Dan

For the people posting their times, I will say this: Seeing the times of fast solvers is disheartening to many developing solvers, and for that reason is considered gauche in many corners of the crossword world.

Loved this Friday puzzle. First of all it was no pushover for me. But especially, there were So. Many. tricky clues with cleverly deceptive wordplay that made me chuckle aquiet. Looking forward to more puzzles from Kevin Zhou!

A cute theme, which was fun to solve. But once the theme clicked (thanks to the revealer clue), filling in most of the Down answers was nigh-automatic, so the puzzle did not put up much resistance. Also, some of the clues seemed unnecessarily strange. SETI is not a subject; it's an organization. I don't think OGLE is related to greediness.

I watched Lassie for years (with Jeff, Lassie's true owner) and Lassie don' need no stinkin' leash!

I found this difficult to get completely right, but not in a fun way. I paid no attention to the theme while solving. Now that it's solved I began looking at the theme, but it quickly seemed far too obscure for me to waste time figuring it out.

No doubt this is just me, but I *never* want to se either HEAD CHEESE or SEWAGE in my crosswords.

Not being a Star Trek watcher, my first reaction was "Oh, no, another puzzle based on something I know nothing about". But as the solve progressed, I became a big fan of this puzzle: By ignoring the circled letters it was possible to guess the long phrases without any Star Trek knowledge. And of course I could not help having learned a little about it just by osmosis, which did help a bit. At the end, I had to find my mistake(s), which turned out to be YeP instead of YUP. Lots of clever misdirection! So I ended up liking this puzzle a lot.

Broken link again, again. This was my favorite kind of Friday puzzle — tough, fair, clever, fun, and mysterious. Lots of tricky clues that had me guessing until they managed to solve themselves (I take no credit). Looking forward to more from this duo!

A fun puzzle and cute graphics. But I have no idea what the theme was.

Nice one. Cute using OCTAD and not OCTet.

A really fun Friday puzzle today, that had me struggling to figure out many different tricky clues, and which felt as if it took much longer than the clock shows. Just the kind of Friday puzzle that is my favorite.

I'm not sure why exactly, but I enjoyed every moment of solving this puzzle, which went pretty fast for me. The clues seemed very much on the easy side, but fun.

Wow, that was hard! I had to really work to get the upper left area, and I'm still figuring out why a few other things were what they were.

(The normal link doesn't work.) I liked this puzzle a lot, since it made me feel smart. It felt very hard in some sense, yet I was able to guess a lot of clue answers without any letters, which made this hard puzzle proceed pretty quickly. At times this resembled riding a pogo stick down a steep hill in a thick fog. (It did not, however, smack of juggling three flaming battery-powered chainsaws while they are turned on — not at all.)

Other than the broken link (again?!), this was a perfect Frday puzzle for me: Tough, but not as hard as a typical Saturday; fair; and fun. What more could one ask? I may be the only one who read the title "A Christmas Story" in that clue and thought it was "A Christmas Carol". Yes, the depredations of age. I knew OVALTINE was an old-time product (one I even enjoyed as a child) but — To think! — it was around during Dickens's time. Who knew!

This was a fun themeless for me. because the theme went over my head. But I will figure it out ex post facto (since it's too late for ex pre facto).

Granted, there is a question mark in the clue "Outlet store?" for 13D POWER. (But I hope this doesn't suggest that energy per time is actually stored in a wall outlet, because it isn't! Instead, energy is actually manufactured inside each powered device, by a new kind of battery based on a recently discovered archaea microorganism that eats light.)

An extremely fine Thursday puzzle from Simeon Seigel today. Besides a clever theme, the clues were for me appropriately tough, so it took me a good while before the theme dawned on me. Once it did, the oceans of white space could finally get filled in. Very satisfying!

I enjoyed figuring out the theme entries in this puzzle. But having once lived in France, I do not believe any of the ILEs in la Seine are "specks" (other than when depicted on a map).

This was a rather tough Friday puzzle for me. Initially the upper left and lower right got filled in pretty soon, but the two remaining quadrants resisted mightily. When only the lower left was left to fill, again it resisted mightily two or three more times, but when I finally saw the elusive J of JANE GREY, that catalyzed the fall of the remaining dominoes, allowing the solve to snowball and nail the last few clues like low-hanging fruit. Never heard of JINK. Not sure if I'd ever seen A.A.V.E. or FOREX before. A terrific crossword that afforded me a bunch more minutes of solving pleasure than usual.

I found this to be just the kind of Wednesday puzzle I like. Many cute clues, not a lot of pushovers, and a nice theme. I confess that I didn't know how LIGHT ON HIS FEET connects with the Dracula / Hallowe'en theme. This definitely took longer than my average Wednesday.

This was good! The theme deftly concealed itself for quite a while, which deprived me of precious theme letters and seriously slowed down the solve. Once I caught on, my repeatedly forgetting that I knew the theme gimmick did not apply to Down answers seriously slowed down the solve. Which made it all the more fun. And I appreciate that the theme entries all form words or phrases. I confess to not knowing who SID, TED, ABE, SAM, and MEL are.

I never find a clue like "Stinks" to be appropriate for the answer "odors". It is like using the clue "Shouts" for the answer "talks".

