Barry Ancona

The complexity involved in creating this masterpiece is mindboggling. We should prostrate ourselves before the constructor, saying "We are not worthy." I see the early birds got the worm; I hope later arrivals do too. Bravo, Dylan!

Cirrus, cirrocumulus, cirrostratus, altocumulus, altostratus, nimbostratus, cumulus, stratocumulus, stratus. CLOUD NINE

Deb, Keep staying in the day, every day, for many many days.

On xwordinfo.com, Jim Horne notes: My dictionary defines audacious as "debuting on a Friday with two triple-stacks." I quite agree. Nice one, Caroline. Glad you tried a themeless.

Well, exQQQQQQQQ me! (Steve Martin did this puzzle decades ago.)

Meep Meep.

Deb, 9D? How soon you forget! [Plan B, for seniors] is where you go when you don't get into your first choice college.

One L of a crossword! no L's in emus

Now that was a Saturday puzzle. Thank you, Byron!

Owen, I hope this fine puzzle is just one of the good things to come out of your dark time, and that better times will bring you even more good things, for yourself and to share. And let's hear it for CASTPARTIES!

Now that was a fine Friday. Thank you, Zachary.

Saw the title. Filled 19A and 22A and got the double theme (as referenced in 126A). Loved the amazing cross of 40A and 69A. Had fun finding the remaining rebuses and completing the recipe. Brava, Miranda! Chef's kiss! Sunday POY nominee.

There is a mistake in the 17 Across clue. The first word of the clue, rather than Classic, should be Former.

CORN BELT two days in a row. EOM

Yes, indeed, Ella. This was a very Thursday Thursday. I hope it has lots of takers. I was taken with it.

Now that was a reasonably Saturdayish puzzle! Nice to see you back, Josh!

Thanks for yet another delightful Monday, Lynn Lempel! N.B. This is NYT XWP #104 for Ms. Lempel, and her 75th Monday. She made her debut in 1979.

The constructors write: "We were told that the test solvers found the gimmick clear enough without the extra help, and we hope that this was your experience as well." Schlossbergs, It was my experience too. We'll see how many solvers agree. Thanks for the enjoyable spin(s) around town. P.S. I hope those who had a hard time figuring out the themers will still find some SILVERLININGS.

I cannot tell a [lie]; this one was fun. My longest delay was wanting to Share A CAB before realizing I needed to SPLIT it. Thanks, Rena, and enjoy Wash U.

Here is the Tuesday puzzle! And a fun one at that. Thanks, and happy birthday, Adrianne.

This may be a tricky rebus puzzle to the very newest solvers (and columnists), but not marking their location and having different rebuses used to be par for the course. It's nice to see it back, and I trust the rebuses will come reasonably quickly, given the puzzle's gentle cluing and the obviousness of what the rebuses will be. Thanks for the fine grid, David; I wish the editors had left or put more bite in the clues. And tell me again why a SPY would exterminate a bug...

A tour de force! Bravo, Brandon. Sunday POY contender in my book. U?

I grasped the first part of the theme immediately with 9D, and gasped when I saw the second part at 70D. Jeff Chen has outdone himself in "tech support" for John Rippe's theme. This was delightful solve with a meaningful theme. Bravo! Bravo! Emus are not endangered.

Hi Deb, Re: 16 Across comment In my experience, re-entry before touchdown refers to spacecraft, not aircraft. (Re-entering the Earth's atmosphere.) Your orbit may vary. Your PLANET may too.

Interesting grid and interesting clues made for an interesting Saturday solve. A few feints and dekes, but a fair fight. Thanks, Fritz.

Pleasant answers, as I would expect from these two pros. Too many easy clues, which cannot be on these two pros. One should not be able to say about a Musa/Goldstein Friday crossword: ITSASNAP.

Caitlin suggests: Today’s Theme The only indications of today’s theme are eight sets of circled squares... I suggest: This is a Sunday when -- more than most -- reading the title is a very, very helpful indication of the theme.

Very nice, Ricky. This puzzle stacks up well.

I love learning useful things from crosswords. I never knew the band NSYNC was actually *NSYNC. Thank you, Hanh. You're a STAR.

A sad note for Wordplay old timers: Dr W, one of the regular commenters from blog days, has passed. He had not been well recently, and retired from posting a few years ago. We discovered we lived a few blocks from each other, and got together several times. <a href="https://www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/nytimes/name/stephen-warshaw-obituary?id=54529218" target="_blank">https://www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/nytimes/name/stephen-warshaw-obituary?id=54529218</a>

I found this very clever and very gentle start to a new year of Sunday puzzles. BASE PAIRS indeed. No cross words for this one, please. Thanks, Gene.

No rebuses. You can come out now.

43A: SPARTA did send troops to the Trojan War, but Odysseus, who led the force in the horse, was an Ithacan (and I don't recall that any Spartans were with him). I don't mean to 58A at the rest of the puzzle, which I enjoyed. Not the trickiest of Thursdays, but not for the birds. Thank you, Alex.

I think I'll sit down for the reactions to this one. Nice Thursday, Dan!

Zhou said it for me: "Obviously, we have a perfect understanding of day-of-week difficulty, so when we wrote this we confidently clued it at a Wednesday level, only to have it be accepted for a Thursday." Nice one, Zhou and Mal. IMO, it has legs.

Hi Caitlin, I had fun with the puzzle, but I didn't read the theme and title quite the way you did. You write "...all of which include at least one two-letter interjection adding another meaning to the entry." But the er or ers don't change the meanings; the words *containing* them have different meanings. The themer clues ask for a wacky reading of an ordinary phrase using a different sense of a word containing the -er. I read ER, IN OTHER WORDS... to mean "ER in words that have other meanings." YMMV MSRP emu

WHAT ARE THE ODDS? that people will enjoy this puzzle? I have no idea, but I thought it was great! Mark Diehl likes to have fun with words, and this puzzle delivered fun words. Fine Sunday fare for me.

I guess that for New Year's Day, three clearly located and gently clued rebuses should offer a gentle Thursday for post-revelry solving. I mean, this puzzle has ANSWER KEYS in the grid! I hope to see some actual trickery next week. (Nice to see your byline, Deb.)

One of those puzzles where I had absolutely nothing on the first pass Across the top, thought I had maybe a Down or two, and then started connecting, half wondering where I knew some of the words from, but then wondering why they had come so hard at the start. For me, that's a fine Saturday puzzle, but not 16D. Thanks, Byron.

I've been solving the Sunday Crossword for more than 50 years. I've enjoyed tricky themes and simple themes (and tolerated no themes). I've enjoyed fill clues of varying difficulty. I expect some Sundays to be easier, and some to be harder, and I'm fine with that. I thought today's theme was clever, and I thank Lance and John for creating the puzzle. I also thought it was, for lack of a better description, a Monday-level theme, and I found most of the fill clues to be Monday-level. To me, this was not the Sunday Crossword, it was a large Monday. YMMV.

A Saturday puzzle! Thanks, Katie.

Fine Friday fare, and a sparkling debut. Thanks, Jack!

Elegant. Classy. Fine Sunday Crossword fare. And thanks to [what I consider] Monday-level fill clues for at least the top half of the puzzle, newer solvers should be able to back into the theme answers if they don't immediately grasp the theme. Nice one, Michael Lieberman. Capital idea.