Glenn Weinberg

@Xword Junkie given the context of the puzzle I don’t mind the ambiguity of ALFA/ALPHA at all.

@Andrzej well, they try, although with a lot less success than they had pre-Reagan. And supporting tariffs is not a good look, even if it is on brand.

@Andrzej if only English used the German spelling of Rhein there would be no confusion 😀

@Bill in Yokohama I say if okay is ok for OK, KAYO is ok for KO.

@Ιασων BAMA is one of the most famous college football teams here, consistently vying for the national title and possibly better-known than many NFL teams in the general population. Blitzed is definitely a slang synonym for drunk here. PARD is absolutely a word in the context of westerns (movies). “Over well” is certainly a way to describe how you want your eggs cooked in the local greasy spoon diner. So yes, harder for non-Americans, but still very much in the vernacular of American constructors, editors and solvers.

@Lisa the clues/answers are a math/language hybrid. The math is that 1/4 is also 25 percent. The language is that 1/4 is a quarter, and a quarter is a US coin worth 25 cents. So write out “25 PERCENT,” take away the 25 (“no quarter”), and you are left with just PERCENT. Yes, it’s complicated and convoluted but it is correct in the context of NYT crossword clues and answers.

@G perhaps, but @Andrzej is right about the white asparagus. It’s always a treat when we can get to Central Europe in the spring and have a white asparagus dinner.

@Heidi “I PARRED that hole” is very commonly used in golf, assuming you’re good enough to actually PAR a hole. For future crossword reference the same is true for bogied, birdied and eagled, although the frequency of those is proportional to one’s handicap.

@David Connell while I don’t live in LA, I’ve visited or driven through many times over the past 30+ years, and I can tell you that the air has improved tremendously in that time. 30 years ago you could barely see the mountains on a “clear” day, and my eyes would burn as I drove down into the valley. Now, thanks to the EPA and California emissions standards, the air is about as good as in any major US city. We can only pray that the current regime doesn’t send us too far backwards into the days of killer smog.

@Andrzej An ALLEY OOP is a basketball play in which one player passes the ball above the rim and the other dunks it. Hence a “two-person” shot.

@Jerry @Jane Wheelaghan to avoid any future crossword confusion, while Lake Erie may be eerie, it is spelled Erie.

@Barry Ancona Sam had me at Amsay.

@Harrison must be one of those generational things. As a Boomer I had no problem with either.

@Jane Wheelaghan The original ITS A SMALL WORLD was installed at the 1964-65 New York World’s Fair and then transported to Disneyland. Replicas have since been built at other Disney parks. The main reason it’s ironically iconic is the music, which many consider the most insidious ear worm of all time.

@Charles Peterson legitimate anti-fascism does not need to be, nor should it only be, left of center, let alone “left-wing.” That would be equivalent to saying that the US and its soldiers in World War II were communists for fighting the Nazis. @Yoshke is correct, this consistent cluing of ANTIFA by the Times editors is right-biased.

@Mean Old Lady the idiom referred to in 11D is “slow on the UPTAKE[S],” i.e., slow to learn.

@Barbara Prillaman I slogged through everything except the NE in something over an hour, and finally gave in and had to look up hekelphone. Then it fell into place with a few corrections, after I accepted that DOOFUS wasn’t considered too mean to ding-dongs.

@Reggers let’s take the example of 5 down with 23, 26 and 28 across. 5 down, “Metal marble” is a STEELIE, with LIE being a rebus. 23 across, “Contradict,” is BELIE, also using the rebus. And finally, 26 and 28 across, “Actor who played a character with the same first name on ‘Two and a Half Men’” is CHAR(LIE) SHEEN, with the rebus LIE “spiked” up into the preceding row. Does that help?

@Helen Wright in the US sandwiches served on long rolls (or in some upscale locations baguettes) are regionally known as submarines/subs, heros, hoagies or grinders. Probably some additional more obscure names too.

@Drew Arthur Ashe is hardly obscure for anyone who follows tennis at all, not to mention his name (albeit most often just his last name) has been an answer on the order of 200 times.

@Elle I, too, “knew” it had to be SRS, but couldn’t initially live with OPENENDER so waited for the “keep trying” before changing it.

@Lady Morgan Kelly Diana a CO[-]TENANT is one who shares an apartment (or flat), i.e., living quarters. If there are two COTENANTs then they would each pay half the rent. So “paying half for quarters.”

@Grumpy you must be one of those people for whom stress suppresses hunger. There is another group, me included, for whom stress makes us want to do nothing but eat. That is the definition of STRESS EAT and as others have pointed out grief is a stressor. If I didn’t STRESS EAT I’d probably weigh 20 pounds less.

@NYC Traveler yeah, I can’t imagine anyone not from Chicago or in the theater knowing ARIE Crown.

@Alexis yes, “LINE A” is at the top of a tax schedule in the US. We have forms (the most [in]famous of which is Form 1040, the base form for all but the simplest personal income tax submissions), and then those forms have schedules attached to them to provide more detail on things such as itemized deductions (Schedule A), capital gains (Schedule D), etc. Things a CPA would know 😀

@Andrzej I love my BMW i4, and with one you could slightly counterbalance your emissions-spewing countrymen while still getting excitement and performance.

