StevenR

A big thank you to Aidan Deshong for building WASPS into his debut puzzle. My mother was in the WASP during WWII, towing targets behind a rickety airplane so anti-aircraft gunners on the ground could get some practice shooting at live targets. The WASPs are all but forgotten today, so seeing them surface in a NYT puzzle was a wonderful surprise. And definitely my favorite entry of the day.

Wow! That's a lovely puzzle. The spanners were the relatively easy bits, once I got a few letters into them and could see where they were headed. The middle, though? .... I fiddled for a long time with the crossing of SUCKS WIND with DECOCT (neither of which is usually in my daily vocabulary), even though I had NOSH and SKYWAYS early on. I had to walk away, refresh the coffee, and take a second (and third) run at things before they made sense. The cross of URIAH and PRO stumped me too, because I had entered wHEW (which seemed obvious at the time) instead of PHEW (which has always meant "That smells to high heaven!" to me). And then there was CEES, crossing CHE. I know zip about Thai cocktails, and it took way too long before I saw the double letter C in [aCCessories] and gave myself a dope slap. Altogether, this was a great, fun puzzle for a Saturday. Lots of clever clues, some challenging word choices, and a good grid. Thank you!

I just skimmed briefly down the comments and am surprised by the number of utterly nasty comments about today's puzzle and about people who -- like me -- thought it was a wonderful puzzle. I liked the concept behind it and found the fill clever and not terribly hard to deduce. A fine job for a Thursday. As Bill the Cat would say to the naysayers, "Thbbft!" The only time I slowed to a crawl was in the far SE corner. My imagination ran away with me for a bit, I'm afraid. I expected the last line of the poem to be A LOT TO DO DIDDY DO, which would have been nice but it truly messed up the crossing entries.

I always enjoy being reminded of Victor BORGE. I saw him in concert in Boston in my teens and still have the playbill squirreled away somewhere. Thank you for that, Mike. I was sailing along pretty well until I got to WIZ KHALIFA, where I had to rely totally on crosses. Thank goodness for Gladys Knight and KALE. PINOLE was no help, sadly, but even it made sense once I got the rest. I guess I have to listen to more rap. This was a good Sunday puzzle with an engaging theme. I have to admit, though, that I didn't really appreciate how well designed it was until I stood back and saw that the greyed boxes followed the scale down - DO TI LA SO FA MI RE DO. Very nicely done.

That was a good puzzle, but I do have to quibble about the notion that quartzite is HARDER than quartz. First of all, quartzite (a rock) is made up of fused quartz (a mineral) grains. It's the same stuff. Second, hardness is a mineral property defined as resistance to scratching. You can't apply to a rock, although you can apply it to separate mineral grains in a rock (in which case, see my first point). Third, you might argue correctly that quartzite is more resistant to breakage than quartz, because the fused, interlocked grains stand up better to crushing. But that property is not called HARDNESS; it's TOUGHNESS. So, [Like quartzite vis-à-vis quartz] is a misleading clue for HARDER. A more interesting pair are diamond and jade. Diamond resists scratching much better than jade (so it's HARDER), but it fractures much more easily than jade (which is extremely TOUGH).

That was a nice challenge. I made it all the way through without looking anything up, but that's partly because I had recently read a short piece about TIM REID and another about the Andes (where Mount Chimborazo is) and I spent 20 years in Iowa (where they do indeed have CORN PITS). It's funny how odd bits of information pop up sometimes. There were some lovely clues. REPRESSED was a good twist, and I smiled at the horizontal stack in the middle of the puzzle. All in all, this is what a Saturday puzzle should be: fun, hard, and well-designed.

I can sympathize with color blind puzzle solvers. Personally, I found the colored rings only mildly annoying. Without the colors, though, many of the clues for words on the rings would have been obscure (as they probably were for those who are color blind). Is there a better way to present a theme like this? I can't think of one offhand. Perhaps the proper way to think about this sort of embellishment is to accept it as another challenge, the way we accept rebuses and other trickery -- pleasing for some and a bane for others. As they say in computing circles, with Pollyanna charm: "It's not a bug; it's a feature." I thought this was fun puzzle, not particularly difficult but well-constructed and timely.

