Shan

Tough for a Tuesday, at least for me. My personal Natick was EVIE Sands and Meredith VIEIRA, neither of whom I'd heard of. Seems like they should both be familiar but I missed them both. I remember dinner table conversation about Leopold and LOEB when I was a kid. It made an impression on me and I've never forgotten it. I didn't know ACCRA and tried to cram Mothra into the RODAN spot for a while, but I got there eventually.

It's interesting how different people's knowledge bases are. The first commenters often say how easy a puzzle was. This one looks easy, now that I've finished it, but while I was solving? Impossible. I wasn't confident of much beyond ENYA and COMO. Stared at the NE and SE corners for a long time, partly because I thought it was YOU SEE not YA FEEL. Finally resorted to Google to verify that CAMPOREE is a real thing, and looked up the oldest daughter in This is Us which I've never watched, and the river in Glasgow (which I should know, darn it). I tried looking up those blasted potatoes but couldn't find them. Oh, and I had to look up Squid Game, another show I've never watched. My first job in Phoenix was washing dogs in a DOG GROOMERS shop. It took me way too long to get the pun and find the answer. I've spent enough miserable minutes on them that I should have gotten STAIRMASTER faster, too. I was sure Jamie Lee and Neve were Final Girls but couldn't make it fit. This puzzle had plenty of crunch for a Saturday. Hannah below said she thought yesterday's was harder, but I found that one pretty easy: 14 minutes and no lookups, compared to 41 minutes for this one even with Google's help. To each her own, I guess.

I learned a new word today: ENDUE. I'm used to seeing things I've never heard of in the crossword - slang, names, sports terms - and I wouldn't be surprised to see a word that's new to me on Friday or Saturday. But in a Tuesday puzzle, it was a surprise! I'm leaving my dictionary open to the endosmometer-to-enemy page in hopes it'll sink in for future retrieval. And now I've accidentally learned what endosmosis is and what the device is that you measure it with. Not bad for a Monday evening. I liked the puzzle theme; I don't know the card game but it was easy to figure out the pattern so it helped with solving.

I liked the themers a lot, but got badly stuck on an awful lot of the short answers. Didn't know the Robert Frost collection, couldn't remember Cher's catchphrase, hadn't heard of the ZAYN or STIEB. Another hand up in surprise at solvers unfamiliar with COZY MYSTERY. In their defense, I think it's used more to describe books, not movies, and all the other themers are clearly movie genres.

I just read about Will Shortz's stroke from the link in the constructor notes. I've only done NYT crosswords in the Shortz era, and they've given me lots of pleasure along with plenty of frustration. I also used to really enjoy his Sunday puzzle bit on NPR before the 2016 election news and aftermath turned me into a less regular listener. I'm joining in the well wishes for a speedy recovery.

Nice puzzle, and I enjoyed the gimmick. I think of Thursdays as hard because they're tricky, not because they have a lot of Friday/Saturday level answers - so if you get the gimmick early, they're relatively easy. That was the case for me today. I got a nice little aha moment when I figured out the COLD SORES/OLD SCORES answer. I'm sad to hear about what happened to the constructor and his girlfriend, but glad that therapy helped, and that the happy memory was crossword related.

I think I might have encountered BACKSAW in a crossword before but it didn't stick. RHI seemed like a plausible baseball stat, so by the time I struggled all the way to the end of the puzzle I didn't get the happy music for a good long time. The theme was fun and there were a few gimme short answers scattered around, but overall I found this quite challenging. SALADIN was new to me. I tried Salassi for a minute - I knew it was misspelled but thought maybe there's an alternate accepted spelling since the original isn't in Latin letters. Thanks to reggae musicians I know Selassie was in Ethiopia, but I wasn't thinking it through. I guessed MR PINK although I've never made it to the end of Reservoir Dogs because of that one torture scene that's still seared into my brain 30 years after I saw it in the theatre. TAJ was new to me, too. So many opportunities to learn from today's puzzle!

