Gary K

♯ This is a a sharp (if it shows up properly in the published comment), with two vertical strokes. # This is a a pound sign, hash, or number sign, with two horizontal strokes.

I am recovering from a minor surgery, which already has relieved my month-long pain. And now I've just finished a wonderful Saturday puzzle. So I'm feeling good!

It was a good puzzle, thanks, except for one glaringly wrong clue. Last night — last night! — I was out for dinner with fellow mathematicians (mostly Oberlin College profs) and complained that the Times puzzle clues COSET as "Mathematical subgroup." There was a chorus of No, No, No, That's just plain wrong! You need a test solver who can catch such a mathematical howler. That entry has appeared 8 times in Shortz-era puzzle. Five times the clue has been incorrect; twice it's been acceptably vague; the best one was "Subdivision in group theory" back in 2020.

Having HALF-AKED, I naturally put in N for the "revealer."

I must be quaint, because I say "needn't" pretty frequently.

In case no one has already pointed it out, Jeanette Rankin was the sole member of Congress to vote against the declaration of WAR on Japan in 1941.

I came here to praise the puzzle, and now knock me over with a feather to find out who constructed it. The most fun part was realizing that filling in my last blank gave me the name of my old friend SHOJI. Great entries, clever clues. It looked hard at first and then it cracked open, just as a satisfying Friday should do.

I love spanners!

A couple of those Northwest entries made me smile. My grandmother — born in Buffalo in the 1890s — always used the word "arctics," but I'm pretty sure she didn't know it had two c's. As for "milksop," I once played a tiny part in "Much Ado," whose best line was "Boys, apes, braggarts, jacks, milksops!"

Great debut!

Very solid Friday — I wait for the day, or to be honest the previous night at 10.

Being a petulant child, I kept trying to put AMERICA in at 41-Down.

This puzzle is a thing of beauty. It has six great new entries, according to xwordinfo. I began to smile when CONEOFSHAME fit the available space, and even more when the center was complete. The northeast was the last to fall, and yes, I'll admit I giggled when I figured out 18-A and 12-DOWN.

A wonderful Saturday puzzle. By chance I ended at the Southwest, not even having looked at its clues earlier, and it fell in just a minute. Where do I claim my NERDCRED?

So there are hotels named W, as I just learned. I got that entry from all the crossings, and then said W_T_F? Having now done my research, I see there's no such hotel within 500 miles of my home.

Nice solid Friday puzzle. I've got to disagree that CURST is suboptimal — a word that appears 24 times in Shakespeare's canon is certainly fine — but, as Sam says, the clue is suboptimal (and that may be due to the editor). "Afflicted à la Shakespeare" would have been spot-on.

What an excellent Friday puzzle!

Solving this puzzle in the town where the movie was filmed, I feel abashed by how long it took me to glom onto the theme.

C## should be C♯♯ Is it impossible to use the correct symbol in the online puzzle?

I called out to my wife as I confidently filled in UPDIKE at 44-Down. We're from Updike's home town of Shillington. I guess the precise wording of the clue should have made it clear that entry was wrong: Updike wrote only briefly "for" the New Yorker, although he appeared frequently "in" it.

As I sometimes do, I started this puzzle by going through all the DOWN clues. Well, I got nothing in that first pass, but it did seem that a lot of the obvious answers were longer than the available space.

"four familiar phrases" I have never encountered the phrase "imagine dragons."

The rebus difficulty was neither "hard" nor "brain tenderizer," but rather "pretty easy to grasp and thereafter straightforward." The only challenge, at my end, is that suddenly on my Mac the keyboard equivalent of the rebus button fails to work. Anyone have an idea how to reset it?

Since we're being superpedantic here today, let me point out that the subject of Sandburg's little poem is not the fog of San Francisco (said to be disappearing) but that of Chicago.