Sam Lyons

Best constructor’s notes of the year? Nick Offerman FTW. (Oh yeah, and he hammered out an awesome puzzle, too.

Quite a test of brand awareness.

Having read the comments, I’ll add this: How do you get from Michael Lieberman’s [brass] to GALL? Practice, practice, practice. Many Saturday puzzles may seem impossible to newer—or even intermediate—solvers, but take it from those of us that have done a few hundred of them by now: They eventually become pure bliss to solve. Puzzle solving is like yoga. Your first class is pure torture. You stand there in (your pitiful version of) the warrior pose, feeling as awkward as you know you look, your quad burning so badly that you think it just might pop right out of your thigh, and you want to wipe that gentle smile of your instructor’s face as she’s telling you to feel oneness with your breath or what-the-heck-ever. A couple of years later, that class and the quad-bursting asanas are the best part of your week. Stick with the Saturday puzzles, folks. Your mental quads will get there.

Proper nounanza.

All this puzzle needed was for one word to read differently in the theme clues. For example, for the ARTOIS/BARHOP pair, instead of [Part of a beer name ... or an instruction for answering 53-Across], if it had been [Part of a beer name ... or an instruction for *reading* 53-Across], lo and behold, we’d have a theme that makes sense. A difference of one word: One small step for the puzzle, one giant leap for logic.

This puzzle just sparkled with love-at-first-bite puns and cluing. [Felt something on your head] for FEDORA was just brilliant. John Donegan, fangs for a fantastic Wednesday.

Best constructor notes ever.

Excellent. Really, really excellent. Inventive, spunky, and energetic. You know how when electrons enter an excited state, they zigzag around like mad? That’s what this puzzle did for my neurons. Did I mention this was an excellent puzzle?

The one thing I didn’t say when I finished this puzzle was Eww! A very nifty puzzle, Rena.

Just had to DROP in (TROU still on) to say that I absolutely loved this. Clever, playful, and challenging, it was the perfect puzzle to wake up to this morning. Thanks, Brad!

My erstwhile neighbors, lovely folks—an Omaha beach sailor and his wartime Angel of Mercy bride—got themselves a Basenji in their sunset years, a pretty girl they named Tulip. “She’s a descendant of the dogs Egyptian pharaohs kept,” Dick used to tell me. “Basenjis were bred not to bark in keeping with the dignity of the royal palace.” Upon which Tulip would let loose at a random jack rabbit, bird, moth, or nothing at all. “Tulip didn’t get the memo,” Dick would add ruefully. Their property abutted ours. One day, we came home to find that Dick had fenced in a portion of his, right up to our property line. Suddenly there was a chain link fence running through the junipers. “Surprisingly… unneighborly,” my husband said, what with there being no chain link fences anywhere in our little town. Our houses bordered the National Forest line, and neither mountain lions nor bears appreciated metal obstacles. Then we saw the gate built into the fence, opening up onto a straight shot to our rear deck. Sure enough, Dick and Tulip came through that gate not an hour later, bearing a good bottle of NM Riesling and the good news: “Did you see the enclosure I had built so our dogs could play without bothering the bears?” And play they did. We let them out through their respective gates on the side of each properties and let the Basenji/Australian Cattle Dog Games begin. The representatives of both breeds could outyap a nervous Pomeranian. Tulip didn’t give a fig about courtly manners.

Had to but sniff the salt air this morning, catch the faint scent of lutefisk on the wind, and lo, mead-stained ancestral neurons fired: SHETLAND ISLAND was in before the coffee hit the mug. Of course, I’m still half-expecting my great-uncle Håkon to rise from his fjord-side grave—if that’s where he is; the aunts were vague when we asked if he’d been sent off into the North Sea on a funereal longboat instead—and send me a lengthy, only semi-joking email on the misspelling of the clue. (By bloodline and broadband, he’d always held me personally responsible for all NYT editorial decisions.) “Shetland?” he’d’ve said. “It’s not Shetland, Sam. It’s Hjaltland, and you, a right-thinking descendant of the Norwegian crown, must honor this. After all, what’s 600 years between warring kingdoms?” Then there’d be the usual paragraph on the stain on our Viking tradition that is my parents’ naming me Sam instead of, say, Sǽmundaða. Or Svanhildr. “Americans,” he’d sniff. “And BRANDY ALEXANDER,” he’d continue. “Brandy is what happens when you run out of potatoes and backbone. It’s the sort of thing a great-great-etc. granddaughter of Alexander II would sip while annexing our islands.” (Alexander II of Scotland started the pawning of Shetland, you see. Like, just the other day—ca. the 13th c.) Then he’d whip up a proper cocktail: 2 oz aquavit, 1/2 oz pickled herring dill brine, dash of bitters made from fermented Vōlsunga saga pages, stirred once, then thrown into the sea for luck. Skal!