THAT was a nice challenge. I'm glad that I don't solve for time. I had to take several breaks an d work through a 20 ounce mug of coffee before all the pieces came together for me. I thought I was off to a good start with KATE SMITH, Baby YODA, AD ASTRA, and YORICK, but I had an annoying number of partial fills that refused to yield after that. ___BOOTH and ___LIES should have been easy, but who's ever said NAKED LIES or GAME BOOTH? I didn't get either one until I remembered GALBA and JAKOB Ingebritsen. There were some lovely clues in this one ([#2s, e.g.] was my favorite), but I do have to pick a tiny nit with 30D. Anyone who ever said ["Peace, dude!"] is way too old to be saying LATER BRO. The reverse is true too. It's as unlikely as me saying "23 Skiddoo!" to my dad. Some lines just don't translate across generations.

This was a wonderful puzzle. Not easy, but well-constructed and cleverly clued. I can imagine people having some difficulty with a long Chinese entry, but I could say the same thing about entries in German, French, Spanish, or other languages that sneak into our vocabulary (like ROTELLE and KOSHER). They are familiar to some people, but for the rest are a "learning opportunity". In this case, GONGXI FA CAI was fairly easy to get from crosses anyway. And now it's in my vocabulary.

THAT was a wonderful puzzle! After the first couple of passes, I still had only four or five words filled in, and I wasn't too sure about all of them. I refuse to look things up or consult Wordplay until I am truly desperate, so I was poking at things for well over an hour -- with coffee breaks -- before I finally filled in LAMAZE to finish it. (Yes, I did look up to verify IN-N-OUT, which I had never heard of and which struck me as an improbable answer even after I had filled it in.) Aside from LAMAZE, which made me laugh, there were several very clever clues. SEA SERPENTS was absolutely my favorite, but BIKE LANE was a close second. Well worth the price of admission today. What fun!

My wife lived in Shelton Hall at BU for four years when it was still a women's residence hall, so I was familiar with its earlier incarnation as a Sheraton hotel. Because men were never allowed above the first floor in those days, I never saw more than the lobby. By the 1960s, it had lost whatever charm it may have had when Eugene O'Neill lived (and died) there, but the stories were still told. Thanks to Ryan Judge and to Caitlin Lovinger for tickling that memory today.

Absolutely beautiful and challenging! I got off to a roaring start with Sancho PANZA and ECZEMA and thought I was sooooo clever to see PARACHUTE and COS quickly. Even ETHER and STENO POOLS came quickly. And then I hit a brick wall for the longest time More than an hour later, I finally broke the center section of the puzzle apart and sprinted to the end. There were lovely mis-directions and wild clues -- STICKER SHOCK! -- in this one. Bravo!

Strictly speaking, LAVA is most commonly associated with shield volcanoes like the ones in Hawaii, which are not cone-shaped. The cone-shaped ones are generally cinder cones, like Paracutin, in Mexico. They're called cinder cones because they spew cinders and ash rather than lava. Volcanoes like Mt St Helen are stratovolcanoes that can spew both lava and cinders. They can be sort of cone-shaped but are usually not as well-defined as the cinder cones -- which don't erupt lava.

The dead center of this one was the last to fall for me. I wrote DRAGS for 31A and then couldn't let go of it, even after I recognized LOME as the capital on the Gulf of Guinea. I finally admitted defeat and looked for the 1987 hit by Heart, and gave myself a dope slap. This was a lovely challenge. Neither SQUEE not SQUIRCLE is in my wheelhouse, but they made that SE corner fun to solve (thank you, SLR). James Bond's WALTHER PPK had faded into a dark corner of my mind, but dragging it out made the NE corner fun too. All in all, this puzzle was the prize of the week.

