girlfriend to have her basket blessed and all I got was holy water in my eyes - the priest was apparently bent on blessing everybody and everything in the room, not just the eggs and sausages. He might as well have turned on the overhead sprinklers. The thing priests use for the purpose - a thing like a small broomstick, basically - is apparently called an aspergillum in English. I bet we will see that as an answer on some Saturday.

Coming from a largely catholic country, I was confused by NAME DAYS. Over here every day is a name day (at least two names are assigned to each day; my name day is November 30th, and it is a well known one, called andrzejki, associated with fortune-telling. Interestingly, atheists like me, my wife and most of both our families also generally celebrate name days, even though it is a very catholic thing, originally). As a result, personally I found the clue to be technically correct but also inscrutable - even more so as in Poland we don't specifically celebrate St. Patrick's day, so I did not recognize its date. TAW was new to me. What a strange word. I'll try to remember it. Marbles are known over here but not popular at all. Almost nobody I knew played it when I was a kid. Bottle cap "football" was much more popular - I suppose because we could cheaply make our own game pieces.

I can often do Friday puzzles quite easily, but not today. Not knowing some of the trivia and apparently not being on the constructor's wavelength were my undoing - I needed several lookups and autocheck to finish in reasonable time. I have had much better results even on many Saturdays, including those decried by man as being too hard. It is really interesting how idiosyncratic solving experiences can be. I have never seen HAVOCS used as a verb, but I suppose dictionaries allow it? ERICH threw me - I speak German so I would never think of pronouncing the name to rhyme with RICH, and that mental leap was needed to get the answer. I wanted ERICa there, for a Spanish connection to riches. I sighed when I saw the Detroit Lions spanner - just what a foreign solver wants: an uber-long American sport entry 🤣. For an experienced American solver this must have been an enjoyable puzzle, and not very hard, either. For me it was impossibly difficult in places, but I'm not complaining - you can't win them all as a foreigner.

I almost had to turn on autocheck to complete this puzzle - but not because of not knowing CCCP: that was a gimme. Polish people never much liked the Soviets, but their "culture," "achievements" and products were force-fed to us for decades. I learned CCCP from decals on model airplanes a battery-operated lunar lander (my parents were both historians, and they always took care to comment truthfully on the Soviet-aligned propaganda, e.g. my mom told me about the American role in the space race when I got that Soviet lander in the 80s). I am slightly surprised some solvers thought the answer would be USSR - that would be the equivalent of American rockets being labeled with the Russian США. TAJIK and TAIGA were gimmes, too. The cultural differences between me and American solvers are just fascinating - we struggle with such different things! I have no idea who Charlie Brown is (or who his friends are), I have never heard of a MOOD ring, I only vaguely know March Madness from these puzzles (and as a result its winners are a huge enigma to me), and as for sports coaches... Well, I can only name a few European ones. Oh, and I have never watched THE SOUND OF MUSIC (but have you seen any classic Polish movies of the 60s?)

Personally I found this a strange puzzle, very enjoyable in places and impossibly hard in others. I had to look up a few things, but even then the SW corner was just too much - I ended up turning on autocheck to resolve that area in reasonable time. The crossing of _OINKED and FRO_O was a mystery for a while but then I came up with a Y to go there. Perhaps I have seen FROYO before in NYT puzzles? I can't remember. It's not something I've seen in Poland or Europe in general, anyway. Also, what scale involves a DOE? Is it a play on do-re-mi-fa-sol-la-si-do, as a comment below implies? If so, it was incredibly arcane. I wanted to ask about the enigmatic VEEPstakes, too, but Google explained it to me. I am not an ignoramus, and I am following the build up to your presidential elections (as Putin's neighbor I care about the result no less than you do, possibly), but I do it in the Guardian app, which being British/Australian does not use American slang.

