Kevin

This is definitely a legit Saturday puzzle, the kind where you think that there is no hope at the outset, scramble for a foothold, and wrestle your way to the happy music with persistence and some opportune guesses (after abandoning some bad ones). Paired with yesterday’s surprisingly chewy puzzle, this is shaping up to be the toughest weekend of the year for me. Let’s see what Sunday has in store…

This completes my first perfect calendar year! I started doing the NYT crossword with a few friends at lunchtime in high school back in the 1970s when Eugene T Maleska was the editor. Kids, in the olden days the crossword didn’t gradually get harder throughout the week (that was one of the best later innovations by Will Shortz), so you never knew what you were going to get. And you had to wait until the next day to check your work (no happy music). Throughout my working career, I would do the puzzle with small groups of colleagues. I am a social solver who really enjoys the interaction and conversation that crossword solving elicits. Now that I am retired it’s just me and my wife doing the puzzle together every evening. Of course we do Wordle, Spelling Bee, Connections, and Strands too. Many thanks to the New York Times for providing a lifetime of thoughtful entertainment, may the new year bring every solver many tasty chewy aha moments!