This puzzle went so far up my alley it needed one of those beepers delivery trucks use when backing up. Some folks know a lot of urban myths; I’m more of an Urban myths (and random facts) person. For example, if you’re Catholic and you’ve ever stopped to admire the beautiful silver liturgical vessels, you owe Pope Urban I thanks. Prior to the 3rd c. upgrade he instituted, clay or wood vessels were used for mass. And in a twist of serendipity only a crossword puzzle can provide, we know this thanks to the letters of St. Jerome, who also (oddly enough for someone fixing to be beatified later) wrote about Catullus and his beloved Clodia. And Catullus, of course, is the author of the oft-quoted Odi et Amo—featured indirectly in yesterday’s puzzle. Ōdī et amō. Quārē id faciam fortasse requīris. Nesciŏ, sed fierī sentiō et excrucior. I hate and I love. Why do I do this, perhaps you ask. I know not, but I feel it happening and I am in torment. Not everything Catullus wrote was so tortured—or so tame. Before the (in)famous Clodia, whom he referred to as Lesbia in his poems, put him through his paces, she had inspired him to write in an altogether different spirit. Yet, very democratically, he merited a mention in St. Jerome’s writings—just like Urban I. Fast forward a couple millennia, and Catullus and Urban are back together again, this time in two back-to-back NYT crossword puzzles. Like I said: serendipity. And it warms the cockles of my dusty volume-loving heart.

Speaking of frozen things. We are renting a smart home—which wasn’t my first choice but here we are—and so we’re plagued by (to me) random advice and admonishments from a disembodied voice which doesn’t always respond to my, “Not now, Google; shut up!” This morning, as I was brewing the coffee, Google announced that the freezing fog we were experiencing would be, “deposited, leading to rime on roads. Use caution.” Huh, I thought and said, “Hey Google, did you just wax poetic and say, ‘rime?’” Google waited a beat, then said brightly, “The laundry is finished. Please unload the laundry.” That was the end of our witty banter, but all day I kept bugging my husband to go for a drive on the “roads covered in rime. Rime!” My husband has a wordless look for times like these. “But honey,” I said, “It’s rime! We now live in a place where rime has left the literary realm and become a reality I can drive over!” (I have used a lot of exclamation points today.) My husband gave me another look and said that Google had announced rime many times over the past year but I never paid any attention. Also, that there was rime covering spider webs on the lawn furniture and the one hanging right outside the kitchen window in front of which I’d ground the beans just minutes earlier. Well, he can’t spoil my joy. 40-odd years in this planet’s high desert regions had never brought rime to my daily vocabulary. Today I get to report from beneath otherwise miserable frozen fog that I’ve got RIME!

Lots of white space, no glue, no green paint, only elegant, interesting fill. Now this is what I call a Friday. Nicely done, Kyle. The one unknown for me was YOKO Ogawa. Before I came here to post, I read up on her fiction a bit, then immediately JINKed over to my library app and put holds on three of her novels. I’ve had to bump two homegrown writers further down on my reading list for this year to make room for Ogawa (2026 is my Year of the American Novel), but her writing promises to be compelling. Finding a gem like this in a puzzle is such a breath of fresh air after the usual having to parse TV show titles or stage names of pop artists. (Yes, yes, I’ll tell y’all to get off my lawn before this post is over.) Other than that, quick but really, really enjoyable, and please don’t tell anyone I stared and stared at, uh, CART nAILER, having conjured up visions of dray horses and Conestoga wagons (see Year of the American Novel). GETS A BAD nAP is a perfectly valid entry, after all (see Year of the American Novel as it eats into my usually limited anyway sleep), if you fill it in without first reading the clue. On that note, it’s time to get up and grind some beans. Have a good day, everyone.

