Peter

My first NYT crossword completed without my doing any googling or checking of Wikipedia. There were relatively few proper names or references to American culture (such as in education) and these had plenty of cross checks for which I could use my general crossword solving skills acquire from the British papers. So, thank, Kiran, for a nicely constructed crossword.

I had trouble logging until I realised that my subscription had expired and it was time to use the gift that had recently been sent to me. So it's my first anniversary here. When I started, I was taking over 2 hours to do Sundays with lots of look-ups. Today I dropped it below 70 minutes. The average of my averages for the seven days is 37:10 When I started I was taking over an hour for Wednesday's onwards. Wednesday's now average under half an hour and even my Saturday average is now at 45:01. I used to need look ups for every day and I now do nearly every Monday and Tuesday without look-ups or needing the checker. Although I'm not setting daily records very often nowadays, I still beat my daily average every day of most weeks. I've also worked backwards to late September 2023 in the archives. By this time next year, I hope to be doing most Wednesdays and Thursdays without look ups. I expect my overall average to be substantially under 30 minutes and my Sunday one substantially under an hour. I don't think I'll have reached the stage of complaining that most crosswords are far too easy. But I'll be approaching a five year gap between the current and the archive crosswords I would be doing and so can start to judge if there was a change in difficulty the last few years.

I've just experienced an example of why its important to check things before making a complaint about a supposed mistake in a clue. I was already to say that it is Stratford-UPON-Avon but have found out that even though that is the name of the town, the local government district it is in is Stratford-ON-Avon. So my nitpick falls.

I expected to need to do some googling after not having got many clues on the first pass and having found that two I did know didn't fit, However on the second pass it was pretty obvious where the rebus was in those two answers even though I hadn't been able to work out what type of A/C was involved. I kept plodding away and filling in likely answers for answers I had a few letters of, a cookie could be named after Lorna Doone, a museum of Portuguese could reasonable be in Sao Paulo, "central A/c" could parallel "central heating" "Terra" could be a brand name for a snackfood pretending to be healthy. I eventually ran out of squares to fill in and was amazed when the crossword complete pop up appeared rather than the so close one. And all in less than half the time I was averaging four months ago when I first gad a go at the NYT crossword and hadn't hear of rebuses in this context.

Today was the opposite on my experience on Sunday. I got to SA_ crossed with E_ON as my last space to fill and thought I might have to try several letters, but I had seen those answers just enough times in the NYT xword that L was my first guess and the little tune played. I started doing the crossword in late February and now am getting all Mondays and the majority of Tuesdays without help. I have also gone back as far as February 2024, so that achievement is from a year and a half's worth of crosswords, not six months'. And I have long experience of cryptics in UK newspapers. My average solve times are coming down too, though it will take a long time to properly make up for initially needing over an hour for Wednesdays on wards and over two for Sundays.

A nice crossword and my fastest fill since I started doing the NYT last month. And no resorting to google or look-ups to confirm my guesses. There were about five new names or phrases to me but the crossers helped out. Or in the case of CHEEZ it became an obvious guess which also helped with CNBC and BUZZKILL

I think there's a definite split between US and non-US solvers on this one. For me the Southwest was Natick corner.

I liked this one, and not just because I solved this with out look-ups in under two-thirds of my average Friday time having had a lot of blank space after my first pass. What was good was how there were relatively few proper names and how they do not cross. And the trivia could be worked out - just a few crossers for Kangaroo and I knew the cradle of humankind had to be in the Great Lakes region of Africa. Much easier than the nicknames of sports teams that have no obvious connection to their location.

When I started doing NYT crosswords in February last year, I was averaging more than an hour for Wednesday to Saturday crosswords and more than two hours on Sunday. These required a lot of searching for answers on the net. I have now managed to get my Wednesday average below half an hour and I didn't need use any look ups. This is now fairly common for me. As far as the theme is concerned, I 'm afraid I am not a fan of Sondheim. The only way I would pay to hear anything he was connected with is if some highlights from Westside Story were part of an orchestral concert I wanted to go to. And that's because he only wrote the words for that musical. That is not an art-form I am keen on but I accept that the NYT is going to have a fair number of clues related to it.

I've gone through the existing posts and either I've missed something or none of my fellow Brits have complained about the photo in the Wordplay. Adding a teabag into already milky water! How can you get anything drinkable if you do that?

I had a better experience than most people. When the "Almost there" message popped up, I decided to use the check puzzle button. Only four black squares, one of which was very naticky for me - the crosser of Wapiti and Toro. (I'm a Brit and was already veggie before I ate at a Japanese restaurant.) I probably should have worked out "AIrHIGHfIVe" but we Brits didn't high five when I grew up in the sixties and seventies, but I never studied Spanish or stayed in a country where that was the first language and the other two wrong crossers were cultural references that mean nothing to me. I finished in 42:17 which is slightly closer to my best time than my average one for a Sunday and is surprisingly competitive with some of the times I've seen in the comments. Maybe it's because I enjoy puzzles like the jigsaw cryptics which Araucaria introduced in The Guardian.

When I got to 21A, I reminded myself that this was the NYT and therefore I should use US spelling. Of course, as the example was a British theatre, I should have kept to what I would have entered naturally.

