LordBottletop

One thing I love more than reading comments from the anti-rebus sect is reading the chorus of replies amounting to one big STFU. Rebuses have been around since the cave paintings of Lascaux and the tombs of the pharaohs. And these were clearly signaled. So lighten up and deal with it. Now I think I’ll buy myself a MOLESKINe notebook, and never ever write a word in it. Only rebuses. Nice 8-bit mallet, by the way. Can’t touch this.

Great to see a shout-out to Eugene T. Maleska. An old college roommate and I submitted a puzzle to the Times in 1977 when he was the editor. We devised a patriotic theme, as we'd calculated that the Sunday paper on July 3rd would carry a diagramless. Mr. Maleska wrote us back, suggesting some changes, and we re-submitted, but were ultimately rejected. I didn't feel so bad when I read an interview in which he said that he'd submitted something like eight or nine puzzles to the NYT before one was accepted. Years later, I'd heard he could be a little harsh, but his rejection letter to us was supportive and encouraging, telling us that as novice constructors, he thought we showed talent. I still have the typewritten correspondence, and the puzzle as we'd constructed it.

I thought this was a wonderfully creative puzzle, but at least from the first few comments, I gather there's a lot of frustration. I'm not sure why so many commenters get their knickers in a twist about this stuff. Anyone in the least familiar with the Indianapolis 500 (and I probably qualify as "least familiar", never having paid it much attention and never having watched any of the race) knows that "Gentlemen, start your engines" is part of the lore. Everything these days seems to be a hot button for some people to gripe about, but this is just cultural literacy, as much as the meaning of a "No Vacancy" sign at a motel, although I haven't seen one of those in a while. The point is that once you realize that there's something going on with the first row entries (and duh, the circled letters, people), and the unclued down entries (hey, they also begin with circled letters), it's simply a matter of working through the grid until your Aha! moment arrives. And trust me, it does. I just stumbled along until it did. If it makes you feel better, scream your head off about it. But it didn't make me wonder why I enjoyed this puzzle. Great job, Kareem!

What a ride! I loved it. There's A LOT TO UNPACK in this puzzle, so I'll try to mansplain how I did it. Glad I'd manread Rebeca Solnit's book, because it allowed me to get FLUTESOLO on the crosses without even checking. There were other wonderful, millenial-speak long (8+ letter) entries, including QUIET QUITTING (Guilty) and IS THAT A THING, but Ms. Stevenson still managed to throw us boomers a bone or three with BATARANG and DISCO BALL, and as soon as I read "Traveling Wilburys", made super by the mere--apologies to any other Wilburys, living or deceased--presence of Roy Orbison, I knew it was SUPERGROUP. The cluing for TARANTULA was a scream, as my first association with fuzzy was wuzzy, and I was, like @sotto voce, looking for something cuddly. I shared a house with a Pharmacology PhD student who kept one, and I remember how fascinating it was to watch Mr. T spinning its silk. The cluing for ALL AT ONCE threw me, as "suddenly" seemed to make better sense, but it's Friday, Jake. Expect the unexpected. Loved "One-sided dice", as it's literally what "SNAKE EYES" are. I mean figuratively. I could quibble about HIERARCHAL, but I'll leave that to the Carperazzi to complain. Hadn't heard a scuba tank & regulator called am AQUALUNG since Lloyd Bridges in "Sea Hunt". (boomer ref.) Honestly, there's no better feeling that rallying back from cruciverbal despair, almost-but-not-quite ready to hit the Google button, and finishing with a flourish. Fun way to start the weekend!