Woo hoo, I'm one of the first commenters, it looks like! Probably helped by the broken link from the puzzle page. A challenge for me, up there with last Saturday's. Had to look up the college in Ypsilanti, a place I want to go someday. I wasn't sure what a blown save was, but as soon as I knew it had to do with MLB pitching I got ERAS - not sure how to count that, half lookup and half figured out myself. I had pAStor instead of VASSAL for a while, which made that's fair pALID (alternate spelling of pallid, maybe, I thought). Surprisingly, it was the long answer DON'T ANSWER THAT that set me straight. I usually don't even attempt long entries until I have a whole lot of letters filled in from shorter crosses. Happy weekend, everyone! I'm off to the bluegrass festival in Flagstaff this weekend and looking forward to some real fall weather instead of the endless summer here.

Loved this puzzle! I stared at RUSSET POTATO for a while, having filled it in mostly from crosses, then shrugged and moved on. My aha moment came with WILMINGTON, which I also filled in mostly from crosses. I love it when the theme helps me figure out the answers, which it did for all the rest of them. Like a few other people have mentioned, I thought several of the clues or answers were eerily appropriate to current events.

My personal Natick was ENDRANT/ANA - I was thinking of the physical vent, and thought maybe it was a ring or something. I slept on it after finishing and not getting the happy music, and this morning finally realized the tennis player's name didn't have to be Ina. With the A in place and a bit of caffeine END RANT occurred to me. Until the comments I thought it was a dumb answer, something the constructor made up, but I guess it's a real thing. I've been trying to stay away from social media, especially the kind where people are venting. END RANT

There's nothing quite like the satisfaction of solving a tricky Thursday puzzle. It reminds me a little bit of the story problems we used to get in elementary school, and the feeling I had when I saw how to translate them into an equation. I went wrong in so many ways before I got to the end. I spent some time trying to decide whether voRMINAL VELOCITY was a thing (I had ifSo for the coding answer, what can I say?) This was one of the few times I solved the revealer before I got any of the theme answers, and the revealer clued me in so I could get the rest. SIN CITY was almost the last thing I filled in; I was trying to think if I'd ever heard a nickname for Wayne Newton or Celine Dion. I was proud of myself for guessing the Taylor Swift answer, never having seen one of her albums. Never heard of POSTS UP either - guess I should go look that up now. Hand up for SAUcEPAN instead of SAUTE PAN for a good long time.

Wow, so clever, and so satisfying when I finally got it. I started it last night and got nowhere fast but it all came together this morning. My first one was ARCANE/CLEAR AS MUD, which I got because I had the CLEA and the UD. I stared at the freeze-drying pioneers and "just like that" for a long time before I noticed the "that" was italicized; adding ITALIC gave me CLEAxAxUD which couldn't be anything else. Once I understood how it worked, the gimmick actually helped me solve the rest of the puzzle. There were an awful lot of things I didn't know in here (KNURL, for instance, and INCA freeze-drying) but in the end I solved the whole thing without a single google.

Whenever I see long strings of white space my heart sinks a bit - I never expect to be able to get them without a lot of crosses. This turned out to be right up my alley, though! Fun long answers, and the short ones were nice and punchy, not too hard to get. Thanks to John Ezra for pasting in the Ode to Tuna. What a beautiful, sad poem about an unexpected subject.

I knew this was going to be fun when I saw the vines running down the middle. I stumbled over a few things, like ALI G - I spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to fit 'come on in' into not enough squares. Westerner (BC, California, Utah, Arizona) all my life, and TOCK and talk are homonyms to me. It's interesting to see all the people who pronounce them differently. There was another puzzle a while back that gave me trouble because it rhymed words that didn't rhyme in my ears. It was using an east coast pronunciation, if I remember correctly. My personal Natick was ALY Raisman/YOINK. I thought for sure it was DOINK. I've since looked up Aly Raisman and I do remember her from watching the Olympics with a gymnastics-loving niece.

I was opposite from Deb - SAM Altman was almost the very last thing I filled in, and the only thing in this puzzle that I had to Google. It didn't help that I thought the champagne-like beverage was cuve (which is actually spelled cuvée, apparently), making the bottom word -STEeMS. Probably something I've never heard of, I grumbled as I tabbed over to look up Altman. Once I had SAM which took me to SEA LANES it occurred to me I'd heard of something called CAVA. Audible dope slap applied to forehead when I finally recognized MS TEAMS. Good puzzle! The expanses of white scared me at first but as it turned out, I was able to fill in everything but that one bottom corner answer all by myself.

