Adina

I think the best I can say about this puzzle is that it wasn't my cup of tea. ⁎Nine⁎ names from the entertainment business is about six too many in my opinion. Plus a spade is a LAWN TOOL in the same way an axe is an orchard tool. There is very little good you can do to a lawn with a spade.

Am I the only one bothered by 48A, [Holland/tunnel]? DITCH and Tunnel are not the same things. A DITCH is open above, while a tunnel has a roof. It's brilliant wordplay, except that...it's not correct. Other than that, I loved the theme!

Clever puzzle, very challenging, I'm glad I finished it. Please never do it again. The concept was good, but getting the stolen paintings lined up with where they were stolen from and then keeping track of the Down letters that weren't part of the Across answers just sort of sucked the fun out of it. I feel like I shouldn't ⁎need⁎ scratch paper to do a crossword puzzle. Probably this would be easier on paper with a highlighter pen and multiple ink colors, but that's too much like work.

Saturday with no lookups! Not that it was an easy puzzle, just one free of excessive proper nouns.

A challenging puzzle, which normally I love, but this one just didn't spark joy for me.

Last Saturday was hard, but fun. This Saturday is just badly clued.

I have no problem with SEX TOY, but CREPE MIX had me going "What?!" Crepe batter has five ingredients: flour, water, eggs, sugar, salt. TIL that CREPE MIX is actually a thing, sold on Amazon. You still have to add the water and eggs, but the flour, salt, and sugar are premixed. This is, presumably, a great convenience.

In my family we've change that poem to "The thunder rolls in ON LITTLE CAT FEET". How can a ten-pound animal without hooves make that much noise--on carpet?! (Usually at 3AM....)

My hat's off to Hanh Huynh! I managed to get the "holes" before seeing the revealer, but only got the "cows" after finishing the puzzle. It provoked an audible groan loud enough to scare the cat once I got it. That's a compliment for a pun!

Fiendishly difficult! I loved it.

I loved the theme! And then I spent way too much time trying to remember when Frodo Baggins was chased by ORCS. He spends most of the first book being chased by ringwraiths, and most of the second and third books /hiding/ from ORCS, but he does actually get chased by them in Moria. So that's okay. 😉

I got RIVIERA from crosses, didn't /think/ it got cold enough for Ice, then realized the asterisk was being used as a wildcard. I got the rest of the theme clues pretty quickly then, but without realizing they were B OR N. I misread ⁎Ovid as Corvid, in fact, and was trying to think of a crow in Greek mythology. D'oh! to use a popular bit of crosswordese.

Good one, I liked this a lot! I got the theme pretty quickly, though not until after staring at EIFFEL TOWER for a while. Once I got the SPEECH part that gave me the theme, though I still had some work trying to get the rest 39A. Nice groaners on "self-own" and "soup or...". I had the same trouble with VET and "Rook's opposite", though. I've never heard a rookie called a "rook", so I was thinking chess and corvids (ravens, crows, and yes, rooks). Live and learn. Only lookup was the correct spelling of SANTaRIA. I think some commenters could use a nice cup of tea and an early bedtime.

This was a great Wednesday puzzle! (Pity it was published on Thursday.) I loved CAT SAT because I've seen "ANTED" so many times. I actually looked at it and thought "It would be really cool to make a puzzle with CAT SAT instead of ANTED. Oh, wait..."

I haven't read all the comments, so maybe someone has already pointed this out, but 2D, DE RIEN, is literally "Of (or for) nothing". Nice (unintentional?) tie-in to the theme!

Love it!

85D reminds me of a friend of mine, a professor of Germanic linguistics, who said that the issue with "Ich bein EIN Berliner" is exactly the difference in English between saying "I am Danish" and "I am _A_ Danish."

Too much trivia for my taste, but that's okay.

I saw COW and DASHBOARDS, but not COD and WASHBOARDS, so I thought it was different for across and down. I had a vague expectation of Washer/Dryer appearing in the revealer. Possibly something about "stacked appliances"? Dunno, just finished laundry for the week, so it was on my mind. Very easy for a Thursday.

Will Shortz will be back when? Can't be soon enough! Nice puzzle, cute grid art, but yet another disappointment as a Thursday puzzle. It would have been excellent -- yesterday, as a Wednesday puzzle. As a Thursday puzzle it lacks any sort of twist, trick, misdirection, or basically anything that makes it Thursday. Again, this is great Wednesday puzzle, nice balance of challenging but doable, some fun fill.

Great puzzle! It was FUN.

The theme was brilliant--head scratching difficult, but I finally got it. Some of the fill needs work. Excellent first puzzle, though!

Fun!

Now this is a Thursday!

Lovely puzzle, but since we got a Tuesday puzzle for Thursday could we get a Thursday puzzle for Friday?

I had a hard time getting a toehold, but once I did I could work through it. I'm not sure if it has harder than most Fridays or if I was just tired--it's been a long (productive, mostly good) day. Lot of backing and erasing! Seconding, thirding, or whatever that Thursday and Friday this week are much more fun than last week. Today's twisted clues earn delighted groans when solved, not "Um...well, maybe, I guess?"

OUT OF THE BLUE reminds me of a zine from...1989 or so?...that was always printed with a yellow or pink cover. Why? Because we're "out of the blue".

No lookups, close to my best time for a Friday. Good peanut butter, but not very crunchy.

Not my cup of tea.

A very well constructed puzzle!