This was a fun one. I enjoyed seeing TECUMSEH, although I had to stretch to remember how to spell the name. Knowing the T, though, helped me avoid the ATRA/AFTA trap. On a first pass, my reaction to 62A was, "Oh, a SERIES!" It wasn't until I saw WESSON oil that I realized belatedly that it was a series of NINTHS. When my children were young, we used to play math games, recognizing common patterns like that and less obvious ones like the sevenths. I gave myself a quiet dope slap when I finally saw this one here. I liked seeing the HIGHLAND COW in 17D, but my favorites were mostly in the SW corner. TIL about PEETS, which was new to me, and the clues for LETS DANCE and EL NINO made me smile. All in all, this was a great start for the day. Thanks to Margaret Seikel.

I guess everyone sees different roadblocks. For me, the NW corner was a snap. PITSAWS, ISIS, and STETTED fell right into place. The top center section, though, was a bear for the longest time. I still don't see why RULE is [Kick butt], so I kept disbelieving other nearby entries , even VSOP and VOCE, which were gimmes. As I say, different blind spots for different folks. I had two other odd blind spots, thanks to Mr DiPietro's lovely misdirection. I was sure that [Mark's successor] had to be LUKE and that [ ____ Mix] was CHEX. Since they crossed, it was obvious that I had one of those answers wrong, but it took a while to realize that both were. All in all, this was a fine puzzle. Once I saw the revealer, I figured that the 3- and 5-letter grayed out words had to be RED and GREEN. I didn't understand the rest of the trick right away, though. Very clever. Thank you for a great Thursday.

This was a rare solve-from-the-bottom-to-the-top puzzles for me. On my first pass, the only entries that I was confident about, strangely, were STUPA and PUTTEE. I have no idea where those two have been hiding in my brain. They were enough to open up the SW corner, though. STUPA suggested STUPOR, and the rest of the corner opened up. Whew! I loved TOENAIL SCISSORS (initially CLIPPERS because, hey, who uses scissors?) and RAINING for [Not fair, in a way]. My favorite, though, was GENUS AND SPECIES. What a lovely bit of cluing! Simple and open-ended. I didn't see the right answer until I had both WAFFLE MAKER and MACARONI SALAD and a handful of crosses. It's a good thing that I don't pay attention to my solving time. This was one puzzle I could solve slowly and savor. Thank you.

I didn't read -- or even notice -- the instructions. I just did the puzzle and it worked. I'm a fuddy-duddy, though, so I do the puzzle on a computer except when I'm away from home and am forced to do it on my phone. This was a nice theme, not overly hard for a Thursday but well executed. Thanks.

I loved it! As Deb remarked, it did help that a lot of the clues were easier than usual. That made it fairly easy to see where the strange vertical entries 21D, 23D were probably going, but 53D was a real puzzle. I kept trying rebuses in each of the circled letters but couldn't find ones that made sense. It wasn't until I understood WORMHOLES that I figured out how to fill in the missing letters at the tops of all three. Bingo! This one must have been a bear to construct. Nice job!

I left the NE corner of this one alone at first, because the word ZEDONK isn't usually on the tip of my tongue. It's a fun word, but it didn't drop into the puzzle quickly. Thank goodness for straightforward crosses. Other than that, I thought most of the fills were easier than I usually expect on Thursday, so I only caught onto the theme accidentally when I filled in AT WINDMILLS from crosses. Then I said "Oh!" quietly and smiled. The others, which I hadn't quite filled in yet, suddenly made sense.

This was a fairly straightforward solve for me until I hit the SE corner. The [Mouths that don't talk] was clearly meant to be DELTAS, so I filled that in quickly (despite the fact that a delta is actually the fan of silt at the mouth of a river, not the mouth itself). Being a Minnesotan, though, I knew that the Anishinaabe people here use the spelling OJIBWE, so I lost some confidence in DELTAS and things started to go downhill. It didn't help that I had decided that [Huck's pal] was JIM, that [Popular apple variety] was GALA, and that [Rest stop sights, informally] were VIEWS. However, those possibilities all clashed with each other and with OJIBWE or any other [First Nation people] I could think of that started with O. When I finally sighed and accepted OJIBWA, the corner came together and I got the happy "Congratulations!" screen, but it was an uncomfortable conclusion. Once I finished the puzzle, of course, I Googled a bit and found that OJIBWA (or OJIBWAY) are acceptable alternative spellings, so TIL.

