Jennifer

I held on to Cha Cha instead of CAN CAN for an embarrassingly long time. Given puzzle lead times, I’m sure it was unintentional, but did anyone else find a new sad resonance beyond the theme answer between FEDERAL GRANT and LOOK THE OTHER WAY?

Yesterday, in a down moment while volunteering in an elementary school, I picked up a book from a series on which animal would win a fight with another animal, specifically an alligator versus boa constrictor. The last page had a picture of a 600 pound GREENANACONDA, the largest snake. Volunteering is so worthwhile!

Tortured words such as OARED lessened my enjoyment of this one.

The teacher of a special poetry unit for 5th graders uses this Frost poem, along with several contemporary poems in different styles. Though the theme version was so randomly different, having key words in my recent memory banks no doubt helped. And the GIDDYUP just haddabe. This filled very quickly for me for a Thursday, albeit with one look-up: When an actor from a show I’ve never watched crosses a rapper, I thank my lucky stairs I live in the age of Google

Zipped right through this entertaining maze. Who knew OSIRIS has green skin? “Six-letter god starting with O” is how I got it. No music. Flyspeck. Looked hard at the change I’d made in the southeast to accommodate OPENENDEd. Considered OPENENDER, Figured I must’ve missed something else. Shrugged, checked puzzle. Sigh. There’s more than one reason my streaks are so limited

I wanted 36A to be SET THE BAR LOW (my personal motto for 2021) but it’s a letter short. But I knew this puzzle was talking right to me when, (in addition to the plethora of pot references: “HAIL MARY Jane” indeed🤣), “Plan” turned out to be DIET. My 2023 resolution was to lose one pound a week—and not exceed that goal. I gave up gluttony, being sedentary, and eating fast. And gained 52 pounds of lightness. Word play helps me. WASTE excess food, don’t WAIST it. It’s ridiculous, but sitting in hunger for an hour (hadn’t felt that since about 1975) made me realize every tummy rumble isn’t a starvation alert. I don’t over eat now because I might get hungry later. Pot has fewer calories than alcohol, so I relabeled “the munchies” as something else. I have a glass of wine, but not three Manhattans. No tricks, no draconian prohibitions. Eat anything, but not everything at once. After four decades of failing at every diet plan on the market, I had a little win, week after 52 weeks, and I feel like a big winner. This year’s goal is a pound per month. Eat a little less and move a little more = gain lightness.

I still remember my dentist saying, “Oops” during a root canal. Not a good feeling. I had to reveal THALAMI, and do check puzzle a bunch, but all was forgiven at DOGNAP.

This was a lot of fun. Mind boggling to think of constructing such a thing. That moment when the light dawns, and sense emerges from nonsense… OH LORDY.

California cookies crossed with Incan royalty … maybe I shouldn’t try to solve at 4 am.

Having ventured to the path of totality last week, I thrilled to see “eclipse” in today’s juicy puzzle at 92D, I think. I got goosebumps again, just remembering the moment when I took off my glasses to bathe in the cold dark beauty, and marvel at the bright red protuberance bulging from the lower edge, and the brilliance of a suddenly-visible planet, which disappeared from view again four minutes later. Jupiter? Venus? I went for the house party, but was unexpectedly moved. Anyone else go? I still feel extra-energized in an inchoate way; I planned to file for an extension, but instead got my taxes efiled. I need to move, and it feels great. Though I obviously still make mistakes, I SUNSPOT them, smile, and move on.

Caryn Robbins is my dream. The witty, consistent themes always brought a chuckle, and DONTGETMADGETELEVEN, plus the flashing alert that Sunday puzzles have a title, flipped the top half from impenetrable to a piece of cake. Brava!

Not to brag, but I got ABS OF STEEL from just the clue and the initial A. Not a fan of active politicians as NYT xword fill. TIL that the Sahara is 8% of the Earth’s landmass. Those flat earth maps we studied as children must have been massively distorted! It also made me ponder the long, perilous trek in “Lawrence of Arabia” which crosses just a tiny edge portion of the Sahara. TIL the meaning of TAUTOLIGICAL, which I did by asking SIRI after solving 5 minutes faster than my usual mark. I spent as much time enjoying the column as I did on the solve; I’d worked out that the name came from the language, but I wasn’t getting all the fun until the column. Bravi tutti.