MEDAL or MEtAL seemed to work because for the not domestically inclined, DIY frequently ends at the TIY stage: “Tried It. Yikes.” Or so I’ve heard.

Some of us filling in the grid right now are saying GOOD MORNING, and some NIGHTY NIGHT. I had to smile at both of these side by side in the puzzle, like a nod to our internationality.

This puzzle was so far up my alley that if it were a VAN, it would have RAMmed right into my garage. Not that I know anything about BIRD CALLs. As I sit here waiting for the coffee to finish brewing, there’s a bird, er, hooting? outside my window somewhere. It’s done this faithfully each morning since we moved into the house, and each morning for going on a year now I’ve wondered if owls hoot after sunrise. Have I looked it up? I have not, and I’m someone who looks everything up. Loved, loved the clue for AMERICAN CROW. Currently an expat like Ginny, I also found my last Thanksgiving and 4th of July lacking in proper fanfare. No one was crowding around the frozen turkeys for the former and we flew our flag alone for the latter. Today feels particularly expat-y as I hear the morning traffic in the distance. It’s Pioneer Day in Utah. We should be home, fixing to watch the parade. [Ahh, yes. That first sip of coffee.] Back to the puzzle. AMERICAN CROW was a bittersweet reminder of the cawing I used to wake up to when we lived in Seattle. We’d been adopted by a crow, whom I christened Cawrlos. Cawrlos later brought his family—his crow wife Isabella and little Cawrlito and Bella. Those 3 years were the only time I inhaled books about a bird species. Which, I might add, I’d read while Cawrl sat on a branch near me, usually in companionable silence, occasionally rattling or clicking to get my attention. How I miss our special relationship. Thank you, Ginny. Fantastic puzzle.

Dogs on short stumpy legs, long novels, Dante, Barnes & (implied) Noble, and triple-stacked spanners? A puzzle to warm the cockles of my heart. As for Adrianne’s story—I’m not crying; you’re crying. Adrianne, may your life be filled with friendships like the one you shared with Arjun. I am so sorry for your loss.

“What’s that wood thingie behind the sheet rock you want me to nail the picture to, honeybun?” “Stud, muffin.” (This is a snippet of a recurring dialogue in… er… a house we’ve heard of. The names have been changed to protect those who can never ever remember construction terms no matter how many times their husbands patiently reeducate them. Also, to sound more sickly sweet just for fun.)

Yes, a Sam E. puzzle brings a little frisson of excitement, followed immediately by a bead of sweat on your brow that this—this right here right now—is how your cruciverbalist self-respect will meet its ignominious end. Although, sometimes, you wait to see how it goes before bedewing your brow because, hey, maybe it’s not a Saturday Sam E. puzzle and maybe it’s your lucky day. So you reserve your (usually sound) judgement and just dive right in like it’s like any other puzzle. “Phew!” you PSI with relief as 1A is obvious to you as soon as you read the clue. “Not so tricky after all, that other Sam.” You then plug in RETROGRADE and GLASS THERMOMETER with nary a cross, and EUREKA, and PIRANHAS, and EPILOG and, of course, MARCO Polo. Screeeech! Yeah. That’s the sound of the halting of your progress. Ten minutes later, you’re still trying to fit Arf!Aaarf! in as the answer to “Lab report component.” You do finish. You’ve been ant this hobby awhile so you finish. As for your self-respect? Well, who needs that silly OLD thing, anyway. As you fill in that last down clue, in your mind’s eye Sam E. is calling out to you, “SEE YOU! Till we meet again!” And he waves at you with his PSI-shaped pitchfork.

Maybe I’ve been doing these things for too long now (8 years, I think?) because I landed this one in about a minute longer than a typical Monday, and only that long because I stopped to think about the theme entries. Was it just me or was this an exceedingly straightforward puzzle?