I've never remarked on the accompanying photo, but today's picture (although its connection with the today's puzzle seems tenuous at best) reminds me that yesterday was the 49th Vogalonga in Venice, an event involving 2,000 boats and 7,000 rowers. Rowers, not motors. The Vogalonga started as a protest against the predominance of motorized boats, whose wakes weaken the foundations of Venice's buildings. The event has been credited with reviving the interest in Voga alla Veneta, the Venetian style of rowing, in which the oarsmen stand in a keel-less boat, the oar cradled (but not fixed) in a beautifully carved black walnut forcola. I kayaked the 40th Vogalonga in 2014, and have never experienced such a thrill as returning to the city amid cheers from the thousands of tourists lining the canals and watching from the bridges, and rowed the 45th Vogalonga in a Venetian sandolo with the Venetian guys who taught me how to row in the intervening years. I hope to participate in the 50th edition next year. The motoscafi, as pretty and well-maintained as they are, can't match the elegance of Venetian rowing craft, including the gondola, sandolo, mascareta, caorlina, and other variants, as they glide soundlessly along the canals.

Deb: I started reading your Wordplay about three years ago, and it was evident from the beginning that you were having great fun writing these columns. If you weren't, you were awfully good at making it look that way. I hope you enjoy retirement as much as I do--it's pretty easy when you start your day with coffee and a crossword. Happy trails!

Dear Mansi Kothari, Great puzzle! I, too, started doing the Times puzzles in high school, over 50 years ago. I'd take over the Sunday puzzles after my father and mother had had a shot at it, and before too long, I was finishing them. I started today's puzzle earlier than usual, because a friend shot me a 3-letter text around 6:45 AM, simply "46D". We share the belief that BRA(S) has never been clued the same way twice, although we're probably wrong. The texting friend and I actually co-authored a diagramless during our college years, in the pre-Will Shortz days, when Eugene T. Maleska was the editor. He never ran it, but his correspondence was encouraging. I still have his letter. I heard he could be quite brutal in his critiques, but his kindness made me think I should have persisted as a constructor. Shoulda, Woulda, Coulda. (insert smiley emoji with tears) Congratulations again!

I got hung up on DQED, and I don't know TLDR from a hole in the ground, so suffered with MIASMIC on the crossing until that didn't look right and PRIGS came to the rescue and MYALGIC coalesced. Then I got jammed in the southwest. REDOS and MARTINI came easily enough, but I confused MIR with MER and thought AYE was ARE or ARM. Nice to see the SINATRA name skirting the booze-soaked theme entries. I sure could used a drink.

A brilliant, really cracking debut! While the northeast corner was tough (the clue for 3D might have specified beer rather than beverage, but I get it, Jake, it's Fridaytown), as the long entries DEADTREEEDDITION and ANHEIRANDASPARE took shape, both 2D and 3D could be worked out with the other crossings. PETPSYCHIC was fabulous. And Syd BARRETT has been on my mind lately because I'm somewhere around episode 157 of Andrew Hickey's marathon podcast A History of Rock in 500 songs, which just covered the birth of Pink Floyd, and the particular sadness of Barrett's disapperance from public life at age 26 after leaving the band. Indications are that he was quite a bit along the Asperger's-Autistic spectrum, and the self-medication and heavy experimentation with psychedelics certainly wasn't helpful in his case. And the double stacked GASSTATIONSUSHI, combined with THISISANOUTRAGE, was just genius. Eli Cotham, I think you have a bright future. You're a natural, not to detract from the hard work that goes into these efforts. Proper respect to you sir!

I love a challenge and a chuckle. Today's puzzle took me about 50% longer than the average Tuesday, but made up for it with the delightfully absurd fill on the long entries. Thanks for the good cheer, Howard Neuthaler, and I hope to see more of your work soon.

It took me awhile to work out the theme, as I interpreted “Er…In Other Words", to mean the ERs had been inserted into other words or phrases, but SUPDUP for “Great ape?” had me scratching my head. I forged on, and by the time I hit the lower half of the puzzle, it started to click that the ER wasn’t an insertion but absolutely integral to the phrase and more importantly, to the clue. So thank you for the challenge, Mr. Kugelman! I would have voted your 7/30/23 Sunday crossword as puzzle of the year had I known how to vote—spoonerisms are always welcome, but the rioutously twisted clues made me laugh out loud like no other puzzle in recent memory.

