John Deal
Goffstown NH
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Goffstown NH
I'm not weighing in one way or the other—while I found this to be a pretty easy Thursday solve, I don't have any strong feelings about it—but I think this is the first time I've seen Ms. Amlen kind of, well, slag a puzzle. Admittedly, I've only been reading Wordplay for a year and change, but I was a bit startled. Not disapproving (she is entitled to her opinion, certainly). Just wasn't expecting it.
Oof, today was brutally hard for me; I usually take between ten and twenty minutes for a Saturday, but I struggled with this grid for close to an hour. I know there are lots of folks here, either more skilled or more masochistic than I, who will have loved this puzzle, but I found most of it unpleasantly sloggy.
Not a brainbuster, and I apprehended the theme quickly, but honestly I don't remember the last time I had this much fun with a Thursday. This puzzle was delightful start to finish.
Easy puzzle, iffy theme.
The "don't say anything negative" squad is out in force again today. Look, friends: sometimes a body just needs to vent. Let people blow off a little steam about a tricky puzzle, and stop being so ironically critical of their criticisms. (I suspect at least several of the folks carping about the negativity of commenters here would rally to defend Deb Amlen's far-from-complimentary words about Joe Marquez's grid in this week's Thursday Wordplay column. Coarse invective obviously excluded, it's okay not to like a thing, and to say so when the thing in question is broadcast to a wide public and thus fair game for public praise or censure.)
I got the solve in decent enough time, but I simply couldn't get a flow going on this one. I'm glad for the folks who enjoyed it, but this was a surprisingly sloggy Sunday puzzle for me. I'm always fascinated by how some constructors and I seem to be on exactly the same wavelength, and how other constructors just aren't operating at my frequency (or vice versa, in fairness).
Oof. This took me twice my Saturday usual. I'm torn between lauding the clues I genuinely loved even though they were brutal ("10-point play" was inspired) and the ones that were so ain't-I-cute clever that the solve became harder if the solver knew anything about the subject (looking at you, SAKEBAR—no one would *ever* talk about sake in shots: not connoisseurs, and not frat boys [sake *bombs*, sure]). I also disliked PEDIATRIC for "childish"—is that meant to be witty? There's hard and fair and funny—which I adore and hope for every Saturday—and then there's hard and confused and self-indulgent. With respect, this puzzle was too much of the latter for my taste.
I struggled a lot more than I have in quite a while, but in a good way. More Fridays like this, please (heck, more *Saturdays* like this!).
Yesterday I wrote, "It may just be me, but I've found most of the recent Friday puzzles much trickier than their Saturday sequels. I'll be curious to see if the pattern holds tomorrow; this one was a good, chewy workout." Little did I know! Got the solve, but at double my average time, and only after a decent amount of brute-forcing. I can't say I had a lot of fun with this one; I'm up for a challenge, especially on Saturday, but a lot of the clues here felt opaque rather than teasingly witty.
@Deb Amlen I hear you. There's a reason I deployed qualifiers in my comment; to be clear, I don't think you were cruel, and as I noted, you have every right to your opinion. I've just never seen that degree of puzzle criticism/disappointment in a Wordplay column before—perhaps, as I noted, because I've not been reading very long.
@Steve L Not obscure at all; in fact, one of the most important modernist poems ever written.
@T. Sato Agreed; as a Japanese speaker, I was also annoyed by "sumos." And even if one doesn't know the proper word, "sumo wrestler" is way more common in English.
@Dan I also found the Thanksgiving-specific nature of the clue here puzzling; I did consider "cob," but then I said to myself, "Not exactly a food strongly associated with the holiday in question" and dismissed it. Maybe I'm wrong, and lots of people eat corn on T-Day? Or maybe the clue was referring to seventeenth-century Massachusetts Bay Colony? Either way, I wish the answer had been clued differently.
I found everything pretty manageable until I hit the southwestern quadrant; the puzzle as a whole took me about 250% of my usual Saturday time, and easily three quarters of that was spent despairing of ever solving the SW. Tough, but very satisfying when I finally put it to bed.
I enjoyed the workout here, and found most of the puzzle just right for a Friday. I stumbled in the northwest, though—when you convince yourself that 1D is NEPAL because then the cross at 19A can be ATEAM, you make things needlessly hard on yourself. Once I realized my error, that quadrant fell easily enough too.
@Puzzlemucker You describe my feelings about this one precisely. It was pure fun with a lot of witty misdirects, both of which I’m perfectly happy to encounter on a Saturday.
What fun! At first this grid looked daunting, but it proved exactly difficult enough to make me sweat but not to make me cry.
@James Curran I judge absolutely no one for feeling differently (as long as you're having fun, you're doing it right), but for me, not cheating on a puzzle means referencing absolutely nothing but the grid and its clues plus my own memory. No lookups, no hints, no nothing else.
Holy cats! I am in awe as well. Easy solve, but the brilliance of the gimmick eluded me until I read the "Wordplay" explanation. Now I can't stop shaking my head in wonderment.
This one was...fine? I was hoping for a little more zing from a Thursday, to be honest. I appreciate the difficulty of creating this grid, but it didn't give me that brain-melting satisfaction I always hope for from this day of the week. Instead, I got a cutesy tribute to a toy. More power to anyone who had a lot of fun with this puzzle, but I was pretty nonplussed.