I was totally frozen in the SE (schoolmarm for GOODOLEBOY was unhelpful), but Sammy, Steven M. and Steven saved me. Thankyou. And I do like puzzle entries that send me careening down memory lanes… TRAVEL VISA had me back in 1976, at a Romanian border crossing, a whole long train kept waiting for three hours while they decided what to do with a lone young American woman with that stamp in her passport.

After the “too easy” “too hard” quibbles this week, I found this one just right. As seems to be my wont, I came up with a clever but wrong answer that I stuck with (arm muscle informally, three letters = “gun,” HEH heh…not) despite having to change PERTH to accommodate it. 🙄 OPERA and egypt both have five letters and something to do with AIDA… I astound myself sometimes, and enjoy the denouMEnt when I figure out my error. Thank goodness I gave a dinner party this weekend and a pretty bottle of APEROL caught my eye in the liquor store. I vaguely remembered an association with cough syrup so left it on the shelf, but it open that part of the grid nicely. Very clever, well-executed theme. I’m sure I’ll enjoy more from Andy.

I enjoyed this one a lot for the wordplay, and the memories. 144 dozen boxes of GSCookies sold when I was 14! ERDA was a gimme for me. Back when I was entering singing competitions, I soon figured out the trick of pairing an obscure Handel Kamikaze-coloratura aria, with Erda’s stentorian, “Weiche, Woran, weiche!” I won prizes. I never thought of opera as “relevant,” but in her scene, Erda warns Wotan (President of the Gods, if you will) of what will happen if the gods stop obeying the law: Armageddon. Wotan’s lust for gold and a magnificent palace trumps all else. He ignores Erda’s warning, and betrays, cheats, philanders, lies… Wotan has disappeared from the stage by Wagner’s final opera of the Ring Cycle, “Götterdämmerung,” but the world still ends in fire. And flood.

AROACE is an acronym too far, especially as it seems a label rejecting common forms of interaction. When did Americans decide their sexual preference needed to be explicitly labeled and shared? Has such Balkanization improved our empathy, or merely facilitated the right to, “divide and conquer?”

A crunchy Monday! I hope it lures newer solvers into some new territory. The cluing made it accessible, if the theme made flyspecking tricky. I had MOMMa, and never read the clue for STY in the SE corner until I finished to resounding silence. Nice job!

The thought that not doing puzzles will save the union is delusional in more ways than one today.

Wow. This was a “I’ll never get it” that somehow came together. Good one. My music came with: “6:48 slower than your average.” Are they now only averaging since the start of the streak or something? In my case, I rarely make it through a week, So it’s apples and oranges. Should I say, L’ORANGE? I did enjoy seeing how I compared to me on other Friday puzzles.

Cheerleader instead of EAGER BEAVER for 14d, and DElay to DEfER to DETER is indicative of how I fared with this one. CHASE seemed too different from the surreptitious aspect of tailing someone so I kept resisting. Lots of clever misdirects such as what kind of farm, which 1%, what’s breezy on a beach. It’s always a kick to see someone I know in the NYT puzzle: brava Eve ENSLER, who continues to insist mankind could do better.

That was very nicely done. Variety in the theme answers, plus Roman numerals and foreign language clues that made me fearful yet solved from easy crosses. Aflat! 🤣

I’m always forgetting Thursday is Thursday when I solve Wednesday night, but MIDDLESCHOOL was clued nicely on the NOSTRIL. I thought the rebus was SCH for a bit, but sorted it all out more swiftly than often. An entertaining romp of a Thursday.

I’m apparently the only one who found this impenetrable. I had so few fills on a 12-minute first pass, and then was unable to get any crosses, I considered just letting it slide. It was so “not in my wheelhouse,” I turned to CHECK PUZZLE (which I consider less of a “cheat” than actually looking up an answer), and my pseudo-solve was still glacial. Looking for the vowel in B*LL through a, e, i and o was just embarrassing. I couldn’t even figure out what to ask Siri: “How would you characterize most Azerbaijani’s” yielded the ethnic tribe Tats as the only 4-letter possibility. Sheesh! When I finally pieced it together, everything seemed pretty straightforward. Can I chalk this up to getting a covid booster today? I think I’ll

The triple stacks yesterday readily popped into my mind, which made the solve quite speedy, and they helped again today. GETTING GOATS indeed. That’s the biggest evolution in my solving—which began near the start of Covid: wordplay used to be an impediment, and now it’s a shortcut. Balancing enjoyment with rigor, I often employ check puzzle instead of flyspecking if I complete but get no music. Deploying Check Puzzle repeatedly helped me see what was going on in many an “unsolvable” puzzle, and seems a venial sin compared with just looking up an answer.

