Michael

Liked it quite a bit. RUDDERS, BELAYS, LEIF The Lucky?! and CLERK all seemed ingenious and well written. The 4 spanning Across clues were also good. Thank you, may I have another.

“DRILY” DRILY? Yes, but only for the purposes of the crossword puzzle. Ignore it for anything else. Ah sure, that takes a lot of rizz to use bad grammar like that. Totally rizz, dude-bro. Totes Mcgoats, totes mcgoats.

Uncomfortably far out of my wheelhouse. I appreciate all of the commenters here owning up to the clues they had trouble with because I was DOA. After 20 minutes I had a smattering of non-connecting clues filled in and acres of grid left to SEED. First, the blog. Lots of help there. Then, the comments thread. Even then, I’m befuddled with MUDS and CHE and CEES (aren’t there a pair of ESSES also), and nothing popped into my head at the spanning clues (all six of them) as sometimes, rarely, maybe on a Monday I guess, happens. Obviously indicative of a broken streak, though my “solved” streak of 2,316 remains intact. A real stumper. Kudos.

Japanese, Yiddish, French, First Nations, Latin, Hindi, Mandarin, Bambara, Austrian nicknames and American late 20th Century pop stars exes … this is not a complaint. I love the bit with Sideshow Bob stepping on a rake, a rake, a rake, a rake and muttering furiously each time. Thank you for that. The rest was 20 minutes of enjoyment and 40 minutes of shuffling six vowels between eight languages and a dozen proper nouns to make PENT and PSST kiss. Bob and Cecil are still fighting over the top bunk, somewhere. Cheers

Not an easy Wednesday, in my opinion. Quite a few tight corners and a handful of languages made this puzzle a little alienating at times. EXULT before EXTOL, which led to LLAMA before ORANG, and DISTROS?! what the heck is that? Anyway clever, good and yep you counted up to four going down the middle of the puzzle, neat. TRADESIES … lol

Mostly enjoyable with an unnecessarily vague NE corner; IMP / UMPS / QUIRK / GUMMO and NIPPY did not fall into place as easily as the rest of the puzzle. I tried variations of NASTY / OUTS / GUIDO / ILOSE / IFOLD / IMOUT … due largely to the firm belief that JACKANAPES implied something plural, which surprised me when IMP worked. Anyway good puzzle overall, cheers.

Using the same answer twice, even as a themed entry, just felt wrong. I don’t recall doing any crosswords prior to this where a single answer was repeated, let alone five or six times. I guess it felt confining and confusing to me, which made it difficult and unfamiliar, even for a Sunday themed puzzle. That and the sprinkling of genuinely challenging entries, (yes, SINTER, RAPINE and FSHARP but also the seemingly benign SGTMAJ, AURIC, PISH and AIT / ACRES / ALIT) made this a slow grind. I needed to proof it a couple of times before getting it past the gold star review, finally catching AVON / PAVE after fixing PAOLO / TELOS / MAUNA LOA. Kudos

Loved it. The NE corner slowed me down with its clever amalgamation of Bing Crosby, invertebrate life forms and Olympic sports. Cheers

Challenging Saturday fare with ingenious clueing. I struggled to get a firm grasp of the corners only to find a handful of natiks that required time and patience to untangle through the middle. SONGMASHUP before NONGMOCROP; GRANOLACORE, GELATTO, PANNINI, WRAPPARTIES and SATYR all found their way onto the chalkboard as well. Loved “Tea supplier” for 32-Down. Minutes and minutes beyond my average, but I solved it without any Google lookups or deferring to the Wordplay blog, so I’m counting it as a win. Cheers

Lots of good clueing and misdirecting throughout the puzzle - after my first pass I had a few entries with only a few crossing clues giving them support. SNAP, FLAP, SNAG and SATE began to fill in the middle and before too long the Southern edge filled in, the East and West edges filled in and NUCLEI, NONE and REALTOR got some traction into the NW corner. But that’s as far as I got. Time slipped past as I tried to remember anything after SKYFALL but the empty boxes clung to me like a disease. Finally I remembered why I had to finish the puzzle, I had to finish it for Dame Judi Dench and her great modern portrayal of M. “We are not now that strength which in old days moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are; One equal temper of heroic hearts, Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield" So I gave up and had a look at the blog post, and FALSTAFF became SANTA FE and NO TIME TO DIE arose out of the broccoli floret mist. Welcome to Scotland.