Call me cheesy, but my favorite ACTION FIGURE was always my MOM. No, really: I even mostly forgot to rebel as a teenager because I was too busy looking up to her. You know, she saw her last advisee less than a week before the cancer finally took her? Somehow that sticks in my mind as more action-hero than all the other amazing, crazy things she’d done in her amazing, crazy life. I suppose I should have known that every crossword puzzle was going to start lighting up with words that so clearly, so obviously are about my mom. This will keep happening for a lot longer than the compressed time of these past few weeks. Eventually, it’ll generate smiles like today’s more reliably.

A bit funny that a grid centered around all things vegetarian is literally centered around the STOMACH (of a) PIRANHA. Made me smile.

Yes. Y E S. Thank you, Saturday gods, for this gift of a Sam E. puzzle. I woke up in the middle of the night (to find my husband watching TV—college football is a demanding love when the Friday night game comes at 4am), saw that the puzzle had just dropped, and thought, “Huh, why not.” And then—bliss. What a fantastic treat. Yes.

What a nifty Monday puzzle. ROCK N’ ROLL indeed. A fun fact: The reduction of ‘and’ to ‘n’ English is about 800 years old, both in pronunciation and writing. Prior to that, the ‘d’ in Old English ‘and’ (also found as ond, endi, or und) was always voiced. We know this from OE manuscripts, where it was never shortened to ‘n’ or ‘a/en’ but rather written out (unless replaced by the Tironian et (⁊) symbol, the precursor of our ampersand (&)), as well as from how OE poetry reads, where the ‘d’ in ‘and’ has to be fully voiced with an alveolar stop or it breaks meter. (Additional fun fact, that voiced ‘d’ is about 3 millennia old, with proto-Germanic andi/unda dating back to the Bronze Age.) But then comes Middle English, and ca. the 13th c. scribes start writing ‘and’ as ‘n̄’ or ‘en̄.’ (I’m using apostrophes here to denote italics. The apostrophe as a typographical way of denoting elision in speech only enters English in the 16th c. as printers adopt the Greek ἀπόστροφος or apostrophos or turning away. Before that, a macron over the ‘n’ indicated elision.) So we now see phrases such as ‘ale n wyn’ or the medieval version of SURF N’TURF, ‘fysshe n fleissh.’ Then we have 17th c. ale ’n’ cakes, then19th c. kiss ‘n’ tell and, finally, rock’n’ roll. And then advertisers drop one more apostrophe to make it all more visually pleasing, and now we’ve got our rock n’ roll and cookies n’ cream. But we’re not such a long way from the 13th c. and “Of mete n drynke he had gret nede.”

Yes. A thinking person’s Sunday. Thanks, Trenton.

I just took the time to go through the top 30 comments or so, making sure I thumbs-upped every single kudos. If Adam Wagner happens to look in on this forum, I'd like him to know how many people loved his puzzle. A colleague who teaches undergrads back home in the U.S. said this to me the other day (with apologies to undergrads back home in the U.S. who don't fall into this category): "A majority of my students see 'challenging' as 'gatekeeping.'" C'mon, folks, don't you want your puzzle to, well, puzzle? (Purely rhetorical question, btw., as I'm about to close this Safari tab and spend the day actually working. Have a good Sunday, everyone.)

I’d done the Saturday puzzle with its front-and-center zoomies just a few minutes before I started on this one, so I still had dogs on my mind (apologies, Señor Gato; we love your zoomies just as much) when I came across the RHODESIAN Ridgeback. Ohh, the memories… We were once the humans who belonged to a very special Rhody/Rottie mix. I’ve read that, if you’re a dog person, you will love all the dogs to which you’ll belong in your life. But that there will be that one dog—or three—who will be extra special. You’ll understand her—or them—in a way that runs more deeply than with the rest of your dogs, and she—or they—will see through all the way to the very essence of you. My first dog was that dog. Then, of the three I had when I met my husband, although I loved all of them equally fiercely, my Rhody/Rottie was my second “that dog.” My husband used to say that if she’d been born a person (and if you asked her, she *had* been), she would’ve been me, and had I been a dog, I would have been her. We were two of a kind. After she left us, followed within a year by our other two dogs, I thought I couldn’t do the happiness-always-ends-in-such-pain cycle again. But then The Dog found us, and she turned out to be one of those special dogs again. Incidentally, The Dog, the New Mexico desert product that she was, had a horror of KUDZU. But that’s another story. And now only Señor Gato is left to execute joyous zoomies before BED CHECK. And execute them he does, dogblesshim.