I enjoyed this challenge plenty! Plus, the black squares formed a beautiful pattern in the grid. My solve time was roughly my average for a Saturday.

A thoroughly satisfying Friday crossword, one of the hardest Friday in memory.

A nice Wednesday offering with snappy answers!

I found this puzzle lots of fun, but I did not use the theme while solving. It was tough to get the last few words right in the lower left, my last to fall. I confess I found the clue "Right-eous path?" for EAST not particularly well crafted: I don't view east as a "path" in any sense.

This felt hard but didn't resist mightily. It was an enjoyable solve. But some of the entries feel lame to me, like IN ARABIC.

A fun idea, which I found too easy tor it to be at all challenging.

That was fast fun, with a pretty easy theme to grok and pretty easy clues. I enjoyed the clue for a bejeweled egg knockoff — FAUXBERGÉ — having viewed a big collection of them at the Metropolitan Art Museum in 1964.

Excellent Saturday puzzle that for me was by far the hardest in months. At the end I could not at first figure out why MOONY should be "Crushing, in a way" and waffled over that for too long until the penny dropped. Loved the profusion of different words like IDYLLS, SARONG, ASTERISK, ANGELICA (which I hadn't heard of despite spending many years in California), and especially KABLOOEY. Thought the clues for SANTA TRACKER and CAMERA LENSES, among others, were terrific. Had a big Doh! moment after seeing the clue "Record qualifier" and thinking "What word(s) could mean asterisk?" until the light finally dawned. I could have done without *two* clues about the same obscure-to-me Marioverse (BOWSER could be clued as a traditional dog's name). But all in all, it's a great feeling when a puzzle seems nigh-impossible at first and then fingerhold by fingerhold and toehold by toehold becomes possible. The longer it takes, the more fun I have! One of my favorite Saturday puzzles in a long time.

I knew ages ago that other countries (like England) had different definitions for billion, trillion, etc. But I thought that the meanings had been uniformized since then. (I believe they have in England, at least.) Is that not the case in 2025? And I always shudder when the plural of octopus is as it tends to be in NYT crosswords, as if it's a Latin word, with the US replaced by an I. I've learned so much about these fascinating and intelligent creatures in the past 10 years that I practically revere them. I found the puzzle to be fine, but distinctly on the easy side for a Wednesday, possibly reaching my PB time. I prefer more of a challenge.

Contrary to the clue for SETS ("Women's professional tennis matches have three of them"), I've seen many such matches, including just this past week, that did not have three sets.

Love a classic Byron Walden Saturday puzzle like this! It was a struggle all the way, but once there were enough letters for some long entries, things moved a bit faster. Enjoyed entering some answers from no letters: PHILO, SANKA, SCALENE, CARET, RCA. And I recall Garrison Keillor telling us that sweet corn eaten within half an hour of being picked was BETTER THAN SEX. Still unclear why "Mocap suit components" is SENSORS (first tried SENiORS), but since I never met the word "mocap" before, this is not surprising.

This was a very tough Saturday puzzle! I had a great time working on the clues and I was almost finished in a reasonable time ... but then the quadruple natick happened with the Emily Dickinson quote and the French fries and the bad singer and the zip. Yowch!! Finally laid aside my pride and looked up the Dickinson quote, which did the trick. I thought the clue "Cardinal ___" was amusing because the answer SIN could refer to Cardinal Jaime Sin, a former archbishop of Manila. Also, this is a beautiful chiral diagram with fourfold rotational symmetry. And now I see that the eternal computer software glitch that is never debugged has added about 10 minutes to my actual solve time. (At least it didn't add several hours today as it did just a few days ago.)

This solved like a rather tough themeless puzzle with the quirk that some answers were repeated. I'm all in favor of tougher Sunday puzzles like this one, that result in prolonging the fun! I confess that I did not grasp the point of the repeated answers while solving. (I kinda thought that NYT crosswords needed to conform to NYT style, and I just saw the spelling PLUSES in the paper very recently, so was surprised to see A PLUSSES here.)

Whizzing through this thoroughly delightful Robyn Weintraub Friday puzzle brought back impressionistic memories of Robyn Weintraub Fridays of Yore, bathing me in warm nostalgia. (Also hit my fastest Friday solve ever.)

This was a very tough puzzle for me, that solved almost Saturday-normally for me until I got around to the upper right area and was badly stuck there until I looked up Mrs. John Quincy Adams and the Star Trek baddie. This was an excellent Saturday challenge, though I confess to wishing that I had known those two lookups (or that they weren't needed for the solve). But one thing is clear: You don't put LOX on a latke. Applesauce, or sour cream, or both applesauce and sour cream. Anything else, and it is not a regulation latke.

This was a fine, well-constructed Friday puzzle that I found definitely easier than I would prefer.

A very fine Sunday puzzle, with a fun theme and best of all, clues that took some thinking about before they could be filled in. I very much appreciate when Sunday a puzzle cannot be solved too quickly.

I learned that an APOGEE can just be an apex, and is not necessarily the highest point of an *orbit*.

Nice snappy Wednesday puzzle!

This was an enjoyable Saturday challenge. Yet again, this was a surprisingly fast solve, close to my personal best time for a NYT Saturday puzzle.