Who is driving this vehicle and what lane are we in? Wow the youth have spoken. A smattering of successful misdirections: 4-Down: SILENT MOVIE 26-Across: ALIEN 55-Across: BONGOS I finally ceded a glance at the Wordplay column for help, and ended the suffering. Definitely a noticeable change in tone under the new editor … a little cheekier, a little more obscure, just a thought drifting past a little out of reach. Cheers

Loved it. Lots of big original fill with challenging vowel structures. Cheers

The South East more corner doubled my time. OVENPANS OVENBARS OVENBAYS OVEN … BAGS? Cho before CHU. Cheers.

Loved it. Legitimately challenging with many well written clues. ERICH below HAVOCS was novel, as I’ve not heard HAVOC used as a verb before or pronounced ERICH as “E-RICH”. However in the spirit of the puzzle, one creates havoc with confusion and obfuscation, so it seemed appropriate. APES before EXES, INDUCTEE before INITIATE, SAMOYED before SHARPEI, PIPPI before PEPPA, JEER before JAPE. I see a lot of enthusiasm for the hometown football team - people ask if I am onboard and I usually say the same thing: at some point I realized I could name more football players than US Presidents. Maybe that isn't unique or relevant, it just seems hard to avoid. Cheers

An ideal Friday puzzle. Lots of disambiguation, lots of obfuscation and lots of grid-spanning answers. I particularly liked 12 and 28 down, while 16 Across was clued just discreetly enough to think maybe the arachnid in question was a mammal one could snuggle. Final entries for me were LAB and LANE. Cheers.

Loved it. Challenging and counterintuitive. Lots of unfamiliar terrain with a handful of reliable supporting clues to give us amateurs a chance. IN A GOOD WAY above an OUNCE of regret works well. COAL CART was tough to let go of, as well as OMITS for DOFFS. Cheers.

A really nice Friday entry. ZOOLANDER took a second or two to recall but other answers intuitively jumped out at me after the first pass: LET LIE, FOLIO, COMTE, BURGS and IT DEPENDS, for example. In my county library system, LIBBY is available for as many ebooks as you can listen to at once, while EMBROIDER, SELL SHORT and LOVERS all felt vaguely clued and required some gronking. Cheers Because ZOOLANDER is a personal favorite, here are three more great quotes: “I'm not an ambi-turner. It's a problem I had since I was a baby. I can't turn left.” “A eugoogalizor, one who speaks at funerals. Or did you think I'd be too stupid to know what a eugoogoly was?” “Just because we have chiseled abs and stunning features, it doesn't mean that we too can't not die in a freak gasoline fight accident.”

I was surprised with Tuesday and Wednesday this week - Thursday being Thursday did not surprise me at all, and then this Friday beauty, complete with a few old favorites I haven’t seen in months; SISAL for one. The misdirections were good, (“Rivet” the verb, not “Rivet” the noun!) and COURT SEAT / COURT STATEMENT was simple but effective obfuscation that sapped my confidence. Enjoyable and approachable without anything overtly narcissistic. Thank you!

Yeah I don’t know. Last week took half an hour less, and what’s the difference? This puzzle roamed and ransacked across the grid with little to no assistance from an OREO or an ORO. Sure ASHE found a foothold on the Eastern edge but the rest was like getting directions from a dyslexic local who knows how to walk five miles directly through a city without knowing a single street name and arrive where they want to be, when they want to be there. “Take a left at, informally, the street formerly known as Latin 7 but now is called Avenue Faux Pas - go thirty meters and turn left at Katz’s but stop for the pastrami, then keep going until you hear a tympani drum, you’re almost there!” Anyway I got through without googling anything, at least. JINK seems excruciatingly geographic - someone in the Northwest might call it a DINK, someone in the Midwest might call it a Poorly Exercised Tactical Response to a Sudden Movement or a spasm, for short. Blah

Geez what a beast. Kudos.

