NotMyRealName
Delaware
BEST PUZZLE EVER The grid art, even the mushrooms! The colors! The rebuses! The near-Weintraubian fun fun clues! The lack of junk fill! HOW could it have taken months to get accepted? I feel so… full.
What a fun, fun puzzle!
Swing and a miss on this one. Seeding the puzzle with ten unchecked letters just makes it a sort of Super-Natick and more chore than fun for the solver. I miss Will.
If usage is even important when a word is not generally used: we don’t normally “have the APLOMB to do so.” We do so “with APLOMB.”
My kvetch is using a literal translation as a clue for ON TOE. That’s Dell-level clueing, not NYT.
RENEE, arghhh! All I could see was IRENE!
@NMarie I agree completely. If the closest you can get to your construction goal is to change its spelling, and you find you can also do that with other similar words, does that make a theme for the solver or just a fun exercise for the constructor? It didn’t feel fun to solve.
Tripped me up with Hecate as I went for the snakes and ignored the torches, filling in Athena- really made a mess in that part of the puzzle for awhile. Got me! This one was an interesting mix of clever, fun, difficult areas and areas that were difficult just because of the huge amount of glue to slog through. Not one of my favorite BEQs.
@Teresa the constructors are women, and young, but Will Shortz isn’t, and he should have sent an offensive term like “Babe” back to the 1950s where it belongs.
Also, the mark itself is called an interrobang.
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