A toughie. Very fun. Great clueing—got misdirected several times. Happy Friday, everyone.

Ah, puzzle-induced trips down the memory lane… My parents never took me bowling because my mother couldn’t abide the idea of (horrors) renting a pair of SHOES someone else had worn. (We all have our phobias.) So, sophomore year, I (secretly) signed up for a bowling class and, for one joyous semester, myself and three girlfriends all of whose names ended in -ie traipsed out a side door and across the road to a bowling alley to experience bliss (because bliss it was). Afterwards, the three -ie’s and I would traipse out the bowling alley door and across the road again, but then double back to an ice cream shop for the kind of giant sundaes only a Utah ice cream parlor has ever made. Of course we cut Health to do it, and eventually our absence on sex ed day was noted—‘cause that day signatures to our awareness of the evi…er… dangers of all that were required. The abstinence pledge was optional. Not really. Parents were called, messages were left on answering machines, which were promptly erased prior to said parents’ getting home, of course, but then letters were sent and not all of them were successfully intercepted, what with 15-year old brains forgetting to check the mailbox every day. Then epistolary missives were sent in the other direction on the evi… er… dangers of letting children learn an other-people’s-shoe sport in lieu of mandatory tennis. Ah, the 90s. What a time it was. Thank you, Adrian Johnson, for the memory. (I can still bowl 200 if I’m showing off.)

Maybe it’s that it’s 4am, but I just couldn’t see the HOOHA/UHOK cross (I was only seeing ‘I’m OK”) and UBER and OXES in the SE corner. Had to close the puzzle and do Wordle, Connections, and Strands really quick while the back of the brain processed the jigsaw puzzle pieces. Other than that, it was a zippy puzzle. Really great cluing and interesting entries—a real Friday treat. Happy Fourth, everyone!

Puns! [smiles happily] [brings glazed donuts for Andrzej]

With _ _ _ CUS in place for “In which you might confront the elephant in the room,” I confidently plonked down CauCUS.

[Fights back tears] was worth the price of admission.

This was tough. CAT DAD was adorable and this GEN-X-ER appreciates a shoutout. But it was tough.

“Early number” got me but good. I didn’t pick up on there being other heteronyms because solving mainly on acrosses I never got to read those clues. For 2D though, with ETHE_ in place and there being left no other noun but ETHER, I *still* didn’t pick up on the silent ‘b’ in ‘number.’ I ended up finishing the rest and then running the alphabet on 2D. Other than that, this puzzle backed up so far up my alley that its back-up beeper alarm scared Señor Gato. Wait, can I pass this off as a segue to a gratuitous cat story? Yeah. I can. So Señor Gato had his senior check-up today. He waited for the doc to come in very nonplussed already, what with having been brushed first, then tricked into the cat carrier, then hauled off for what he knows is also his monthly shot and nail trim. So he was hunkered down under the bench I sat on. The doc came in, said, “Hey, Gato!” Gato glowered. The doc took out his stethoscope. Gato popped out from under the bench, ran over to his kitty carrier, hooked his nails into the mesh on its long end, one paw on each side, and started backing up back toward the bench, dragging the damn thing in front of him—tug, drag, tug, drag—until he completely barricaded himself in with it. It was the funniest thing I’ve ever seen him do—and he fills our days with funny things. All cats and dogs are special, but we really won the lottery with the two fur-kids that adopted us. Now returning to regularly scheduled Wordplay programming.

TENURE, DEANS, BURSAR, oh my. Got me thinking about work even before my first cup of coffee. All I need now is a CHANCEllor ENCOUNTER today. Happy Friday, fellow Wordplayers.

