Joe

@Jim Casey This gripe doesn’t make any sense to me. You didn’t like the puzzle because you didn’t know some of the answers? But you also didn’t like the puzzle because you did know some answers? I wonder if you just don’t like crossword puzzles.

@Sheila This was the Monday puzzle. Each day’s puzzle releases the night before. You can still go back and do the Sunday.

@Mean Old Lady The name of the country is Ukraine. It is Soviet propaganda to call it “the Ukraine” as if it is just a region, not a nation. You don’t say “the France” or “the Russia,” do you?

@Kristopher “We can do better”? Can you, though? Really?

@John Depends on your vocabulary, I’d say. “Ennead” is not a proper noun and could easily be deduced from the crosses, even if you somehow have no knowledge of The Brady Bunch.

@Dan Luckily for you, then, the answer was TAPIN, not TiPIN. Think golf, not basketball.

@Lewis This comment really increased my appreciation for the puzzle. And just to save anyone else a lookup, a “semordnilap” is a word that spells another word when read in reverse. It’s actually “palindromes” backwards.

@Joe Looks like I was wrong about chortle. The modern definition doesn’t have anything to do with snorting, but the word was actually coined by Lewis Carroll in “Through the Looking Glass.” He may have been combining snort + chuckle after all.

@SP I’ve definitely encountered ARCH with that definition in books. Imagine hundreds of pieces of paper, all bound together, that contained many different words, some less common than others. These “book” were how we used to improve our vocabularies back in the day.

@Jack McCullough What a strange coincidence your comment is! I was just at the “Lost in New Haven” museum last night, where they had a US Rubber Company display, complete with and authentic stuffed Nauga! For those not in the know, Naugahyde is a synthetic fabric invented in Naugatuck, CT.

@Prose Agreed. At least a note telling us that it’s broken on iOS.

@Beldegraded Nah, you’re misunderstanding both phrases, at least how they’re used here. Both are said when encountering a frustrating or annoying situation.

@Francis You made me curious, so I had to look it up. Pretty interesting: <a href="https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bye,_Felicia" target="_blank">https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bye,_Felicia</a>

@Joe Just realized I should have said “this was a *treat* for me.” Can’t believe I squandered that opportunity.

@Phil Nah, you’re conflating two common phrases: “golden oldie” and “an oldie but a goodie.”

@Conscious Human Even as a cold, emotionless man, I found it difficult not to be annoyed by that one.

@Puzzlemucker Overlays are turned on for me, yet no circles appear. Maybe on iPad it’s working, but definitely not on my (fully updated) iPhone.

@Andrew Regan It helps to remember that they are crossword clues, not dictionary definitions.

@Steve L I didn’t feel too tough, but my time ended up being way higher than my recent average. Nice change of pace.

@Francis Nah. There are plenty of publications with easy crosswords every day of the week. The NYT used to be the place to go for a challenge.11:37 with no lookups here, btw, and I’m half-asleep and wasn’t even trying particularly hard. Fun puzzle, but this drift towards pleasing the lowest common denominator is very disappointing.

@K P Please explain how it is “lazy.” It seems to me that it would take quite a bit of effort to create a puzzle like this. Are you sure it’s not just sour grapes? And, by the way, the revealer did indicate that there was something special about four of the squares.

@Barry Ancona I don’t know the name of a single Alp, but usually you can just stick ALP anywhere that looks like a mountain reference.

@Jeff Z They are undeniably much, much easier than they were in the past, this week especially so. Unfortunately, the easier they are, the more attractive they seem to be to the subscriber base, so I doubt we’re ever going back. The Games section basically subsidizes the rest of the paper at this point.

@Ron Myst sold over 6 million copies and held the record for the highest-selling PC game for almost a decade. It was responsible for popularizing PC gaming and introducing the hobby to many newcomers. Just because you are not familiar with something does not make it “obscure.”

@Rich in Atlanta Those are old fashioned emoticons, which we used before smartphones popularized emojis. It’s like a face rotated 90 degrees. In your examples, you can see Lincoln’s hat and beard and Mickey’s ears. Pretty interesting that the NYT ran that theme before most people had Internet access.

@Paul Turner Forever. I once left the app open overnight and scored a good 8 or 9 hours. At least my Tuesday times will be below my average for a long time.

@Zack The argument that TARDIS and Uhura first appeared in the ‘90s is dishonest at best. Both are featured in current shows this year. If anything, the argument could be made that these entries are especially suitable for Monday, since they span generations.

@Steve L I noticed the same thing when I had the flu. My solve times increased by over 50% during that week or so. The weird part was that it didn’t actually feel like I was going slow while I was solving them.

@Barry Ancona Also, remember that this is a puzzle, it a trivia contest. There are tricks you can use to figure out a name you don’t know. In this case, you should gather from the revealer that the highlighted names have the initials “DB.” There are only so many first names that start with D. Then, when you have a series of letters like “DA—-B———,” you can probably guess that the first name is DANNY. Don’t just throw in the towel when you encounter some unknown trivia. Usually a little logic and some guesswork can get you there.

@Teresa From what I can gather, in this comment section “trivia” is defined as “question I don’t know the answer to.”