WM

@Lewis extra crossword-y: BABY EEL BABY EMU

@Mass HOS yes that one hit close to home

@Dave K. I was picking up on the music theme: IDINA WAITRESS RAPDUO SINGIT GROUPIES MAJORTOM And several more that could count if MARIE is counted as a part of a science theme 😄

@Francis JAZZHANDS was a gimme for me and I was suspecting by then that this was a pangram and I was anticipating the Zs! I have heard donezo used although the spelling looked weird as I was filling it in from crosses. Enjoyed the puzzle and went faster for me than Monday (although tbf I was multitasking).

@Steve L I noticed too! Halfway through I started to suspect it and although JAZZHANDS was a gimme for me, it was made slightly easier because I was anticipating a Z (and got two!).

@Dave Rosenbaum same for me! Friday I got some of the spanners right away but struggled with many entries and had to sleep on it and come back a few times. Today pretty much all the long entries only came after several crosses but the overall puzzle was more my wave length. Both days were a good challenge!

@CCNY yes! I immediately thought of 1A but then started second guessing myself and didn't put it in till I worked the crosses.

@tautau same here! The top half was very intuitive for me, the bottom half less so. There was a mention of Adrian doing the top left, I wonder if he was responsible for the entire top half.

@dutchiris it was more about the SNOb SNOt confusion! I started with the Downs.

@Cat Lady Margaret thanks for that, I missed it 8 years ago!

@Andrew right, and Sam's tricky clues hint says she understood the answer to be the opposite of "quite some time".

@Mishlev same here!

@Stevedson I definitely thought about it!

@Times Rita same on KOS except I first tried TKO. I think it's one of those crossword short entries that automatically come after doing the NYT crossword for a couple of years!

@CCNY same last letter due to the crossing of ROSTRA and the vague cluing for ESP! Very fun challenge overall. Definitely checked some answers after getting them through crosses. And confused EirE (for Ireland) and ERSE for the language.

@Nancy J. I'm a scuba diver and box fish are among my favorites! When you follow them to try to get a picture they look back at you in seeming dismay

@WM that should say Tuesday or Tuesday plus. The emus ate my plus sign!

@Cloudy Rockwell I recommend Bananagrams! Everyone makes their own Scrabble-like board and when someone has used all their tiles you call out Peel and everyone grabs one tile and tries to fit it in their board. For me, much more fun than Scrabble since play is simultaneous and you don't have to worry about those triple letter and word spots. Bananagrams is all about speed and how well you can incorporate new tiles to make new words.

@Grumpy they did leave it out of the clue! I had a harder time with rhino as I'm from Indonesia and we also have rhinos (not very many left sadly) so African didn't immediately evoke rhino.

@HeathieJ I also was on Rose Conlon's wavelength (faster than Thursday or Friday) and really enjoyed this puzzle! Once I got rid of the S I put at the end of 17A, HUMANCANNONBALL just came. And thanks for the Brooklyn 99 clips ❤️ as for love languages, sure, an at home LAPDANCE would count in several categories.

@Andrzej in my experience macaroons are coconut macaroons, a soft and chewy mounded cookie with no filling. Macarons are the French almond flour with a filling. The internet does say that some macaroons are also an almond flour mounded cookie, I wonder which versions Lewis and Times Rita ate.

@Remy Sundays, though larger and a test of my eyesight on my phone, are a nice break after the challenge of Fri and Sat as they are a Wed/Thurs level. That level of challenge is my sweet spot and the longer solve holds me over through the quick beginning of the week puzzles.

@Dan it does seem to be beyond standard evil, some kind of qualifier fits the definition better. Turpitude comes from Latin turpis, meaning "vile" or "base." The word is often heard in the phrase "moral turpitude," an expression used in law to designate an act or behavior that gravely violates the sentiment or accepted standard of the community. A criminal offense that involves moral turpitude is considered wrong or evil by moral standards, in addition to being the violation of a statute.

@Michael Weiland the crossword loads at the same time every day (it doesn't depend on time zones) so you'll still have the same amount of time to do them and as long as you do them in order (and close to the 26 hour window) you should be ok. I've definitely loaded a crossword and worked on it on a plane with no Wi-Fi before :-) sometimes it doesn't save or your time gets weird but a worthwhile sacrifice for amusement on a long flight. Have a great trip!

@dutchiris I had 49D as rhapsody in g lue which didn't seem right, but ALG was as plausible to me as the actually correct ALB. Good luck finding your typo!

@Mean Old Lady "we have running water etc" made me LOL!

@Alex I was solving mainly the acrosses and started to see a lot of doubled letters. By the time I got to the downs the theme was mostly revealed. Agreed though that the number of doubled letters also allowing a straightforward long to be entered would have been challenging if I'd started with the Ds.

@Patricia Henry close! Timor is actually the name of the island and timur is East. Timor timur was the name when it was part of Indonesia and the other half of the island still is Timor barat or west Timor. TIL (after googling to confirm) that Timor likely was derived from the Indonesian/Malaysian word for east, now spelled timur. I'm from Indonesia and I grew up thinking Timor was just the name of the island and sea. It would make sense as vowel sounds do change a bit in Indonesian depending on the region you're in and prior to a standardization of spelling that happened in the 1940s there was inconsistency. @MarkGawron as to where the other direction names come from and the many other sources of words in Indonesian it is a function of Indonesian deriving from the trading language /lingua franca of the region and absorbing words from Portuguese, Arabic, Sanskrit, etc etc. It also means that Indonesian is very stripped down with no cases and tenses!

@HeathieJ same on Connections! And thanks for the restaurant rec, I'll check it out!

@Helen Wright don't give up! Galangal was added at some point, I remember when I half heartedly tried it yet again and it worked!!

@Jon Onstot yup, and POKY was not obvious enough to me to give me the Y in FLYNT!

@HeathieJ @francis 🤣

@HeathieJ so good! I must never have seen that music video, it is definitely ripe for parody!

@Francis come to Indonesia. Plurals are made by repeating the noun. No need to add an s or account for different etymologies. One book: buku. Multiple books: buku buku. So simple! And in texting you can just write buku2.

@HeathieJ @Andrezj I'm late to the party so you may not see this, but do you watch Seth Meyers' Corrections videos? It all started with a commenter correcting Legos to Lego bricks... It's been doing a while now and honestly is funnier if you go back and watch from the beginning. I think you would both enjoy it if you're not already jackals!

@Phil and it doesn't help that ser is a variant of sir... I resorted to looking at the answer key.

@dutchiris happy birthday!!

@Mike beautifully put and I agree! Thank you @Deb!!