Mortiser

To be a commender You have to remember That after an aria "Well Done!" has gender.

A person can discover the trickery and thrill in the larger process of solving but then get completely stymied by the small but critical difference between TCM and TMC.

Departing NYT columnist Deb Amlen is referenced in one of today's Washington Post puzzles by Evan Birnholz. A worthy tribute.

Don't do this puzzle when you're hungry, or you'll enter brioche rather than chignon.

When I discovered the vowel thing,I realized that some folks are much further and deeper into word and language interplay than I will ever be. Remarkable to have that level of structural command over an entire grid. And with less than 60 clues, which is a sign of a brainy, challenging 15 x 15 puzzle.

If this level of difficulty is a NYT debut at 16 without excessive references to typical teen cultural interests, I have no trouble calling it the work of a prodigy.

When alternate words fit and create a seemingly logical cross, you can get in a jam. There are such things as "prizebots" and a "bar" is a reasonable goal to shoot for, whether it's high, or in the current moment, desperately low.

Corn dogs, bangers, donuts and Taco Bell - I'm headed to Statin Island. To be counseled by my concerned relative Auntie Oxidant. Who will push the chia and tilapia. And forbid the sloshing.

Thank you, Joel for the great job you did as puzzle editor (and constructor) in Will's absence. In my view, you got continually better at the job as you went along. Not knowing anything about the situation, as time went by, I began to sense that you might have the job for quite a while longer. My thought was that if so, the helm was in very capable hands. The NYT is fortunate to have an ample well of talent in this department.

If Alexander was a red headed country star, his stage name would be Rebus Max Entire. Seriously, I enjoyed the puzzle. A higher rebus count than I've seen in the past, but I liked that it kept me on my toes right down to the last clue. And that the rebuses worked in both directions, which isn't always the case. Oh, what a busy farm he built When first he stocked it without guilt

Patti Varol is a good puzzle editor. Glad to see her get one of her own published here. Her LAT edited puzzles are run by the Wash Post. A few weeks ago, the Post reformatted their online puzzles into an awful neon color chiclet tile design with each puzzle load preceded by a mandatory ad. As a longtime Post subber, I refused to even view those puzzles and sent the department comments about it. The Post has now made the online puzzles more palatable, so I'm glad to say that Patti's edited grids are back in my daily life.

With couple of "entries", I pictured the Church Lady putting her fingertips up to her pursed lips and murmuring: "Oh, my".

The answer to the classic kid lit question "Is Your Mama A Llama?" is "No, But My Orca Pod Is An Octad".

Today's word found in both the NYT and LA Times/WaPo crossword puzzles is: "Lola" (the bunny from Space Jam).

Constructors have a lot of license with some words. There could be a new rendition of Let's Call The Whole Thing Off that would go something like: "You spell Khadafy and I spell Gaddafi" "You spell hummus and I spell hoummos" Then you get to "babaganoush", and things really start to open up.

Like driving with the windows down in a light rain, I enjoyed the puzzle on its own merits and disregarded the difficulties entirely.

Whether by design, chance, or solver shortcomings, this was one of those puzzles where alternate words fit perfectly and seemed spot on in some places and then became devilish to dispute and disprove with crosses. I decided to not worry and blast away with fills whether correct or not, and enjoy the process of impeaching them when needed. Much easier and more pleasant to do online than on paper.

A little harder than the usual Tuesday, but not as hard as a Thursday. The main thing I liked about this one is that there was a moment when I was sure there were rebuses that I hadn't figured out yet, but as I kept solving, I found that there actually were none. Often, it's the other way around, and I have to be led unwittingly to the rebus water trough. I imagine the mind of the constructor making the process more enjoyable by doing things like locating "Iman" and "Oman" close to each other. Clustering similar or thematic words and being able to jockey them around when the opportunity presents itself.

Today's word found in both the WaPo and NYT crossword puzzles is "Urdu".

Really weak cluing on 1 Down. Not a solid reference at all.

I loved this puzzle. Seeing the clues for the publishing dates immediately spurred the brain to think of what happened in those months and years. If you thought you knew what the historical event being referred to was, you still had to figure out the wording and spelling of the headline. 1948 was especially fun - it was a big year, and the publishing reference could have been an event in India, Czechoslovakia, or Palestine among others. No way to know what the event was until a few letters got filled in via crosses. I'm sure there will be some haters and I've hated puzzles in the past myself, but this one sat just right in my experience, with good cluing that made for fairly brisk fills.

I think it would be OK for the constructor to stay on a steady track and let another seven years go by before submitting puzzle #3.

I liked that the theme fills ran in both directions. I sometimes struggle with vertical trickery - I feel like I'm trying to read an old Chinese newspaper. Solvers can take the Sheltand Islands approach to this puzzle. If you liked it, you can refer to it as a Whatsay, Mademyday. If you couldn't crack it, you can walk away muttering Muggle Flugga.

Thanks for the teakettle photo caption advising us not to get too steeped in stress about the year ahead. If you know a way to avoid that, please share it with us. Do you and Maggie Haberman know something we don't know? Also, the Mini crossword did not get its year off to a stellar start, sorry to say. Hoping for a return to its usual standard in the coming days.

When you have two constructors, each trying to land their own 10 rebus legal limit, this is what you end up with (i.e., overworked).

Great puzzle. I guess we should award stars. But the traditional limit is still five, I think. I almost wish that I hadn't found the clue early on that revealed the number of rebuses. Might have been more fun to carry on not knowing. PSI was my undoing, as I had PEI which worked both ways in that cross if you didn't know the numbering of letters in the Hebrew and Greek alphabets. Which I didn't. Learning enough Latin to be an altar boy in the 60's was tough enough.