I got stuck in the bottom right corner. EVOO is an acronym I've not met before. Midas isn't a company that's well known in the UK and "muffler" v "silencer" is a difference between Amlish and Britlish I hadn't been aware of. I think I've seen NO CAP once before in the Nyt xword but it hasn't stuck like TSA, ICEE, EDYS and other more common answers.

I filled in everything and the almost there popped up. It being such a large grid, I decided to use the checker. Only one square was wrong, the crosser between PATOOT and LTR. So close to being my first Sunday without help. The combination of tow Americanisms got me. I had thought it was PAhOOT and LTR isn't a reference to paper size that I am familiar with.

I started the puzzle thinking it would be a struggle as the theme questions seemed to refer to a film or show I had not seen. And yet I ended up with a record Wednesday time for me that was better than yesterday and better than both my Monday and Tuesday averages. I'm one of those who has never, to his knowledge, encountered a 55 across. Pool was not a common game over here when I was growing up. The bar at my college had a bar billiards table not a pool one, so I don't think I encountered pool until I was working. So the idea of a Magic Eight Ball would have seem quite strange in a world without numbered pool balls. The fact I solved the puzzle so quickly is down to Daniel's providing plenty of easy crossers for the theme clues. There were also solvable crossers for CERA, KATE and DEBOSE which were about individuals I was not aware of and enough solvable ones for ADELE and VERNE who I had heard of even though I did not know of the specific works. So, for me, this was a nicely designed natick-free solve.

Being someone who only started this crossword regularly in February, I'm one of the few who beat my average Saturday solve time, though I'm not sure by how much because there are different times showing depending on whether I look at the crossword or the Statistics page. I suspect it has something to do with my internet going down in the middle of the solve. Some nice wordplay in the clues for TINE, ROE, SUBWAY STSTEM etc. I suspect that I would have listed CHOCULA there too had I lived in a country where that was a known brand.

The two main theme clues were among my last ones in. So I had already put in answers through answering the crossers (and through NOTABLE being sorta conspicuous). I only worked out the no "ICE" thing after looking at my solved crossword. Still a decent time by my standards and my second Thursday in a row without any cheating.

Could some please let me know what does IRR mean in the context of bargain bins?

Given that the art form for which New York is probably most famous is musical theatre or more generally Broadway and off-Broadway, I can't complain when the NYT has a crossword themed on it. That said, if I ever visit NYC, I'll be looking at what's on at the Met, the rest of the Lincoln Center and Carnegie Hall. And if I went for something more "popular" it would be rock or punk. So I had to get the theme song from several crossers and that made sense of my not being able to fit in the answers I thought of for some down clues. SHUE and STYNE were new to me and some other answers that were more common in Amlish that Britlish. ASTOR I got from a couple of crossers because of the vile woman who was the first woman to take her seat in the Westminster parliament. I ended up distinctly slower than average and I don't think it was entirely because I did it in the middle of my night

Well that was a nice pre-bedtime not quite quarter of an hour. I had only heard of one of the women and didn't know that she had had that honour but the cross-checkers were solvable except for 1 down. And in that case the most familiar possibility for the woman's first name proved to be right. One of the crossers would have been more of a challenge if I wasn't Jewish. I dredged the stadium name up from somewhere and some other unknowns were solved by crossers. So a nice straight forward Monday. Thanks, Kathy.

For me, as a Brit, there were two crossed Ts that were the answers I really had to look up. CST/TPED and WELTY/TGEL Everything else was solveable though SST needed the crossers some of which I only got by seeing the answer ATOB which I think I could have got in the end.

I got most of the way there but had trouble with the top and middle right corner. As someone who has no interest in baseball, neither SHOHEIOHTANI nor TAGS were solvable in themselves. ENE was a letter in an alphabet I've never learnt. (Except for cruise stops when I was a child, I've never been to a Spanish speaking country and French and German were the languages I learnt as a child.) TETON is just a string of letters to me. I did think of BALLOON DOG but it could have been balloon anything. OF course if I keep doing this TETON and OHTANI will become what TSA, ICEE and SSN already have and fix themselves in my head as things to insert into NYT crosswords.

The only red-headed boy from American 60s television who I remember reaching this side of the Pond was Will from Lost in Space. Quite a few other bits of Americana there too. We had DEBs here too who were presented at Queen Charlotte's Ball but "cotillion" is not a term in remotely common usage over here.

I got the top half of the grid unaided. Unfortunately I had DRUM roll and ANT nestS (where I also tried ANT hillS). Being a Brit without TV for a long time, CERTS and LAVERNE needed all their crossers. "Pub quiz(zes)" is the term that comes to my mind rather than "bar trivia". Still, it only required a couple of rounds of pressing the check the puzzle option to get the right words in to complete the solve.

I found the bottom half easier than the top half. But tomorrow I will have the pleasure of seeing four orange and three blue squares in the week's crossword line on the Games homepage for the first time since I decided not to google the answers to some questions once I got stuck with the whole crossword. 0bviously I'll have to start being able to solve some Saturday crosswords before I can talk about having a run as such. Maybe once I've been solving these for over a year...

I needed to resort to the hints. I didn't get the theme without them. Also AY PAPI crossed with ARBUS and YOINK and YENTAS with NAST were naticky to me. I may be Jewish but "yenta" wasn't a Yiddish term my family used and I've not met that meaning of "tea".