Curtis

I like challenges, but without too many obstacles. The long word plays, the slang, double entendres, oddities, all add up. My least favorite NYT puzzle in the past 2-3 months.

I am not a fan of rebuses, especially on Sunday. Often the rebus cell is fairly easy to determine or just omitted. While I detected about half of them, I lost patience with this puzzle because I thought the remaining down rebuses were too obscure.

The asterisk clues were annoying. An inordinate amount of time was spent trying to figure out the tangentially related answers, after about 90% of the puzzle was fairly readily solved.

I like challenging puzzles but this is ridiculous. Rebuses are hard enough. Leaving out occasional letters are very difficult. But leaving off letters on all down clues more than triples the usual solve time, even after the pattern is discovered.

Three Mondays in a row of exceeding my usual average. A bit frustrating. As for some of the stickier items, I've always thought that phew should be whew. Salad spinner was fairly foreign, especially for a Monday. Though that was not even close to the "tingly feeling" clue for ASMR. A completely left field item for Monday. At the end, the puzzle software had a glitch, not allowing reviewing the puzzle for more than a second at a time.