Wow, what a puzzle! I loved it. I was definitely scratching my head for a while, and I had to reread the note a few times. At first I thought these were going to be actual art heists, and I'd need to know the names of paintings and the museums or cities they were stolen from. It was a relief when I finally understood that for EAST[I]ANDARDTIME I just needed to mentally replace the I with ERNST to get the straightforward answer to the clue. What tripped me up were some of the downs: I had Model Ts for As, kems for fems (don't ask me why), and toyman for toy men. I ended up printing out the filled-out grid, going through the clues to find the 10 pairs, circling those extra letters, and finally writing out the phrase, which was ultimately what led me to fixing those three mistakes. Sounds like a lot of work but altogether it took me an hour and 12 minutes to finish the puzzle, which isn't unusual for me. I agree with the commenters who would like to have had the highlights work both ways. I did a lot of back-and-forthing - my short term memory was not up to keeping track. I solved it on a laptop, can't imagine how hard this one would be on a tiny phone screen. Silly me, I thought most of the complaints about the puzzle would center on the note referring to stolen paintings but the answers all being the names of painters.

Loved the long answers, tore my hair out on almost everything else. That DADA/DECO at 1A/1D set the tone for the whole puzzle. I'd never heard of Duchamp's readymades and skimming the Wikipedia entry on them didn't give me Dada, which was a total guess that turned out right. In contrast to my many many short-answer guesses that turned out wrong. I was starting to feel pretty competent at solving Saturday puzzles, but this one put me in my place.

So tough! I usually do the crossword at night, but this one was too hard for my nighttime brain - I had to stop partway through and finish in the morning. So many things I didn't know, and so many words I had to rethink (my favorite was hill in the clue for POLISCI). Still, I somehow managed to guess or figure out everything on my own except for one key answer: STRIPSTEAK. Thanks for that one, Google. I got a little thrill every time I found something I could feel confident about, like THUNBERG, which I got after filling in some crosses. Say "social media" to me and I expect the answer to be someone I've never heard of. I had to come to Wordplay to understand the 375 ppm, which led me to look up my own birth year - it was 312 ppm in 1952. Terrifying. Oh, and I loved YULE CAT, which I'd never heard of. My grandmother was from Iceland so I'm tucking that bit of lore away to share with my own granddaughters.

Heavens to Murgatroyd. I was feeling cocky after Friday's puzzle, but boy, was I taken down a peg. Hand up for reading etymologist as entomologist and confidently dropping insects into the grid. Lookups: Hecklephone, apologue, the Primo Levi title in Italian (I always misread Italian clues as Spanish and try to cram in the Spanish answer), soffritto (a lot of Italian today). I've read Gawande's book on cancer but couldn't remember his first name. I'm embarrassed to say I entered "episode" as the first word of the Star Wars crawl, even though it's in the clue; my first Star Wars was the one where you had to line up for ages at the only theatre in town that showed it - here, it was the late lamented Cine Capri on Camelback Road - so I didn't register that Episode 1 meant the one with all the politics. An hour and 11 minutes, even with allowing myself lookups.

Satisfying aha experience for me when I finally got "ship out." I spent way too much time trying to figure out how the horizontal circled letters fit with a down answer - I was so sure I'd figured out how the puzzle worked after getting LEMON SCONE and BASKETBALL STAR. I must have read the title a dozen times before I grokked it. I was cursing the constructor for a while because of those boats. I needed the crosses to get the downs that connected to them (especially Steve KERR), and before that aha moment all I knew was that the across answer didn't make sense with the clue. Good puzzle! I found yesterday's pretty easy, but definitely got my comeuppance today.

Tough Tuesday! I changed Bobby McGee to Bobby Magee when I realized the C made it MELC, which made no sense to me as a name. I knew it was McGee but talked myself into the change for the sake of the Spice Girl. Grr. I did enjoy the scavenger hunt though!