Nice puzzle, Freddie. I focus on speed-solving early in the week, so I often don't get the theme until after it's all over. Today, none of the long entries came immediately, but with a few crosses and solid, straight-up clueing, they popped into place and I continued on my merry way until the end, when I finally looked back. Thanks for ELLA, ETTA, and DINAH, all favorites. I have no idea why or when or where I would have seen "Gojira Tai MECHAGojira", but I did, and I loved the title so much I used to walk around growling the words in what I imagined was a Japanese accent. I used to clean think tanks for a living when I was a teenager. It was mostly just sweeping up the ideas that were thrown against the wall and didn't stick. It paid a little bit more than mowing lawns.

That was a VERY fun "I was like whaaaat?" puzzle. I usually just glance at the the revealer, but in today's case I really had to go back and read it closely. ORC, OVERT, EVE, RAM, PAS, etc., made no sense as answers to their given clues in any way, shape or form, until the light bulb went off and 5D "Choreograph" ORC was simply the first three letters of ORCHESTRATE. Then, checking downwards, the rest of the word seemed to be there albeit in other entries, except... the DARK spaces! And sure enough, it was behind the black curtain that I found the HORSES of the revealer entries. Of course the macguffin was that it was only the first clue of these hidden key entries that yielded a misleading answer. Well played indeed, Hanh Huynh! And how delightful that the puzzle editors have brought in the master ORCHESTRAT(OR) of the Knives Out detective series with favorite-Bond-ever Daniel Craig as the molasses-mouthed, silver-tongue brilliant-detective Benoit Blanc. Today's puzzle & accompanying column left just the right amount of clues to make me feel like I should have been a private eye.

Thank you, Margaret Seikel, and I hope we see more weekend puzzles from you. This was a perfect Saturday puzzle: a challenging struggle resolved to a satisfying triumph. The northeast corner was the last piece to fall into place. A Monday Moe would have been a stooge. A Thursday Moe might have been Spy/Catcher Berg. I knew the names of most of the Velvets like Lou Reed, John Cale, and Nico, but not their drummer, and took a chance that it might have been Mae. But then I just kept trying to make sense of what a "stanthany" could be, pronouncing it in my mind, thinking that it might be a name for a string one ties around one's finger in order not to forget something, but how was that possibly an intercessor? It's those fanciful ruminations and logical eddies that make Saturday puzzles such fun.

I love the point when my attitude changes from "I can't solve this without a look-up" to "It's doable on the crosses" and things start clicking in. EYESOCKETS, MORTUARIES, NOVOCAINE, and STRESSATE all went well with my coffee. A mordantly satisfying Saturday puzzle.

Been off the mark the last couple of weeks, timewise, but this was a snappy grid and I got my groove back. All of the down entries of 10 letters solved without crosses. COMMITTOTHEBIT was fun. Had no idea and had to work most of it from the crosses. I had CREEPYCRAWLERS because I thought of the 1964 bug-manufacturing toy from Mattel, and I needed ENOKI and BANNERYEAR to set me straight. 14 days short of 11,111 digital NYT puzzles solved. The math doesn't quite add up, because I think there were 3 "digitally unsolvable puzzles" that we were given credit for, but then solved them anyway (with hints) and were given double credit. Sorry to be missing the fun in Stamford, but the live sessions were booked as of last month. Maybe next year.

I'm sick for the first time in over 2 years, with low energy and congestion. This took a long while, and even when I thought I had it finished there were three rebuses that I hadn't done, so it took 5 more minutes before I heard the music, without a lookup. Really good puzzle, very imaginitive, and everything fit together so nicely, and in myriad ways. OK, back to bed.

Fun theme from a debut constructor who I hope we hear more from, and it kept me off-balance the whole way, like a good Thursday should. A few of the titles were unfamiliar, but easy enought to suss out and come up with a plausibly bent genre. I'd dithered about that Dave Stieb vs. Steib for awhile, and had RELIEVER as BELIEVER, someone whose viewpoint had been changed after listening to a long explanation, but then I remembered that nobody changes their mind anymore about anything.

Congratulations, Mr. Zheng! A pleasing start to '24, in which I promise to do more. The root of incur comes from the French verb "courire", to run, and has a number of forms which at times have carried mostly negative connotations, including "recur" and "occur", as if to suggest that nothing good can come of running. So I'll cross "running" off my list of resolutions right now.