The NE corner seemed a little unfair, compared to the rest of the puzzle. JAMBOREES before CAMPOREES, AMANRA, SHOBARS … I don’t really think it’s worthwhile to say it was easy besides this corner, much of the rest seemed unwillingly to AGREE until it was IRONED out smoothly. Tries for a long time to make MACGYVERS into MESSY CHIC, oh well. Interesting symmetry with OSIRIS, AMONRA and ARGH, ACK. Kudos

Was really enjoying this puzzle until the SW corner, and had solved it to DO TO AT but couldn’t believe that was correct. A quick peek at the blog told me that was correct - if I had been more confident with ALOO GOBI it would have been briefer. I liked ADULTING, I CAN TAKE IT, I DO WHAT I CAN and CRAWL SPACE. Cheers

Dang … a bit slower than my average but I finished without googling the many things I was uncertain about. TRUMAN before TINMAN, ACH before ACK, EMBOSS before BEDECK, LOLLED before LOAFED … the theme didn’t help much besides the obvious trivia: MARTINI, DOUBLE (oo) and the Scotsman we all associate with IAN FLEMING. I’ve turned a corner in the “Best James Bond” argument and abandoned Connery for Daniel Craig, highly recommend. Q - “Age is no guarantee of efficiency.” Bond - “Youth is no guarantee of innovation.”

Nice assortment of clues with a friendly theme. There were some tricky corners but no tears for this clown. Cheers

Lots of well phrased clues with only a handful of redundant “crosswordese”. After my first pass I had only two or three filled in … AGE, for one. Things started to fall in place with the NW corner, with a few hold outs that would prove to be problematic. DREW before BRER, OUT before OPT and MTETNA before GEYSER, to name a few more. A bit above my average time but it feels like an accomplishment to not scour the blog, the comments section and the internet for that last W. WE GET IT, WE GET IT, you did it. Hoorah. Cheers.

Fabulous, loved it. Tough to pass up a nod to the Duke Boys here, and the wildly inappropriate legacy of their adventures. Cheers

There were a lot of tight corners with this puzzle. The punny themed clues were not too bad however NOELFLYZONES took about 15 minutes to piece together because of the constituent parts and a lack of intuitive guessing. REEF, WAVE and WARF before WAKE, CHA CHA before CAN CAN and DOE before EOE made it a little more tedious. The clueing seemed trickier than usual with a few gimmes going left instead of right; 20-Down for example: Regard highly … not ESTEEM?! Really?! Anyway definitely a worthy Sunday puzzle. Kudos

I was hung up twice on this puzzle - GENY and SABRA both took a little extra time. I don’t get “Demo for children of … “ Demo as in demonstration? A demonstration of nomenclature? And SABRA crossing CIARA, well that one is on me I should listen to Missy Elliot more often. Loved the longer clues HIDEYHOLE and ITALIANHERO; GLEAMED and ENIGMAS and HITSASNAG popped into my head almost immediately, ORGANICBEEF took a minute. GUILT before QUALM. Cheers

Really clever, enjoyed it to no end. Can’t wait for Mr. Miller’s Tuesday offerings. Cheers

Great Saturday puzzle, lots of longer entries and shorter answers with disambiguating clues. CREATES before IDEATES, TSP before AMT, SETUPON before STORMED, LEAFLET before LEETIDE, IOTA before WHIT, SPATS before FEUDS and WHEEL before REINS, to name a few. Cheers

Fun and crunchy Friday puzzle with good connecting entries between more subtle clues, I finished the grid and needed a minute or two to parse out a few single letter typos: LEECH before LEACH, GLAN before FLAN and NANTE before TANTE. Cheers

Loved it, no notes.

Generally an enjoyable puzzle with a handful of regulars thrown in, (MENLO, ANEW, AWE, ANON, NGOS), this puzzle did have some well written clues that were ambiguous enough to confuse. I found no traction at the start and began making headway after jumping at BLINDDATES, eventually filling in the SW corner enough to get OLIVIARODRIGO and ALONETIME. ORANGESODA gave me a toehold into the SW corner while RAHM eventually got me through the NE section. After RAFTS, NOWISER and PALETTES I thought I was home free, even though FETTID was misspelled I was certain ROTTED was not. TEA before CHA and ROTTED before ROTTEN. Cheers

