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.

Wow, that was one of my slowest Fridays in recent memory. I think this was probably one of the tougher Fridays recently ... and I am 100% in favor of more and more puzzles like this. I'm too punchdrunk from being buffeted hither and thither by this puzzle to be specific, but I enjoyed a whole boatload of super-clever clues that kept me guessing for a long time. A very fine Friday experience for me.

I found this puzzle to be a more or less ordinary solve. The theme, however, was overwhelmingly uninteresting to me.

A perfectly fine puzzle. But not Saturday difficulty by any means.

That was one terrific Friday puzzle! It was quite the challenge. At no point did I feel completely stalled, but had to circulate all over the puzzle multiple times in order to eventually make progress. The kind of puzzle that leaves me with a sense of accomplishment when it is finally solved.

I found this to be one terrific puzzle. By re-interpreting familiar phrases, they are clued by mysterious sequences of words. Finally the light dawns. But for me, even better than this fun theme was the consistently high level of cute and deceptive clues, many of which had me fooled and/or mystified for a long time ... combined with the consistently high level of interesting answers, including the theme answers. The evilest clue of all was 20A "Ape-man's introduction" for ME, TARZAN — the last thing on my mind from the letters M E T A R _ _ _. I think from the very tricky constructor's name I was half expecting something like his puns & anagrams puzzles with innovative new clue types and other edgy wordplay, but this really fun puzzle was played straight.

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!

Loved solving the puzzle. Like a rather easy Friday puzzle. (But it was over *much* too fast for a Saturday. There were way too many clues that hardly slowed me down. Please go back to when Saturday puzzles were Saturday puzzles. Today's "Saturday" puzzle strikes me as what must have been a deliberate choice by the editors. It seems impossible to have merely been a random fluctuation — there were just way too many non-Saturday level clues. Editors: Please nip this ill-conceived plan in the bud.

Now that was one tough Friday puzzle that proceeded by fingerholds and toeholds but ultimately resolved itself. MY favorite kind of solve. It was a good deal longer than my Friday average, so the fun lasted longer. And there were plenty of cleverly deceptive clues that resisted for a long time. Looking forward to more puzzles from Barbara Lin!

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.

Yet again — two days in a row now — the Wordplay link in the usual place on the Games page is broken. (Cute puzzle, by the way.)

This went fast ... until there were about five squares left to fill, and then slowed to a crawl. Fun.

I really liked this puzzle! And I needed to fully get the gimmick in order to finish it — something that I especially appreciate. And finally. it was all about my favorite polar molecule!

I was surprised by the nonstandard plural SERAPHS.

I've never found the words OR SO to be the least bit wishy-washy. (Inexactness and wishy-washiness are two different things.)

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

That felt just like a fine Saturday puzzle during the solve, but it was over too soon.

Aha — so OREO is now a collective noun.

This felt hard at first but went fast, as it turned out. I wanted RAzor's EDGE before RAGGED.

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.

I loved this!. (Though I confess that my first try for "Game point" was Antler, which made me chuckle, but after realizing the answer is ARCADE I had to retract the chuckle.)

Any puzzle with both CARACAS and MARACAs puts me in a good mood!

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

This felt like a Saturday puzzle, but solved a lot faster than yesterday's Friday puzzle. It surely wasn't easy — I was stuck in the NE and SE areas for a long time. But this was a lot of fun, with tricky clues.

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!

We have been very nicely treated to some lovely recycling!

I was taught as a child that a JIGSAW is not a puzzle; it is a tool. And if I meant the puzzle, I should say "jigsaw puzzle".

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

Nice one. Cute using OCTAD and not OCTet.

Cute! I grasped the theme only little by little, which is always more fun. An enjoyable solve with plenty of geography.

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 all in favor of the many forms of wordplay that Will Shortz has introduced to the NYT crosswords. But if I had my druthers I'd be totally in favor of going back to a time when no brand names were ever mentioned, people's sexual orientations were never alluded to, there was no slang that only a niche crowd knows, and no answers involved not-nice words (the kind that people used to teach their young children not to say).

I would have liked this to last longer, but other than that it was an ideal Friday puzzle. It occurs to me that it *might* be an editorial decision to make weekend puzzles easier *periodically* to help allay the frustration that some solvers probably feel when tackling a NYT Friday or Saturday crossword.

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.

I found that to be fun and well clued, and also I had a heckuva time getting the last few letters right.

This was hard! at first, and I had to go all over the place to add a speculative letter here and there — or remove one, as the case may was. (C'mon, that *ought was grammatical.) But little by little — littlerally — the gestalt gestalted and words slowly began to reveal themselves. And my solve time wasn't that much longer than my Friday average. There were many great clues, Saturday-worthy, perhaps. Like "Camp neckwear" for BOAS, where camp don't mean summer camp, but campy. Or "Yard sticks?" for FENCE. And the six 15s always make a puzzle fun. It seemed ironic that "In tandem" clued AS ONE, while it might also clue "AS TWO". And I was awestruck when at a conference in 1983 I found myself in Detroit and visited the Detroit Institute of Arts and saw the Rivera murals. Especially considering that his Man at the Crossroads mural (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_at_the_Crossroads#/media/File:Mural._El_hombre_en_el_cruce_de_caminos._Diego_rivera_(1934).JPG" target="_blank">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_at_the_Crossroads#/media/File:Mural._El_hombre_en_el_cruce_de_caminos._Diego_rivera_(1934).JPG</a>) was destroyed almost as soon as it was completed, these murals are well worth a visit. (There are also some great murals in the manner of Rivera, in Coit Tower in San Francisco.)

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.

Yet another use of the word LIKE that is ultra-common in my experience at least for 40+ years is for the phrase "to be like" used in the present tense to mean "said". As in "I'm like "What are you doing here?' and he's like 'I dunno, nothin' really.'" I'm not sure if that's part of Valleyspeak or not.

That started very slow, but quickly picked up, and ended after about my average Friday time — but it felt much faster. I haven't had a mangosteen since visiting Thailand in 1968 — but I have never tasted a fruit as delicious. (They weren't allowed in the U.S. until recently, due to fear of insect pests. Maybe I can find one now.)

(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.)

I enjoyed tonight's Wednesday puzzle. But I'm curious if anyone else has this puzzle symptom, which I've seen in the last week, give or take, upon solving on the NYT website on my desktop: As soon as I type the final letter, there is an unusual one- or two-second pause before the little musical phrase, etc. appear as usual. This never happened before, since the advent of this online app. Just in case, I cleared my cache and then solved an old Monday puzzle from the Archive right away ... and the exact same thing happened. Anyone else have something like this? (In case it's relevant, my browser (Firefox) and my Mac OS are both up to date.) What might be causing this?

Well, that was snappy. Nice puzzle. Felt fun at all times.