All rise, Mr. Judge! That was one challenging puzzle. I had bits, not even pieces, early on in the corners (like TOT was gonna break open the Northwest, sure). I thought I couldn't finish without Googling, but then things ever so slowly fell into place. The DRMARTENS was a flash, and I knew that to be the official name. In the Southeast corner, I kept wanting to end 59A with RINKS, but but then ICE wouldn't fit, and 44D "John and Paul" stymied me. I still don't know who John Bunyan is, but whatev. I lived in MORocco, which also uses the dirham, for 8 years, so I was mentally blocking on UAE, and likewise had DUH and not DOH, IOTAS and not MOTES, ASTA and not TOTO. All self-sabotaging assumptions. So thanks for the tough love. I was aiming for 12 minutes, but came in just under 20. Consider me chastised.

Ni Hao, everyone, and Gong Xi Fa Cai! The first greeting was the only phrase I know in Mandarin. But not only was I able to solve this puzzle, I lalso learned a wonderful new phrase. Can't wait to use it! I thought AREAS as Pentagon figures had something to do with Roswell and Area 51, but I can almost smell a bad fit, so thanks for clarifying what should have been obvious to me, Caitlin. TAURINE was a lucky guess, but I knew it couldn't be TAURIC, TAURARCHIC, or TAURARCHICAL. ;-) Cluless on ARYA, ELOTE, SHEPARD, MEGACON, and of course the New Year's greeeting, but managed to finish in about half my Saturday average time. Try using the crossing clues to solve what isn't immediately obvious. Or just be a kvetchpot.

All the hue and cry over ICERAIN. My wife is not a native speaker of English, and she'll use terms like that. It may take me a second or two to get what she means, but the notion that language is descriptive rather than prescriptive is more appealing. I thought this grid was a little too easy for a Friday. It took a little less time than Wednesday's and Thursday's puzzles, and just a bit longer than Monday's and Tuesday's, so it's been an oddly flat week like that. That said, of course, I have a feeling I'll be gobsmacked by Saturday's puzzle.

That was the wildest, wackiest, wonderfulest puzzle in a good while. I could halfway (or maybe 2/3 of the way) get the theme, but the kicker was the 3/4 of the way round the rotary (I think that's what we called them growing up in Jersey) entries that continued upward. I'd be worried that another train might be coming in the opposite direction, but had a big smile on my face when it all fell into place. Hope to see more of these ingenious constructions from the Schlossbergs in the future.

Loved the theme, and the rules/not rules in Deb’s column. My only gripe with rebuses, especially ones that require different combos for the crossings, is that I’m never quite sure what’s an acceptable fill, and so I’ll often lose time overthinking it. In this case, I knew the downs were the reverse of the acrosses in this grid, and the standard is Across Fill/Down Fill, but I just entered IE in each of the 8 squares, and plowed my way through like a bull in a china shop. The answer gods apparently accepted a fairly wide variety of answers, so I kept my time well under Thursday’s average. Thankful for these small mercies.

Congratulations, Warringtons, on a wonderful Saturday puzzle. I wondered if the father-daughter dynamic gave rise to some generational one-upsmanship, in which Grace drew upon her SocMed savvy and Swift-boated the old man with ERAS, whereupon Greg played the Dad card by reciting a line from the Music Man referring to obsolete containers: "Gone with the HOGSHEAD cask and demijohn, gone with the sugar barrel, pickle barrel, milk pan, gone with the tub and the pail and the tierce.” But Grace threw down the gauntlet and used her gaming experience to win the BOSSBATTLE Royale! Clever clueing on ANDY. At first, I’m like AN and DY? Duh!