Thank you for this puzzle, what a gem! MONTESSORI had me hung up for the duration of the puzzle, finally yielding when I corrected CHEERERS to CATERERS. I liked The Office reference as well as Linda Carter’s and Gal Gadot’s *other* alias. CUES before JETS, IMEANREALLY before IMEANCOMEON and ICBM before SCUD. I didn’t try IRSAGENT before ASSESSOR, but I thought about it. Cheers

I made solid progress on this puzzle until the NW corner - nothing there stacked easily for me, and TAKI was the only thing I was sure of. CHARLOTTES WEB didn’t fit at 1-Across, maybe SAINT FRANCIS? FBI or ATF? HOARS or NOELS? MESS, MUSS, FUSS? ATTIC or ATEAM? METIER and REIKI are not in my wheelhouse so nothing helped there. Finally I had a peek at the blog and found ANIMAL FARM, (of course), then the rest started to fall into place. GUNS before PUNS also slowed me down for a spell. Cheers

Very enjoyable and crunchy Friday puzzle with lots of original clues and entries. Loved the Ted Hughes quote, the cascading earnestness of MEANSIT, ICARE, SEEMS and SLAMDUNK and the four-way natik of OPI, ESSIE, SARI and DOHAS. I took the bait and got hung up on “What the heck IS a Dosa anyway?” before realizing LIP READS was more apt than LIT READS. Correction made and completion number 2,546 in the books. Cheers

That was painful. The entire Western half, from Washington state to the Sea of Cortez, and inland to the Rocky Mountains, took 45 minutes, at least. The rest wasn’t so bad - PUSHES or SLIDES or STOVES finally gave way to SHOVES, but it was difficult to let go of SHELVES, OYSTERS, NACHOSALAD, LEAVEEARLY and IHEARDTHAT. Even the gimmes had crossing clues vague enough to give me qualms - SADKEANU gave me TUDE, but my first answer was “RUDE.” A bucketful of SAND could be a SCAD or a SLEW or TONS or a STEW or …. A Row Crosser could be a POL or a SEN or …. so yeah it took me a while. Anyway, cheers.

After Saturday’s mid-section comprised of five … was it five? sixteen letter crossings, was it sixteen though? I was prepared for something dubious. This was not so bad, lots of esoteric filler, sure, but after a few years EMIR / EMIL / IMAM and IDO / ANI / AOL become good friends you can hear through the most duplicitous of descriptions. I liked this puzzle, even more because it still STILL took me behind the tool shed for twenty minutes over ANDERSON / ANDERSEN, and who doesn’t need to know that one is predominant in one part of the world and the other, well, you know. Anyway, kudos, loved the theme. Adieu

KIDTRAPPED then DADTRAPPED, I thought DARTY was close enough to DODGY but NASTY made more sense … finally NAPTRAPPED fell into place, a little better than my average time. Loved the PHLOX / AZALEA / ALOE waterfall, and struggled a bit with PUPU / POKE / PUDGY. Cheers!

There was this great story recently about a guy from France who spent years reconstructing the Eiffel Tower out of matchsticks. When he got done the Guinness Book of World Records told him he used the wrong matchsticks. Years. Matchsticks. No story I read detailed the height to which his matchsticks had climbed. Was it hundreds of feet, hundreds of inches? Meters? And so a crowd gathered to watch Sisyphus contest his rock atop the hill - would it rest there or roll back to the bottom? Last entry for me was SRTA. Really enjoyable.

Pretty much a solid 0 on my first pass, gradually building up the Eastern edges until a large swath of the West lay before me, enshrouded in mystery. I could ELUCIDATE or EXPAND A BIT or tell you about FISHTAILING cars but those aren’t the answers you seek. A water SHREW is new to me, as is Justicalism. I liked 16-Across (TROLL) and 21-Across (LESS). Challenging for me but in retrospect there were some obvious things that might have helped the Western side of this puzzle; OBOES, DOES, ONEND, LIFT and CAT all seem familiar enough to be of service … maybe it was the clever phrasing of the clues that kept me off balance. Cheers.