I often learn things about NYC and the rest of the east coast in crosswords, and I'm used to looking up things like that mountain in Ecuador. Thanks to @Joya below for the link about the guy who goes up Mt Chimborazo with his donkey and brings down glacier ice to sell - maybe someday I'll get to try one of those fruit juices made with that ice. Anyway, what I came here to say is it was fun today to learn about what must be a purely midwestern thing, the CORN PIT. My dad grew up in Saskatchewan, where my grandpa built silos, and used to tell a story about nearly drowning in a grain silo once when he was a kid. I gather the ones at fairs aren't deep enough to be dangerous. Hard puzzle! I got through both bottom quadrants last night but had to sleep on it before I could finish the top half. Nothing seemed to be in my wheelhouse.

Holy moly, this was hard! Started last night and gave up - I think STEPBYSTEP and INOVERTIME were the only things from last night that ended up being correct. I had TIVO for the device, although I've never owned one and I have a ROKU on my own tv. This morning I remembered WALTHER although not the PPK from bingeing the Bond books in the 70s. REEBOK was a happy memory of my Jazzercise days and I enjoyed NOTCRICKET, which recalled the pleasures of reading British authors like Christie and Wodehouse. I love SQUIRCLE and plan to look for opportunities to use the word. And hand up for the TEXACO ear worm (you can trust your car to the man who wears the star). One nice thing about these extra hard puzzles is they offer me plenty of time to reflect on the things I do remember while I'm struggling to figure out how to get a handle on the tricky clues and unknown people & places & song titles. This morning I'm thinking about those days in the 70s when I had a long bus ride to work, and I used to bring home a grocery bag full of library books every Monday. I read through lots of prolific authors like Fleming and John D. MacDonald and Leon Uris while trying to keep tabs on the stops so I could make my transfers. Once I ended up miles away from where I'd meant to be, only noticing when the bus crossed over the higher-fare line - I had to get off and wait for it to go to the end of the line and turn around. The bus driver wasn't sympathetic. Not a reader, I guess.

So much fun! Like others I tripped over casa, and then I compounded the error once I figured out the stuffed crust idea (it was GO BROKE/KEEP TABS that showed me the way) by entering ha/ci/en/da which meant the sucker was a da-something-POP. Guessed Luis's last name was Ortiz, thought FRAThouse was the place on the row. Steve CARELL would have helped me if I could have remembered how to spell his name. The trick was tricky enough that I really appreciated the clues being relatively straightforward. Love the constructor comment, too!

Fun puzzle! The chicken clue stymied me, and even after the doctoral student hurdle showed me the way it took me till I'd finished the whole thing and re-read all the trick clues to figure it out. If my eyes were better I might have noticed the dashes showed where the word breaks happened. I had the same trouble with DEATH - I tried to parse it as I'D EAT H ... nope, didn't work. Took a while to figure out it was an idEA THat scares those folks. I was glad to learn about Ithaca's waterfalls, and happy to see my local college town's monsoons in the puzzle. Sadly, for the past few years our monsoon season has been mostly a no-show, which local wits are starting to call the nonsoon.

I love a puzzle that gives me that great lightbulb feeling when I finally figure it out. I got that buzz when I figured out the don't put all your eggs in one basket answer. Then I scratched my head for a long time over trying to fit 'mess with' into the three circles in front of TX, gave up and moved on, hoping for inspiration later. I think it was mixing business with pleasure that came together next for me, although I had EfT instead of EBT to start with - I had to write it out on a piece of paper to see what fUSINESS was supposed to be. Lightbulb! Looked again at that Texas clue and the lightning struck again. By the time I got to crying over spilt milk and putting the cart before the horse, I felt like an old hand at this. It probably helped that my parents had a million of these phrases. I channel them regularly. Those foot x-ray machines ... I remember a shoe store that had one on the sidewalk. I wanted to try it so badly but my dad wouldn't let me. At the time, my mother was dying of cancer that he was convinced arose because of the radiation treatments she'd had for acne as a teenager. I think the after effects of those treatments and the similar ones for tonsillitis are well known now, but he was frustrated back then because her doctors didn't want to hear his theory.