OK for Joel. Is tomorrow's puzzle by Amos? Or would that be O-bad-idiah? It's fun when the constructor sneaks their name or some other such tidbit into the grid. It's like the Alfred Hitchcock blip cameos.

A salute to the Herculean puzzle constructor! Hera Hera!

Classic case of a puzzle having some seemingly easy initial fills that turned out to be about three levels of correctness below the actual answers. AILS instead of ACTS, MOB instead of APB, OTIS instead of ETTA, REDS instead of CUBS, SOLD instead of SLID, SHEA instead of BEAN, and so on. Only way I can solve a puzzle like this is to be willing to get rid of any fill on the spot, no matter how badly I wanted it to be right.

Fun in general, but I understand the gripes. My issue is tending to overthink. Figuring: OK, Thursday, where are the rebuses? Added to make the verticals trickier somehow. There must be a pony in there somewhere. No need to make it more complicated than it is. Once you know your elphaba, it's as simple as ABC.

If I go to bumper cars a few times and I keep seeing the same guy who routinely devastates everyone else out there, I'll console people by saying: "You have to understand, this is his career".

For 99% of the solve, my thought was: "OK, I'm Gomer and this puzzle is Sergeant Carter, but I'm here for it". A tough challenge that I accepted. But as several others have mentioned, the puzzle took undue liberty in one instance. "Jake/Jape"? That was a bridge too far.

Just a general comment: it seems as though the Times is publishing the next day's puzzles online earlier and earlier during the current day. I find this increasingly annoying, as I try to carve out time to get to the day's puzzles when I can. I race to the puzzles, trying to get the web pages open before the next day's puzzles get posted and when I'm too late, it feels like I've missed the cutoff time for an online credit card payment. A puzzle posting shouldn't be the cause of this sort of added time crunch stress. It's not the end of the world to have to go into the puzzle archives to find the current day's puzzles at 9pm, but again, I find it to be bothersome, and none of the other major papers that publish puzzles online post the following day's puzzles before midnight. We live in a world where the 24 news cycle moves too fast and the online front page of the NYT changes by the hour. Trying to keep up with that is bad enough without finding out that the Times has a hair trigger when it comes to publishing the puzzles, which I find to be a treasured sanctuary from the daily madness. Please consider slowing the train down a bit and publishing the next day's puzzles closer to midnight. Or even at midnight, as is done with Connections.

Good to see Joel's byline on today's Mini - he must be done with jury duty on the Stefanik sedition trial.

Charlie Parker, Billy Gibbons, Ginger, Tevye, and the anthem of a worthy North American nation. Range.

Good effort for a debut, although I could sense that it was a debut before finding that out due to some of the cluing. Some clues good, a few clunky or not pleasingly aha. Not a consistent level of cluing prowess overall. That will come in time. I liked the mixture of old ways of speaking ("OGLE", "I SAY") and contemporary or futuristic references. When 58A started filling in from back to front and I had "ISLAVA", I really wanted it to fill as "BRATISLAVA". When Riga comes, can Slovakia be far behind?

Just as the "You Sure" level of the wordplay was revealing itself to me, I got another fundraising text from Sherrod Brown. I wrote back: "Dear Sir Rod: How much do you need?"

Good job. Fun in stages because amid partial fills, at first I thought I needed to sub in the rebus "CUE" for a "Q". I hadn't seen that there were plurals involved and a need for more Q's. Vanna, can I buy a consonant? Vanna: "No." Delete rebuses, hope for a gold star.

After filling in the Monty clue, I looked up the line of royal companions and was so relieved to find out that the dog was not named after General Montgomery. No animal should have to suffer such a fate.

I liked that this one pushed the usual NYT vocab envelope a little bit. "Ogreish", "Trank". I was sure that "Historic theater chain" was "Odeon", despite the "chain" part. I would not have gotten "Loews" without the crosses. I didn't know we were going to bring the Tisch family into it. Also didn't know we were going to bring the Ewing family into it. But everything balances out with the inclusion of "Omahans", whose numbers include Warren Buffet, the paragon of modest living amid uncountable wealth.

At this moment, John Cougar Mellencamp is trying to convince a good friend of his to change his name to Marhawklberg.

So interesting that the Washington Post mini puzzles are usually harder than the ones that Joel constructs for the NYT but as a puzzle editor, he is a stern taskmaster who leaves the Post/L.A. Times in the dust.

The trick vertical fills were OK in theory but solving online, you can't spell the word from the bottom up without letters and squares jumping around with a mind of their own. It's a bit of a chore to fill low to high manually, resetting the next square each time. I used the opportunity to hone my backwards spelling skills so I could fill top to bottom the way the grid gremlins wanted me to. I can spell letters backward well enough in music, but that little alphabet only goes up to G.

I get a kick out of how wildly incorrect some of my fills can be. So I thoroughly enjoyed finding out that "Resistance Figure" was "Ohm" instead of "Che".

All good for the most part, with the trickery perhaps a bit too easy for some of the more clever and astute among us. But adequate for me. My only slight itchbay would be amscray.

On a cheerful lively mind basis, this is as close to Merl level cluing as I have seen in my recent travels.

The undecipher'd pun tree under whose burden Some solvers succumb, puzzles the will And makes us rather bear the fills we have Than ask of others what we know not alone Then conscience does make commenters of us all