Sandy

@Helen Wright Somerset, Massachusetts, is my assumption as a former American and acquainted with their curious form of provincialism. Massachusetts would be Eastern, so Eastern Daylight Time. (Glad the flights finally worked out, that seems like it was a terribly huge hassle!)

@K Barrett Here is my two-part theory. One: crosswords are more about knowing the constructor than knowing wordplay. Two: crosswords are, objectively, always about the same difficulty. That is, if you compared a crossword from 1980 to 1990 to 2000 to 2025 you would find that they require about the same knowledge of current events, about the same knowledge of pop culture, etc. If you keep doing one publication's XW, it's going to get disproportionately easier because 1. you learn their quirks (the NYT has put more OREOs into more different types of food than an unsupervised toddler) and 2. you learn what would otherwise be inaccessible pop culture/historical. I don't listen to DUA LIPA or play FORTNITE, but I know that the Gray Lady does. On a good Monday I can finish in under 3 minutes. This is not because I am smart (I am not smart). Spelling Bee takes me forever, if I do it, but I am almost positive that's because I don't play it very often. That, in turn, means I haven't built up my knowledge of what bizarre words the constructor thinks are valid, and which ones they don't, and I get frustrated as a result :P It could also be that the clues have trends, and we're in (e.g.) a period where more of them are about football teams or poetic contractions or something that you happen to be more familiar with, and they will become harder when the next "actors from TV shows you haven't seen" cycle hits.

@SBK To the extent that the gong predates "The Gong Show," it still probably postdates Vaudeville, I think. That show borrowed it as a convention from Major Bowes, whose "Original Amateur Hour" debuted on WHN in New York City around April, 1934. In an interview in 1935, Bowes said that he created it because he had an hour to fill, and used the gong because the stereotypical hook was, of course, a visual gag that didn't work on radio. I, also, can't find examples of gongs being used for that purpose on stage so, if it happened, it was at least rare. I assume the primary reason Bowes went with it was that he found the dramatic sound funny in the context of a talent show, although as a verb "gong" meaning "to stop" from the use of bells by the traffic police to signal drivers to halt also emerged in the 1930s. (And of course for a good half-century before that it was familiar in ending sports bouts)

@Eric Hougland Hm! I guess it depends on how you define amorous. To me, it implies sexual desire—the OED says "feeling or expressing love (now esp. sexual love or desire)" and the built-in dictionary on my computer, at least, also makes that explicit, so to speak: "showing, feeling, or relating to sexual desire." Someone who is aromantic, though, certainly might experience amorous attraction or desire (i.e. a hookup, or a no-strings attached friendship). "Someone unlikely to fall in love, informally" would be more accurate, at least in my opinion. I'm neither aromantic nor asexual, myself, but I have aromantic friends and they certainly experience amorous attraction.

@Grant I think it might just make us old ;) Actually, to expand on my first comment: it occurred to me that I sound like I'm nitpicking, and it's really only that it happened twice in such short succession that caught my attention. Imagine the clue was “Cab-caller, informally?" and you thought "oh okay, not 'oenophile' but maybe 'wine snob'?" but it turned out to be FOODIE. And then two days later they clued FOODIE with "One who really dreads the dregs, informally" and you kind of went: "wait, *does* the Times think those are the same thing?" even though some foodies probably *are* wine snobs, and vice-versa. (When the reality is that it's just the time for a slightly unusual word to Baader-Meinhof its way into crossword rotation, like "BTU")