It took me 45 minutes to fill the grid, so about my Sunday average, and I needed no lookups or autocheck to do so. I am quite proud of this latter feat, as it is quite rare. Usually the size of the Sunday puzzle and the resulting number of trivia entries force me to seek outside help to finish. However, I am also somewhat sadly aware my relatively good performance probably means many US solvers found this puzzle way too easy. After posting I'll browse the comments to find out if that really was the case. This happens often - I do well in a puzzle and feeling great I turn to the comments only to find others just improved their PB by 76%, and of course they did because this was Tuesday, nay, Monday, difficulty. I may have completed the puzzle on my own but I did not get the theme. I mean, I understood some letters were changed or added to some expressions to alter their meaning, but not knowing most of these original expressions meant the theme was opaque to me. I got the themed entries with crosses and some mental gymnastics, in the end. I enjoyed remembering some names I have learned from these puzzles, like SOUSA and REBA. I do not understand the "Comparatively low" clue. ASSAD? I would appreciate an explanation. Is it about, say, Andrzej being as mortified and AS SAD as Agatha about the maniacal rule of some dictator: Assad, maybe?

Do real people use abbreviations like MTGS, or is it just crosswordese? Also, SKEDS? I can see how that derives from "schedules", but is it something people really say?

Thus puzzle was the WURST! But I really like wurst 🤣

TOGAs, which I entered instantly, held me up for the longest time. I wondered if Americans really do sweat some small things called BsADS (b-sad? Maybe in baseball or at the opry, or some other super-American thing? I've seen stranger things be correct answers in NYT grids). I wish there had been some indication of the answer being pluralized in Latin ("...in ancient Rome", perhaps?). I figured out the theme, which is rare. Too bad some bits of the puzzle were nonsense as a result of how the theme worked.

No Polish heritage of today's constructor was mentioned in the column or constructor notes. However, Nowak is the most common surname in Poland. It is the equivalent of the English name Newman. "Nowy" means "new" in Polish, and -ak is a traditional ending of names that derive from everyday words, akin to the better known and more common -ski/-ska (for another example of a name ending with -ak: Marczak is a surname relating to the month of March, marzec in Polish). Interestingly, all Polish common nouns and most proper names are gendered (stół - table - is a boy, in a way, and szabla - saber - is a girl, while łóżko - bed - is neutral). The -ak names, like Nowak, are no longer subject to this rule, but they used to be. In the past, Nowakówna was the daughter of a man called Nowak, and his wife was Nowakowa. This tradition was only phased out in the second half of the 20th century. The second most common surname in Poland is Kowalski/Kowalska (Smith): Kowalski would be a man and Kowalska a woman. Can you imagine how hard it is to introduce gender-neutral language into Polish? Some efforts are being made, and rightly so, but it is much harder than in English. One of the ways to recognize somebody is American-Polish is by their name, because in English the Polish surnames drop the female gendering (all American Polish names keep the male form - how about that for misogyny?). You would never be called Maria (Mary) Kowalski in Polish - it would always be Maria Kowalska.

It took me 50 minutes but I managed to solve the puzzle completely unaided, which is rare on a Sunday. Managing to do it all on my own felt great 🤩. I have only a vague knowledge of Scrabble (it's not a particularly popular game over here, and I have never played it, even though I've intended to give it a go for at least the past twenty years), so I was slow to get the theme, but when I did it really helped me with completing the fill - given how ridiculously inapt I am at deciphering NYT puzzle themes, this was a rare and welcome thing 😃. Also, I truly appreciate how intuitive the sports team name was this time - bless you, HAWAII ISLANDERS 😃. Among the things I learned today - googling the stuff I got from crosses, after completing the grid - was RADON. I was only vaguely aware of its existence, and I did not know any link between it and house hazards. Apparently Polish construction and building safety law recognizes the issue, and we have legal limits for RADON levels in buildings, but given our construction techniques, the problem rarely materializes in real life - our houses usually have basements with concrete slab floors, or sit on such slabs even if they have no basement, which apparently largely prevents RADON contamination, unlike popular American crawl spaces.