Josh

Today I learned that a nice 7-letter gift for a newborn is a “Layette”, and apparently not “Tequila”, “Airhorn” or “Spiders”.

Ouch. I like a challenge but this felt way too hard for a Tuesday. I did like the theme, and I got a kick out of seeing “fjord” because…well, I love a nice fjord.

Fun puzzle. It made me do a double-take! Deb: That imperial chart is hilarious. I just wish we could fully commit to metric by including times and dates. Like this: Hey, just 135 kiloseconds till the weekend!

Loved it. My favorite kind of Thursday, just hard enough to make me feel smart! For the “west” rebus, I think “tsew” should have also been allowed - I get to the bottom and turn west, so shouldn’t those letters be backwards? Otherwise, I feel like I’m spelling “SO WHERE DO TSEWAND”. I see the logic either way. It comes down to whether the rebus letters themselves are part of the new direction. With the other three, they’re not - you change direction AFTER the rebus square. But with this one, that means doubling back and skipping over the square you just filled, which seemed weird to me.

Wow! Solved without the theme and couldn’t see it for the life of me. After Deb explained it and I looked again, it felt like watching the end of The Usual Suspects. Eg, it was in plain sight.

I thought today was Tuesday, and spent the whole puzzle wondering why it felt like a Thursday. I was so confused! It was surely a moral outrage! No, I just hadn’t taken my Ritalin. The weird thing is, I still finished under my Tuesday time limit. So…I had the power all along?

Congrats on your NYT crossword debut! Maybe I’m missing something but I don’t quite get the theme. If we’re saying “hi” to playing cards, they need a suit. “Five” isn’t a playing card. Maybe adding a suit in italics to the clue might have helped. Or maybe that makes it too easy. And if they’re not playing cards I have no idea what those four words have in common.

This was a clunky one. Mostly, it needed a visual design tweak: the rebus squares are very poorly marked. 1) Because there were two in each clue, using a heavy border on just one side of the square makes it look like brackets around several squares, not individual squares. 2) Even when I knew it was single squares, I couldn’t always tell which square was highlighted. For example, it looks like the N in SCAN is a rebus square. It’s not, but the rebus indicator borders both squares equally. 3) It didn’t help that these were the kinds of rebuses that only worked one way, causing gibberish the other way. I dislike these. So how do we solve this design problem? A simple gray background would have been much better but I understand why we want a line here - laugh lines! So then maybe a series of light gray lines, for rebus squares. You get to keep the “laugh lines” theme; in fact it makes MORE sense because now you have laugh lineS, plural. Just my $0.02.

Wait, “Bangles” is a real word?!? I thought the band made it up, like “Beatles”.

For “pointy-eared being”, anyone else guess “Alf” first?