I didn't love this one, but I didn't loathe it either. Took me about five minutes longer than my usual solve time, and the theme was...okay. On another subject, I do wish people wouldn't comment specifically to contradict the subjective emotional experiences of others. When a person comes here and complains about a puzzle, it seems pretty clear to me that they are blowing off steam and possibly seeking commiseration from others with the same frustrating experience. That's human, and even if I enjoyed the same puzzle myself, I get why they do it. Likewise, I understand why people comment to say that they found a crossword to be delightful or pleasantly challenging or cleverly constructed. But I have noticed that the people who dislike a puzzle are much less likely to tell the people who liked it that they are wrong then the people who enjoyed it are to tell those who didn't that they are inept or inexperienced or simply possessed of bad taste. My rule of thumb is to comment to agree, or to simply say nothing. I am weary of people telling others that their opinions are somehow incorrect.
Managed a personal best time on this quite easy-for-a-Thursday puzzle. I enjoyed it well enough, but was hoping for a *bit* more struggle than I got.
I don't mind the new app layout, but it would be *really* nice if the Games app allowed you to access the Wordplay column for any given puzzle directly from said puzzle itself. Having to hop over to the Times app and click through several nested sections is tedious. (Cute puzzle today, but yeah, really easy. Only missed a personal-best time because I solved on my phone.)
It may just be me, but I've found most of the recent Friday puzzles much trickier than their Saturday sequels. I'll be curious to see if the pattern holds tomorrow; this one was a good, chewy workout.
Ugh. I finished with no hints or lookups, but gods above was this a viciously Natick-y puzzle. I sussed out the gimmick right away and blitzed through the vast majority of the grid, but at the end I had to waste a whole lot of minutes playing the plug-in-arbitrary-letters game in a few spots in order to get the win. I'm not complaining that there were answers I didn't know in this grid, but some of the crosses were needlessly, nastily obscure. Just glad I'm done and can move on to more enjoyable puzzles.
Pretty breezy even for a Sunday, but it's hard to argue against the importance of the revealer.
Fun puzzle, and (as has often been the case for me of late), a much quicker solve than the Friday puzzle that preceded it. One cavil? "The Lord of the Rings" isn't actually a trilogy; it's one book. It was originally published in three volumes only because of paper shortages and attendant pricing issues in the postwar United Kingdom. The practice stuck, but Tolkien always considered his most famous work to be a single literary entity.
A delightful and witty debut, and a pleasantly brisk Friday, especially after the last few weeks. I struggled at first, bouncing around the grid in the hopes of gaining purchase somewhere, but finally the southeast started to break for me, and it was smooth sailing after that. Bravo, Mr. Bunch!
That was a workout! I polished off a 2012 Saturday puzzle waiting for this one to drop, and that wasn't half as tough as this. Can't say I enjoyed myself the whole time (loved the tricky clueing, didn't love all the fill), but I can say Xiao made me sweat.
@K Judging by the Midwesterners (and Coloradan) who chimed in, the revealer here may be much more intelligible in places where the "t" in "chants" isn't strongly pronounced. Speaking as a New England native, I'd never pronounce "chance" and "chants" identically, and so while I found the puzzle easy enough to complete, I couldn't make sense of the revealer without reading Wordplay. I'm not saying that one pronunciation of "chants" is better or worse than another, but given how frustrating a number of folks obviously found this puzzle, I might observe that puns based to such an extent on regional-dialect differences aren't the best choices for revealers. It's one thing when people for whom English is not a native language find this sort of wordplay tricky; it's another when the difficulty of the revealer is seemingly predicated on which region of the United States you come from. I'd think it was just as ill-conceived if a puzzle privileged non-rhotic pronunciations like the ones my own home region finds normal, for what it's worth.
@Ann I read the clue as a reference to passengers making sure a suitcase on a baggage carousel is theirs by looking at the ID tag—a lot of suitcases look alike!
Good fun, this. Pretty brisk for a Saturday, though I too wrestled a bit with the southeast corner.
@Eric I enjoyed the puzzle quite a bit overall, but this one answer stuck in my craw also.
This was delightful.
Pleasantly swift and smooth, especially given that earlier today as part of my process of working backward through old Saturday puzzles I almost went mad struggling with the September 12, 2020, grid.
Delightfully chewy for a Friday! I sweated over this one for sure, but it was always just frustrating enough.
@Jin Shengtan That clue annoyed me too. I knew the answer was alcohol-related, and I thus inferred "bar," but "shots" is so...*wrong* for describing how nihonshu/sake is drunk that it mislead me (in a bad way; I love misdirection when it's witty). No answer should be clued in such a manner that *more* knowledge of the clue's subject makes the solve harder. Sam or his editor really should have killed that one dead.
@Xword Junkie I have it on the authority of the Aussie sitting across from me that Antipodeans don't capitalize "outback."
@george I certainly feel proud that I got the yellow star with no Googling or other aid, but the road there was frequently rocky.
@Red Carpet I also found this cluing irksome. You've articulated why quite nicely, thanks.
@Al in Pittsburgh: I’m pretty sure that’s why Cat Lady Margaret wished it had been in the grid in the first place. :)
@Francis I'm all for healthy, reasonably considerate disagreement! I just don't like it when the disagreement is sententious and lofty, which is all too frequently, I fear. Beginners especially need to be able to vent safely without fear of being insulted or dismissed.
@Robert Fair enough. I just always think books (or in this case, book) first.
@Gavin Fair enough! But even then, I'm not sure a lot is gained by *snarkily* pointing out the ignorance of the complainer. It all too often just comes across as superiority and braggadocio.
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