Ayieee, this was hard! I played Mario at my cousin's house once in the 1990s, before he was Super, but I didn't pick up on any of the lingo. Just about everything I know about Mario comes from crossword puzzles. WARIO was my downfall. I managed to do the rest of the puzzle, even FIREF, by guess and by golly (no lookups for a change). Didn't get the happy music, looked over it again and discovered EbAcATED where EMANATED clearly belonged. Still no happy music. Read over every single answer a couple of times, checked a few things like ARIANNA spelling and that ERIN is the sportscaster to confirm that I had everything right. Apparently my eyes skated right over MOm - if I'd reread the clue maybe I'd have recognized it was wrong. Kudos to the constructor for building a game-based puzzle that non-game-players can solve. I often skip the bonus puzzles that are based on things I don't know anything about, like the recent one on Ru Paul's Drag Race, because I can't get a foothold in them. Maybe this will give me the confidence to try again.

Fun! I somehow managed to get Tom Hanks from crosses, which alerted me to the extra OMs in the *d clues. My personal NIT is describing a SAUNA as a steamy bath. A steam room is a steam room, and a sauna is a dry room with a stern sign telling people not to pour water on the hot rocks, at least in every gym I've been in. Maybe it's a regional thing?

I stared and stared at WHOOxEECU with no clue how that would parse into words. The southwest corner sat there for the longest time with nothing but the end of CARE TO ELABORATE filled in. I'd just listened to a podcast about potato bugs/roly polies/pill bugs/wood lice (in which I learned that they're crustaceans, who knew?) but could not come up with ISOPOD without Google's help. Somehow that S broke WHOOPEE CUSHION open for me, and the last few entries came quickly. Good puzzle! Congratulations to the constructor.

Just dropping in to recommend watching the video Caitlin gave us in the column. My dad was a fan of big band music and I can imagine him getting a huge kick out of it. If you stay till the end you'll also get to see the incredible Nicholas brothers dancing and doing that amazing jumping-into-splits move of theirs. Such a treat. The puzzle was great too. I tried to solve it last night but pretty quickly figured out my near-midnight, post-wine brain wasn't up to the task of figuring out the misdirections. This morning, ID tags quickly turned into Idaho license plates, which I saw plenty of when I lived in Utah & occasionally see all the way down here in Az. S_HU_ _ for the Woodstock band also transformed into Snoopy's pal when the sun came up. I hadn't heard of Maria TALLCHIEF but got it from crosses; now I'm going to go read about her & also the backstory of those Idaho plates, and try to remember who it was who used to tell me stories about his summer job on a potato farm back in the day.

I enjoyed this, especially the reminder of the song. The HUNDO/YEUN crossing was a bit of a Natick for me because I thought that U might be an O, and tried it that way first. I hadn't heard of the ALABAMA SLAMMER and couldn't remember FARSI at this time of night, but I got them from crosses. Congratulations on the debut!

Extra tough for me! I had only a handful filled out on my first pass through the acrosses, and some of those turned out to be wrong. I managed to get a pretty good handle on all but the NW corner without help from Google, but ultimately had to go there. I feel okay about having to look up Doja's real name and confirm that it's BTS, not BT-something else, but I really should have known CAIN and the subject of the Windsor court case. NON-GMO CROP threw me for quite a while because I couldn't remember which Dakota had Bismarck; even after fixing it I didn't parse it correctly until I read the column. Congratulation on the impressive debut, Owen.

Good grief. I thought last Saturday was hard. I somehow managed to get the SW corner and a handful of scattered items - like SANTAHATS, which I wasn't at all sure of - but ultimately needed to read the entire Tricky Clues section of the column to finish. I could vaguely picture the sports mascot but didn't have any idea of the team, let alone the mascot's name. Had wig instead of FIR for a long time, making the girl in dire need genie (thinking of I Dream of Jeannie) which didn't make any sense at all. Not quite enough satisfying "I got it" moments for me to enjoy the experience. I'll have to settle for admiring the puzzle today.

I've been getting more and more late-week puzzles with no lookups, and I almost made it with this one. My personal Natick was the NATHAN FOR YOU/NELLA/SALS trio - I found the tv show in the column but had to go to the answer key to get that last L. I should know the novelist, at least. Putting her on my list to check out at the library next week. I don't think I ever saw Do The Right Thing; apparently it's on Prime if I can tolerate the ads. Maybe I'll watch it this weekend.

Slow start with hardly any acrosses filled in my first time through, but the downs gave me a toehold and I finished pretty quickly without resorting to Google. I always think that movie quote is from Blazing Saddles.