RAPANUI, baby! Sorry, I just had to get that out of my system. I LOVE and RESPECT Allison Janney, but have never watched a single episode of The West Wing--maybe I'll start bingeing it with my valentine. Once RAPANUI was in place, as rock-solid as the Moai in its verticality, I could start hanging the gimmes from it: CRONE, CPR, RAIN, ENSUITE, and GIS. Then LOWRISES became apparent after discarding LOFT as a partial entry. And then CJCREGG. And so I was able to guess GUESSER, which somehow made LADYFERN an obvious choice, even if I've never seen nor heard of it. As Yogi Berra said, "I don't know half the words I know." Was it just me, or did anyone else start to puzzle out the "E" love letters in the Robert Indiana LOVE arrangement as S-E-R-P-E-N-T? Just me? Alrighty then....how embarassing.

Loved this puzzle from the get-go, and when I found out the constructors were mother and daughter, it got even better. And from Westfield, no less, one of the loveliest places of my youth, where we'd often visit old friends of my parents. I was happily off-balance for most of today's solve, and the image of a mother (or mother-in-law) in high heels, embedded in a freshly mowed lawn was an absolute delight. I attended a family wedding last month in the Berkshires on a rainy Saturday evening at the bride's father's home, with 150 of us moving under the tent to attend the ceremony and avoid the downpour. By the end of the evening, we were all happily drenched.

Nathan, you nailed it! What a debut! Fun puzzle with a lot of pizzazz. “Argue about Coke vs. Pepsi all you want, I prefer R.C. myself”: SODASPEAK (cross with Papa or Koala)

Superb puzzle, S.A. Donaldson. When the game is afoot, I tend to be a SPEEDDEMON--uh, wait, that’s in Caitlin Reid’s New Yorker puzzle today—so I didn’t pick up on the adjacent opposites until Deb schooled me. It would have been enough to flip the verbs and prepositions in those 8 expressions, but it was doubly clever of you to match the opposites as you did, and spell it out in the revealer to boot. Needed to solve for LIN and SMH on the crosses. Mobile APP felt right, but I was fixated on the Iditarod when I read “Lead dogs” and was looking for ATEAMS or ALISTS instead of ALPHAS. No idea where (or in what act) Lear talked about wind chap, but HEATH made sense. Thanks again for a fun puzzle!

Tough cross for me between PLUOT and TOADETTE, as video games are above my pay grade, so I had to go through the alphabet before hitting on the letter O. I know the trend for hybrid fruit nomenclature has been to borrow parts of the names of the hybridized fruit (in this case, plum and apricot), but PLUOT is an awful name, and sounds like something splattered on a sidewalk. I’d rather eat a plutocrat. Can we fancy-mangle the names and call it an aprésplomb? Otherwise, a smart, crisp, Saturday puzzle. I hope to attend my first A.C.P.T. this April and meet some of my heroes there.

I was in a hurry to de-Christmasize after 12th night, so the relative ease of this Saturday entry was a delight, compared to Friday's beast. I especially loved the spanners--I'm not a born southerner, and "that dog ain't" sounded fine to my ears, until I realized that doctors are the kind of people who still use pagers, so "ain't" became "don't". Dang. And I'm guessing BOKEH was a first? Well, Okeh.

The Elvis entry was a snap. Don’t be Cruel/HOUNDDOG on the RCA label was the first 45 RPM record that my parents bought. My brother and I, three and two years old respectively, would apparently jump up and down when it was played on the radio. During my early teenage years, when I went through my anti-Elvis and destructive phases, I taped a firecracker to the record, lit the fuse, flung the disk, and watched as it WENTKABOOM.

I kept wanting to squeeze THETURNOFTHECREW into 17A, and had a heckuva time with the NW corner entries, but MICS, IMAC, and finally, Yeah, Mr. White, SCIENCE! at 4D enabled me to sort it all out. I've seen Oopsy, Upsy, and Upsa. It's just fill, so stay flexible, solvers. Doris Day had a TV sitcom from 1968 to 1973, so I don't think you're necessarily geriatric to have heard "Que SERA Sera", which was the theme song of the program. Nobody sent that song up better than Alfred Hitchcock in his 1956 remake of "The Man Who Knew Too Much" featured a scene where Doris Day's character loudly and endlessly sings the song at a foreign embassy where her son has been kidnapped. As with so many classic Hitchcock scenes, it's simultaneously horrific and dryly amusing.