This was a great puzzle. It took me well over an hour and a lot of lateral thinking to ALMOST finish it. I struggled with the NW corner for the longest time and finally Googled to find that CHLOE ZHAO, who was totally unfamiliar to me, was the [Second woman, after Kathryn Bigelow, ...]. My favorite clue was [Fudge substitute], especially since it lead to the lovely historical blurb in Caitlin Lovinger's column. Who knew that "Fudge" was centuries old, or that there was a real Captain Fudge? Live and learn.

I loved this puzzle. It had some wonderful, witty clues. [Number at filling stations?], for example, and [Holders of orbs]. It took me way too long to see that [S&P 500 part] was AMPERSAND, but I had to smile when I finally got it. My favorite was 14D, which was a great bit of misdirection. I tried to fit PELL GRANT in there for the longest time and even considered PLACARDS and PECCADILLO, which both had the wrong number of letters but might have been reasonable otherwise. Maybe, if I stretched. As usual in a good puzzle, I learned something. I have visited the Great Wall three times but had never heard about the salt tax. I'm surprised that any tax survived dynastic changes for two thousand years and that it was even on the books for over 60 years of Communist rule. That's a lot of salt. All in all, this one was a great diversion for a Saturday morning.

Fun puzzle, and not terribly difficult. I got a good laugh from DOTTED I, which was a nice piece of meta-misdirection.

I enjoyed the concept of this one. It was pretty clear to me that the middle was meant to be a potato (especially after I saw that 1D had to be POTATO). The challenge for me was the block of entries in the potato itself. It took a long time for me to get PHIL IVEY, COMATOSE and POETRIES (which I swear is not a real word). I wanted 36D to be OFF KILTER and 39D to be SIGNAL HUT for longer than I care to admit. The key to both, and to resolving the potato clues, was figuring out the long entries CHINESE YUAN and INTERCHANGEABLE.

I don't know why it took me so long to recognize that GERALD was the 70's Ford. Duh. That was the last one to fall in place, even after running through the alphabet a couple of times. On the other hand, the middle part of this one opened pretty quickly for me once COMFY shoes and Seiji OZAWA suggested WARM FUZZIES across both of them. NAZCA LINES helped too (although I'm not sure where that one was lurking in my brain). It's lovely when entries fit together like that. Favorite clues? "Get a running mate?" for ELOPE and "Box in a cab" for CB RADIO. Both made me smile. This puzzle took me a while, but I enjoyed it all the way.

I've only just scanned through some of the comments here and see that a few other people caught the cluing error about AVE. Latin is rarely taught in high school these days, as it was when I was young. [Cue the old fogey sigh here.] Still, the editors should have caught that one. As nits go, though, that's a truly tiny one to pick in an otherwise fun and engaging puzzle. I thought I saw the theme as soon as I saw the Marks, then went on a wild goose chase for other kinds of punctuation (COMMAS? PERIODS?). CUTOFFJEANS and LONGJOHNS cured me of that idea. The rest were easy, if not quite a romp. It was a clever theme. Thank you and good luck at Princeton.

I loved this one, as I love most Thursday puzzles. Well, OKRAS was a bit of a stretch and SUI and ZOE SALDANA had me hoping for good cross entries because I couldn't recall either one. Oh yes, and I had PRIME instead of PRIMO for way too long. That made the SE corner tougher than it should have been. Still, Cab Calloway's ZOOT suit and BASIL on the pizza were more than enough to make up for the hard spots. I thought the rebus-driven theme was clever but easy to figure out, especially given IKEA and MINOR THIRD to lead the way. For me, I had more fun with the misdirection in the clues. There were some wonderful ones in this puzzle.