That’s a quality Monday puzzle right there, folks. Señor Gato KITTEN-HEELs every morning when I head to the kitchen to grind the beans. He waits for me at the top of the stairs, then matches me step for step as I sleepily navigate my way down. He’s been with us for almost 5 years now, and still it makes me break out in a wide grin each time he does it. He starts my day by wrapping himself around my heart like a warm blanket. Happy Monday, everyone.

Really fresh, sparkling fill, which made up for the editors’ decision to not run this really neat puzzle a couple of days earlier in the week. SPIDEySENSE was a last-minute correction after I decided that maybe I’ve never seen a sale sign proclaiming “Oy! LESS!” after all. Mmm, street food. We had my cousin (åtte times removed) from the Land of the Midnight Sun down for the weekend with her family just a few days back. We were all moseying around town and came across a Mexican restaurant with outdoor seating. Rain poured down all around us as we sat under an umbrella and ordered plates and plates of street tacos, quesadillas, and nachos to go with pitchers of beer for us and Mexican lemonade for the kiddos. It wasn’t quite food-truck food, but it came very close. Most importantly, my pale-faced, reared-on-lutefisk cousins couldn’t hack the hot, freshly made mango and pineapple salsa and it was mine, all mine, its tangy bite calling to mind my own land: the Land of Enchantment. New Mexico, I miss you so. On this homesick, maudlin note, I’m signing off to go grind the morning beans. Abigail’s puzzle has made me too hungry to go back to sleep.

Before I was married, I too frequently ordered NOON IONS on lunch dates. NOON anIONS only if the date were a GORGEous SECRET CRUSH.

Huh. [Currency depicting Mufasa Kemal Atatürk]: When did the Turks go and put the Lion King on the LIRA? Seems like an odd pivot away from their storied leader.

I knew there was a rebus afoot when I saw only 8 spaces for [Tool for removing a tree stump]. There are 22 letters in ‘good neighbor with an F250.’

Fun, though quick, but bonus points for turning my thoughts to Pablo Neruda, whose poetry carries one’s souls over the highest and the lowest tides of life. Here’s my favorite in William O’Daly’s translation: I have four dogs to declare: one is already buried in the garden, two others keep me on my toes, tiny wild destroyers, with thick paws and hard canines like needles of stones. And one scruffy dog, aloof, fair-haired in her gracious manner. No one hears her smooth golden steps or her distant presence. She barks only late at night at certain phantoms, so that just a few chosen hidden persons hear her on the roads or in other dark places.

Good luck in your new beginning, Deb. Although it’s such a loss for us, I know this is the start of something fabulous for you—cream always rises to the top. What a great Friday puzzle. Thanks, Adam and Rafael.

This isn’t a criticism because puzzles like this have a place in the cruciverbal pantheon: I thought today’s grid served as training wheels for solvers new to Thursday trickiness. I remember the first time I tackled rule-bending puzzles like this and feeling completely lost at sea. “What? How? [insert something worthy of a sailor]” On the other hand, if you’re an experienced solver (which I happen to be), you probably cotton onto the “trick” immediately, then speed through the rest because, as others have noted, the clueing was very straightforward today. I did appreciate the presence of 4 clues that require having read a book. I’ve been keeping track: They’re increasingly rare, and frequently absent altogether.

Oh good gawwwd, the new comment system has gone live [shudders]. Has the world forgotten New Coke? A really fun puzzle. Since I’ve already dug up the 80’s, anyone remember Dennis Quaid as Jerry Lee Lewis? No one’s ever belted out, “Goodness gracious, great balls of fire!” quite the same way. (Yes, I had a tween crush on him. What of it?) One more personal memory the puzzle stirred up. I used to sometimes speak for The Dog since she was limited to having very expressive eyes (one with a black patch and eyelashes, the other with white), a very wriggly body, and one incredibly active stumpy tail. “Oh goodness gracious” had somehow become her signature reply. Now that she’s gone, whenever I say, “Oh goodness gracious,” to some smartaleck comment from my friends, one of them always replies with, “As Tessie always used to say,” and another will supply, “And she said it quite often.” I’ll never stop missing that dog like crazy. Thanks, Joseph, for making me smile. Have a good night, all.