Jamie

This is the best puzzle of the year. The competition is over. Take a bow, Aidan.

Did not enjoy. Weird cluing, clunky fill. No one calls it "ice rain." It's freezing rain.

I can’t even anymore with the too easy crowd. You all have the Games app, go play some old crosswords and spend 45 minutes on a Friday and knock yourselves out. Most of us solvers are angry and depressed and miserable people, for reasons that should be very obvious today. We can’t take any of it out on the people we’re actually mad at, and so we’re very pleased to get a little joy from a lively, contemporary Friday grid. Even if it only took us 10 minutes.

I admire that a grid like this is even possible, but the huge amount of glue needed to hold it all together was a real minus for me. I counted 38 three-letter entries. I probably spent more time grinding through all those than the themers.

While it’s a perfectly valid word and I figured it out, SNARFING should be thrown into Crossword Prison.

I think the theme would have worked better if the directions weren’t ambiguous. Like instead of cluing to “gutter” when the answer is GRATER, it could have been clued to “grater” when the answer is GUTTER. When I see “__ to __” I’m expecting to end up with the second pair of letters, but here we ended up with the first. On the plus side, I’m sure I was in the very small minority of people who knew PARADEREST off the top of my head. High school marching band coming in handy out of nowhere!

I failed the trivia contest.

This was a really good one. I only wish Daniel could have squeezed a fourth themer in there for the quadruple quadruple double.

This went beyond hard and tipped into mean. 14 proper nouns, many of them obscure (although oddly I got ZYNGA without much trouble). I decided early on I wasn’t bothering with the gold star. One of the least enjoyable solves I can remember. Two other things: - I’ve said this before but no one calls Kansas State University KSU. It’s referred to as K-State. - As a native Floridian and day one Tampa Bay Lightning fan, I can tell you their arena was originally named the Ice Palace, and it was built first. Cluing that entry with a Russian building instead was… a choice.

As soon as “bottled spirit” solved to GENIE, I knew this would be a killer grid and I was not disappointed. Maybe the best set of clues so far this year.

Neat theme, but awful cluing around it ruined the fun for me.

23D is my early leader for misdirect of the year. That was a moment of genius.

Big points from me for SCALENE. Finally 9th grade geometry pays off. Also there were many, many correct answers that would not fit into the three letters allowed for 58D.

I figured it out with crosses and three years of high school French, but citing the sixth verse of La Marseillaise in a clue is a bit obscure.

Did not enjoy seeing HOTORNOT. We were absolutely horrible to young women in the public eye in the 2000s.

The theme was kind of flimsy, but I really liked the fill. Even the three-letter entries were fresh. I also finished up a month of gold stars so… go me.

Definitely more enjoyable than yesterday. Still laughing at MEN SOLVED MYSTERIES, that was fantastic.

A much better experience today. Here's the thing. Hard puzzles don't bother me. Tricky clues don't bother me. This isn't the easy-peasy syndicated crossword next to The Family Circus. But you can just tell when parts of the grid are forced, or when a computer might have helped put the grid together. Yesterday's puzzle had that problem, today's did not.

I had a very long and tiring day, but seeing Robyn’s name on this one as I flopped into bed cheered me right up. If you disliked this crossword, you should probably stop doing them.

A rare critique of an entry in this column… but I do agree with Sam. Profits are eaten into or cut into, but almost never bitten into. I would have gone for a cheeky clue like “Masticates” but that’s just me.

That was a great idea for a Crossword. Especially the part where some of the answers were in fact right. Honestly though, I was more annoyed when someone had already done the Sudoku.

Maybe we need a natick-like term for a cross of two foreign words like OSSO and CHASSE. Other than that, an enjoyable test. That clue for GUTTERBALL is my favorite one in awhile.

I feel kind of bad that I solved this without having any idea how the theme worked. That was super cool. On the plus side, I did spell “matryoshka” right on my first try.

I think I would have rather had a rebus. Weird trivia, very confusing cluing, and things like SITSPAT. Didn’t enjoy at all.

This was a fun Wednesday puzzle… wait what?

I threw away a good 2-3 minutes on my solve time because I opted for the Canadian spelling, DRIVERLICENCES. Nice one, you hoser.

Being a news junkie until roughly four months ago, I didn’t have any trouble with this one. The classic NY Post headline reminded me of a scene from The Critic, a 90s cartoon canceled way too soon: <a href="https://youtu.be/wBjVzG4u9FU" target="_blank">https://youtu.be/wBjVzG4u9FU</a>

A little worried how easily I recognized a Michael Jackson song without any crosses to help me, but then again I am a child of the 80s.

Very late Gen X male who got OLIVIARODRIGO and BRAFITTING immediately. I don’t know what that says about me.

I burned through it in under 10 minutes but that’s not why I liked it. There was so much fun fill and clever clues. Although ICE RAIN is another one of those crossword-isms I would like to send to outer space.

You have to applaud any Crossword that gets YOINKS in there. And I beat my Saturday time by a few seconds!

If anyone was wondering, the TEETOTAL in this grid is 20.

For a brief moment I confused a palindrome with a limerick. It turns out THERE ONCE WAS A MAN has more than 15 letters.

For what it’s worth, a lot of Web browsers make you jump through hoops now to visit a site starting with HTTP… if they’ll even do it at all. The much preferred prefix is https.

Any Thursday where I don’t have to type in rebuses on my tiny phone keyboard is a win.

I was awful at mythology and not really into the classics, so this puzzle was a slog. Doesn’t make it bad, it just makes me kind of lowbrow.

The theme was OK I guess… but I didn’t really like this one because of the fill. Especially the short answers. The grid just felt clogged with crosswordese. And only a true sports nerd like me was going to remember Dave Stieb, a good-not-great pitcher from the 1980s. If you’ve ever heard of the “guys naming dudes” meme, he is a prime example.

Based on some football games I’ve seen, I think Pittsburgh used to have a population of around 140 million people. Also thank you for cluing 27A differently but I think that word’s just ruined for me forever.

The long answers were fantastic. I really wanted 16A to be JOESIXPACK. I personally appreciated 46D as a BUCS lifer, but otherwise the short answers were kind of a pain to figure out. I think there’s more finesse to shuffleboard than SHOVING the disk. If you did that, it would slide way past the scoring zone.

More praise for the constructor… that could have easily broken down and led to a bunch of naticks or crosswordese. And FACTIS, this Crossword couldn’t have been published in The Times back in the old days. The first color edition didn’t roll off the presses until 1997.