X-rays were discovered in 1895 and almost immediately used for medical imaging. It was soon apparent that the radiation caused tissue damage, but it was not generally seen as a serious risk. The benefits for diagnostic imaging were much more obvious. Putting X-ray machines in shoe stores, in hindsight, was a truly stupid idea. Sadly, even though the FDA was established in 1906, it didn't get authority to regulate such things until decades later. Some shoe store x-ray machines were still in use until the 1950s. I remember hearing all of this in college in the 1960s, but it has long faded from general knowledge. Thanks to Josh Goodman and the NYT team for highlighting it in today's puzzle.

Fun puzzle! It didn't occur to me until after I had filled in the rebus to create ELLIE and STEELIE that the rebuses were all supposed to overLIE a blank space and explain the dash after it. I'm a little slow. It's a good thing I finally saw the trick, though, because I was not familiar with KYLIE and wouldn't have seen it as quickly as STEELIE and ELLIE. I'm pleased to see that Ms. Cohen found a way to use OH POOH, which is one of my milder ways of saying "Darn it!" It's good to see that it fits in someone else's vocabulary too.

This was fun and surprisingly easy. For some reason, ABDUL, BRAKE, and FAVES fell into place early for me, and then DAV... made me think of my late brother DAVID and it was off to the races. DAVID COPPERFIELD opened up the theme and led me to LES MISERABLES. I remember slogging through some of ATLAS SHRUGGED in my 20s but giving up on Ayn Rand's style. Anyway (TL;DR), for a change the long answers helped me find many of the -- to me -- obscure crosses, rather than the other way around. It was an odd surprise.

Wow! This one was lovely. I can only imagine the challenge it was to construct. Solving it, by comparison, was a snap. The only clue that gave me trouble was 104A, which I wrote as JAM and didn't catch until I got the Uh-Oh message and poked through the whole puzzle to find that it should have been DAM. (Damn. I still think JAM was a better answer, but then the lock wouldn't have worked.)

The Taylor Swift song title, the Jeopardy references, and UTZ potato chips not withstanding, I enjoyed today's puzzle. I find a puzzle that contains a lot of unfamiliar words more challenging (and fun) than one where the clues and answers are all old friends. I refuse to do a Google search unless my back is to the wall, so I pray for good crosses when the going gets tough. This one forced me to wander outside my comfort zone and kept me busy for a full hour.

The clues in this one were worth the price of admission. I loved the pair in 10D and 40A (although I agree with David that I would never think of flipping a turkey in the oven -- too risky for my taste). The clues in the SE corner were very clever too. My favorite, though, was 29A. I was sure that LITMUS TEST was a gimme, but RPGS in 22D killed that idea. SWING STATE was much nicer, and in tune with SIENA at this point in the political season. All in all, it was an easy, fun puzzle.

Yup, that NW corner was the last to fall for me too, despite knowing about STARS ON ICE (my wife has been a skating coach for decades). Even the cross at KOREA -- an almost gimme -- wasn't enough, so I stewed over the corner for quite a while before BUCKET LIST dawned on me. I'm always surprised by the arcane answers that my mind dredges up as I tackle a puzzle like this one. NEZ PERCE and THESEUS were today's. Don't ask me where they've been hiding or why they popped up so easily. The NW corner would have been easier if COREYS and ALMA had done it too. Still, speed solving isn't my goal. I can afford to be patient and wait for those slower answers to rise out of the fog. If I can finish without looking anything up, my day is complete.

Mad Magazine's classic 43-Man Squamish -- a gleefully incomprehensible game -- was introduced to readers in 1965. It hadn't occurred to me until today that it might have been inspired by Bladderball. That's either a heck of a coincidence or spooky parallel evolution. This was a fun puzzle with clever clues. Thanks.

Like others, the SW corner gave me the most trouble. WHOOPIE CUSHION was easy enough, but for some reason my brain wanted 1D to be CARE TO ELUCIDATE and it wouldn't let go. It didn't help that ELUCIDATE and ELABORATE are the same length and both end in ATE. Further confusing things, 54A really should be NO END, not ON END (which means something entirely different). It finally dawned on me that a wood louse is an ISOPOD, and that you might indeed put cameos in a TIARA. I gave myself a dope slap and got rid of ELUCIDATE. All in all, it's a fine puzzle with some clever clues.