Wow. Perhaps the “easy” rebus earlier in the month (week?) set me up for success here, despite flailing in the upper left. This was no TURKEY, OMHO. Happy Thanksgiving, everyone

I enjoyed the process of moving from “I can’t use the same solution twice to, “ I must use the same solution twice.” Unfortunately for my streak-let, only today did I learn how to spell HAStLE. 🙄 But these days, I’m kind of happy to have a simple mistake that is easily rectifiable.

I looked up pictures of a Goblin shark, and of the other unknown creature (which I could see immediately looked just like a NEWT), and felt good about persisting once I got toeholds, and built on them, and whoosh it was done. DOLMA was all I knew for the longest time. I felt my college degree come singing at KEYNES and WHOAMI. Flat out guessed BADOMENS from the A and M and a distant memory. As always, fun. Now I’ll read the column.

Mr. Baude is a Northern Michigan man, according to our local paper. Congratulations on persevering and achieving this goal. The puzzle was spot on for a Tuesday—and I don’t mean ACNE.

Another great example of how the puzzle can be solved despite not realizing all the intricacies the constructor included. I had fun.

Ride the train into Manhattan from Yonkers to hear the wheels screeching that Gershwin credited as the inspiration for that clarinet glissando.

That was really fun for me. The NW filled so fast: AMIGA AMIE MINE. When INFLUENCERS dropped, I feared a typing exercise like those local paper puzzles I don’t do any more. Then the annoying pencil letters that might or might not be right . The trick took a Tuesday amount of time to figure out, but continued to entertain all the way to the end, since some letters were right. As clued, CHICkS, is not an affectionate word, and I was glad that guess of mine was wrong. Brava. From AVer/AVOW on, this accessible puzzle preserved some mystery to the end, while embedding some chewy info. TIL that Toni Morrison got a Nobel Prize. I didn’t have to google it, and I just might remember it. Brava.

I’m always IrKed by foreign stews. That ILK of cuisine could be anything. I must admit POLLO makes more sense than POLrO. Favorite clue: literary runt of the litter. WILBUR is SO CUTE.

I’ve gotten to the point on Thursdays, where there’s a refreshing openness in my mind. So when one of the themes doesn’t make sense, but an answer fits, I put it in and move on, and by gosh eventually… when I read the column… I fully enjoyed the cleverness. An upside to being older is memories of when I started here in the early days of Covid, and would have been absolutely crazed by the part of the trick that didn’t appear on my iPhone or some other kvetch. Today, I’m just tickled that (as it is a Thursday), PAGES came instantly when vertebrae didn’t fit.

55A works out to a SUIT for “Dressy attire.” I was raised to think “business attire” is the clue for SUIT. My father wore one every day; one summer day when it was ninety-six degrees, but he was working from home, he apologized to a young friend of mine who came to visit, and found him with his jacket off and his sleeves rolled up. He was, as usual, wearing a belt and suspenders. Mind you, he had a few things for dressy occasions but the pants were never of the same fabric, as in a SUIT. OBVS, a perfectly valid answer in a lovely puzzle, which made me feel clever, and reminded me of my dear old dad. Well done, and thank you.

I actually used the theme to get the E and I if EIDER, contributing to a super swift solve. We just had a SUBstitute teacher, so I was trying for something more than zero. I enjoy romping through these early week puzzles, even as I wonder what the next days will bring.

I slipped slyly through this in quick time for me, though I checked puzzle finally on the naturEl cross.

I was surprised to get the music, as I had only J in the JOKER/JPEG place… but boy have I set a bar for unaided solving this week —one I’ll be unlikely to approach again. I got the trick early, and had great fun letting my mind juggle possible answers with this added dimension. A tip that worked for me: when I decided there must be a rebus, I skipped down in the puzzle, and worked out what was going on over USFLAG. Hat tip to “Mean Old Lady” who often starts on the bottom.

TIL that the IDES is not always on the 15th… I hope I remember to look up why when I have time. I was impressed with the trick, and it led me to my first 100% look-up-free solve. (I’ve gotten lazy).