Was confused when it became obvious that 59A was NOSHOW, because I associated that word with a “no-show job”, where you draw a paycheck without actually working because your capo bribed a couple of local assemblymen to get the riverfront contract, and it would be a surprise if you actually DID show up on the job, because the only tool you know how to use is a crowbar, so you mostly spend your days busting heads and drinking Godfather cocktails with your wiseguy pals. But upon further reflection, when someone you expect to attend an event surprises you by not appearing, that person is indeed a NOSHOW.

What a ride! I loved this one…for solvers who were thrown for a loop, it’s worthwhile to loosen up the synapses and let those neurons fire away. The circles were a major hint that something was going on and the crosses were easy enough to fill in most of the themed answers before the “aha” moment. Thursday is stretch day, and flexibility is the key.

What fun! Thank you, Nate Cardin. There's something innately juvenile about words containing -inky that makes me smile. Winky Dink. Stinky Pinky. Shrinky Tinky. OK, I'll stop now.

I had OGRE for "Nasty" on the cross. That didn't feel right, although I thought maybe the clue was a noun, not an adjective. I never read "It", or saw any of the adaptations, so I had SCARECLOWN. So I futzed around awhile before I changed COMPOTERSYSTEMS. It didnt help that I didn't know the name of the bunny first appearing in "Space Jam", because I thought surely she would have made her debut much earlier than 1996. Lo lo lo lo LOLA. But then, Bugs Bunny was one of the most convincing drag queens ever to grace the screen.

What a ride! Having worked left to right and down the page, I had OLDFAITHFUL to start, then saw the revealer clue, so I entered YELLOWSTONE. Then I got CRATERLAKE and LADYLIBERTY, so changed the revealer to NATIONALPARK. I stumbled on the southwest theme entries, and could only think of the Okefenokee Swamp as a possible meeting places for crocs and gators, as I'd observed both species when my parents took us there as children. But then EPCOTCENTER exploded the whole National Park idea, so it took a while to sort the revealer out on the crossings. But what a nicely layered, nuanced puzzle. Loved that none of the theme answers touched the revealer. I wish, when if finally dawned on me, that the online puzzle would have let me discover all four of the alternative combinations on the crossings, but after WE and EA, it autofilled the NS and RU for me. Maybe I corrected another mistake somewhere else in the grid, and that's why it closed it out for me. As I understand it, you only needed to have any of the four points of the compass for it to be considered correct. Don't accede to the anti-rebus insurrectionists!!! Happy Saint Patties'. Bottletop

Very nice debut, Ms. Capassakis, and how wonderful to have had two favorite teachers to inspire you! Mullion got me to thinking about Muntins, and I can never remember the subtle difference between them, but I think muntins are the ones that separate smaller panes of glass in, say, a "six over six" sash window. But I think most of us use Mullions, and the rest of us eat Mutton. Karel came easily, but I wondered why the famous bridge across the Vltava in Prague is called Karlovy Most, and discovered that -ov is a possessive ending. Like Karlovy Vary, the old spa town of Carlsbad, or Warmbad. Named for the same Charles as the guy who commissioned the bridge, plus he was the Holy Roman Emperor. So thanks for prompting me to seek out that clarification. And making me want to go back to Czechia for the waters. I'm glad the only labor of Hercules I can rattle off is the slaying of the Nemean Lion. I knew he had the odious task of cleaning a bunch of stables in a single day, but I couldn't remember where. And he had to steal an Amazon's girdle.

Great Monday puzzle, Nate! The fill was indeed "whistle-clean" and crisp. Loved the Tim Duncan clue, and the "'Wailing' instrument" reminded me of Jon Hamm's Sexy Sax Man sketch on Saturday Night Live. As usual, the Monday sprint leaves me little time to grasp the theme until too late, but "Done this before, you know!" made me think of Faye Dunaway's scenery-chewing showdown with the board of directors in "Mommie Dearest". <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OKn00A40uWE" target="_blank">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OKn00A40uWE</a>