This seemed like a legitimate Saturday puzzle with a number of linguistically challenging entries (REVEILLES, GOSSIPY and MAHERSHALAALI) as well as a few esoteric things I only know because they keep showing up in crosswords, (DUA LIPA, COPA CABANA, COE and ASP). Without SAM NEILL, NBA and AHME could have been ALAS, and HAIRMETAL could have been HARDMETAL or GLAMMETAL or ONE OF THE FIRST MUSICAL ACTS TO PROTEST CENSORSHIP BEFORE THE US SENATE … in 1985. Anyway GOSSIPY and TULLE doomed me to minutes of overage fees, with their satiny ribaldry. TUILE: A baked French wafer. Cheers

It took a minute to make any headway with this puzzle, and once I had a start I found myself stepping into potholes and quicksand at every corner. With everything filled in I couldn’t figure out why I wasn’t getting the gold star, but those potholes seemed to have done their work. ZYNGA and PSILOCYBIN were not as problematic as Christmas LITES having strings attached, or the vaguely remembered RAINER MARIA WILKE. Great puzzle. Kudos

Similar to last week, this was a welcome reprieve from the Saturday puzzle, with a handful of challenging clues woven into a few easy building blocks, DNA and DSL crossing DEPILATE helped, as did AJAR, TUTS, PJS and RAE in the SW corner. Sunday puzzles are never without their own specific challenge though, and after 20 minutes of filling in the grid on my iPhone screen, I had trouble finding the single typo preventing me from finishing - this can be problematic as one may start to desperately search for a theme - erasing all of the ITs, trying to insert a lowercase i, replacing all of the circled letters with an Apple logo, who knows how creative my self-sabotage can get? So I learned to pause the grid and read the blog before spiraling into frustration - no theme to be found beyond those circled letters giving different answers, which is clever, but not what was preventing me from finishing. So a closer look, again, and there it was: one does not PARTSKE of the crossword without the occasional missed “thumb-typed-letter”, one must PARTAKE. “One does not simply walk into Mordor.” Cheers

Nice technical corner in the NE portion of this puzzle - if AYO EDEBIRI wasn’t used at least once or twice a month I’d forget how unlikely it is to hear people saying “YES CHEF” in a fast food diner. CROSS / SETTO / AT REST and CESAREAN blurred the edges just enough to make this a little gamier, but HOLESINONE seems etymologically incorrect - shouldn’t that be HOLEINONES? Anyway happy holidays, try the seven fishes.

At first glance I didn’t make a lot of progress on this one - some of the middle filled in nicely but the entire upper and lower portions were empty. Once I was able to get the THAT / WHAT / WHY stack out of the way, the rest started to fill in nicely - except for the bottom three across clues. Of course I remember LASER CATS and other DIGITAL SHORTS but that didn’t help; CRASH BLOSSOM was totally new and CALLITINTHEAIR didn’t fall into place until ATTACHEE became ATTACKER. After all of that, I tripped over NESTSON / NESTSIN and SALUD / SALUA. Oh well. Fantastic puzzle though, challenging and unique.

Yeah, no.

Enjoyably crisp Saturday crossword - lots of building blocks and a few gimmes to make up for a handful of treacherous crossings. The SW corner had me confounded with RETORTS, having tried REJOINS AND REWORDS to no avail. With the great American Birkebeiner cross country ski race celebrating its 50th year RACE BIBS is appropriate - shout out to everyone in Hayward and Cable Wisconsin enjoying the day. Cheers.

A little saltier than a standard Friday. Harder, I mean. The start had me flummoxed until the end. FADE FROM USE hints at a loss of color, and the LOCAL COLOR sitting above it creates a ROOF or the MOON or some other HIGH POINT … if I could explain exactly why it was hard to put together I probably wouldn’t need to. I don’t think it is an accident or a flaw, in fact the more correctly I answered the clues the more hazardous the puzzle became. MAMA and PAPA bear before BRER bear; WARSHIP before SPYSHIP; BONKERS before BANANAS and SAFE before EASE to name a few. Things I still don’t quite grasp: ONYX, ICON. TV shows I still have never watched: Game of Thrones and Below Deck. Cheers

I haven’t read the comments because i have a string suspicion not a lot of people liked this puzzle. Obviously this puzzle was designed as an homage to Ben Platt, and the integrity of the solve did not matter to either Joel or Michael. Yada yada yada the rest has already been said I am certain. Viva le drama, or whatever. Meh.