Speede

If I am not mistaken Deb not only pefected the genre, she invented it. Who'd a thunk that meta talk about crossword puzzles could attract more than a couple of geek readers, much less that it could hold their attention for 15 years? For a long time, she did single-handedly what is now handled by a team, without going stale or lapsing into fanspeak. Brava and ciao!

The lagniappe at the end of the tunnel was the constructor notes. Extraordinary persistence in construction yields extraordinary satisfaction in solving!

I got the theme quite quickly and put rebuses in the theme squares, only to be told by "check puzzle" that all ten were wrong. The official answers are usually quite tolerant of variants in rebuses that must be read differently across and down. But not today.

I spotted another pattern that didn't quite work out. Two-by-two squares in the theme words spell out MAKE and MINE as in "make mine vermouth" or "make mine sake". But the third such square, which I expected to fill out the phrase, say, to "Mike, make mine verrmouth" unfortunately reads MMOE.

Erie, PA, being closer than CLeveland to the outlet of Lake Erie, is down the lake, not up, from Cleveland. Fortunately, I've seen this mistaken clue before, so I checked the crossings before deciding whether to enter Toledo, a better answer. If the direction on a north-up map ruled, one would say Quebec is up the St. Lawrence River from Montreal. which it manifestly is not.

I was just congratulated for solving a Friday puzzle five Thursdays in a row. Not so; I solved at least one of them on a Friday. Will this longstanding bug ever get fixed?

_XI_ led straight to the EXIT, so I didn't get to wrestle with the much harder clues for the other two letters. I would like to believe that personal best times on both Saturday and Sunday are a sign of expertise, but that opinion is belied by the fact that "alternative to truth" baffles me. Please, somebody, explain it.