@HeathieJ so enthusiastic were you, apparently, that you stuck in a Star Wars reference to sow confusion in the non-SF crowd.

@Ken since you’ve conceded GALOIS: 1) There are multiple BLOW DRY BARs in Madison. 2) BOARDIES are common in areas where people surf, so okay, maybe not in Madison, but still, tens of millions of people are probably familiar with board shorts and their nickname. 3) As The Simpsons is one of the longest-running series in television history, clues about Bart’s alter-egos seem quite fair and cross-generational. That only leaves OCELO.

@Natdegu and UP/DOWN worked too, resulting in one of the smallest rebus fonts ever.

@Ms. Billie M. Spaight that’s because until the advent of word processing and inkjet/laser printers only professional typesetters had access to the en and em dashes. In the olden days of typewriters (and the early days of word processing when printers had limited character sets) we used a double-hyphen to represent an em dash. (Except for those lucky enough to use an IBM Selectric, which had an em dash, along with being the best typewriter and keyboard ever.) Nowadays the double-hyphen has gone the way of the double space after a period.

@Jane Wheelaghan yes, we say “I’m fine” (or “I’m good,” although the meanings can be subtly different). But we would never ask “Are you fine?”

@Andrzej as I completed this puzzle I thought of you and how much this was the essential anti-Andrzej puzzle. While JUG BANDs are cute (especially when populated by Muppets), and as you know one must BONE UP on American trivia to be successful at NYT crosswords, I didn’t particularly love this one either.

@Andrzej you don’t get the SERIES part of the joke because you don’t think like a mathematician. Absolutely nothing wrong with that. As you often point out we’re all wired differently. Honestly it took me a while too, even though I am well aware of what a mathematical SERIES is having studied math into college and should have seen it had I paid more attention to the numbers in the clues. The more I think about it the more impressed I am with the amount of math and science in this puzzle integrated with the music, Broadway and language references. Quite the unusual combination.

@Andrzej I doubt most Americans know about beaver coins either. I certainly didn’t. But Oregon’s nickname is the Beaver State and Oregon State University sports teams are known as the Beavers. American geeks would know the former, American sports fans would know the latter, and that covers a lot of bases (thus reinforcing your baseball education).

@Kevin yes, a WINE SELLER is a thing. It just occurred to me it’s a pun on WINE cELLaR too. I had WINE deaLER first. Either way as a Cab drinker my mind went there fairly quickly. That said, count me among the NE corner haters.

@Marty must be serious climate change if you never get RAW weather in NYC. it used to be pretty common there in the winter. Although it is often RAWER in places like Boston or Chicago.

@Antoine It’s Friday. The clue is *supposed to be* misleading/confusing, while still being technically correct. Let me rephrase the clue: “When he became world chess champion, Gukesh was a ____.” The actual phrasing is just as valid, although clearly intentionally misleading. So many people complaining the clueing was too straightforward, and this group complaining it was too misleading. Must drive constructors and editors nuts.

@dutchiris but the rebuses do go in both directions, and in the case of the down entries turn one word into two. The challenge is in finding where the rebuses go. Sometimes it’s obvious, sometimes less so. It took me ages to find the trick — I had the entire puzzle except for the rebuses and one other square filled in before I figured it out. I don’t suppose you got caught by the incorrect grid in the printed version of the magazine, did you?

@Nancy J. Just as in this puzzle, the key to getting around in an IKEA STORE (not to mention putting together the furniture) is to FOLLOW DIRECTIONS.

@Andrzej for me, yesterday and today were within a second of each other, and a minute longer than Monday. My averages are 3 Monday-Tuesday and 5 Tuesday-Wednesday. So yeah, a bit odd so far this week.

@David PTO = Paid Time Off. It’s generally what you get when you lump vacation and sick days together.

@Steve L in Beijing, as it turns out, one does eat Beijing duck.

@Isabeau goes along with the extra vowel in ON A PAR.

@Vaer but the location of the rebus was indicated - by the revealer. As was the addition of the “U.” Much cooler than an explicit reference IMNSHO, even if I solved without it and didn’t get all the details until I read the comments.

@Grant I’m not in the biz, but I am into wine and food (and the shows that go with them), and I’ve heard SOMM quite a bit, although I suspect that the more pretentious sommeliers don’t like it much.

@Andrzej let me try a non-mathy explanation of scatter plots and regression curves. Draw a very long cross (what we call the X and Y axes in math, but I digress). Add a bunch of dots in various places, but to make this easier for demonstration purposes have most of them form a rough line or at least an elongated blob. Those represent the data points in a scatter plot. Now draw a line lengthwise through the approximate middle of the dots. That’s your regression curve.

@Andrzej the University of Miami is in the Atlantic Coast Conference - ACC. For decades the conferences were stable so keeping up with US college sports wasn’t required - once you knew, you knew. But the conferences change almost every year these days thanks to all the money being poured into US college sports (well, American football and basketball, anyway), so asking about conference affiliation is becoming borderline unfair.