Bee Winberg

After rage-quitting a few tough crosswords as a child, I took a forty-year hiatus because I was obviously bad at them. (For context, I love and excel at most word puzzles, my husband and I play Scrabble TO THE DEATH, and I'm a librarian.) I reluctantly tried a NYT crossword about three months ago, and while I won't say I'm hooked - well, yes, I will say that. Why lie? However, I admit I've been skeptical of commenters who claim to love the tricky Thursday puzzle. They're like people who say they adore kale and actively enjoy early morning uphill trail runs. Like, sure, maaaybe those people exist, but are we maybe just bragging for the internet? Well, I stand corrected. It turns out that when you figure out the trick on the first clue, instead of completing the puzzle in a fog of angry confusion, reading the column, perusing the comments, and then squinting at the completed puzzle and saying "OK, I guess I can sort of see that", it's a lot of fun. Today's was my fastest Thursday puzzle yet, at almost exactly half my average time. See you bright and early on the trail! (Forget about the kale, though. I still don't believe those people.)

Given my bone-deep disinterest in the brands of anything aside from pianos, I didn't know FILA was a sneaker brand. Other than that, the cool morning air in the midst of the current heat wave must have put me in exactly the right mental state for this puzzle - it was a PB by more than a minute, and the only non-Monday puzzle I've ever finished in less than 7:00. What a nice way to start the day! I am feeling motivated by my success, and I plan to do all the laundry, lay out next year's lesson plans, and achieve world peace by dinner time. Nothing like a good solve to help me carpe that diem!

I usually have to remind myself on Thursdays that throwing my computer out the window would only make me feel better for a few minutes, and it would make it a lot harder to do the Friday puzzle. Today, though, I got the theme right away and (for the first time ever) solved those clues first. I feel so accomplished! I finished a Thursday puzzle and didn't swear once! If I can just stay in the zone, I should be able to eradicate the blackberry vines from my yard by lunch, clean out the basement by dinner, and solve global warming by bedtime. I am on a ROLL, folks.

My husband brings decades of poker playing to the table, and he has a quibble with TAPOUT. We had TAPPED in the spot until cross clues made it obvious that it was TAPOUT. He maintains that if you "have no more money to bet" (as the clue is worded), you are TAPPED, or TAPPED OUT. When you are tapped out, you can TAP OUT to indicate that you're out of money. So TAPPED is the state of having no more money to bet, and TAPOUT refers to the action you take when you're in that state. I consider myself blessed to be married to someone whose level of pedantry is perfectly aligned with my own.

It tickles me all over again every time I think of NOAH as a doomsday prepper. Thanks for the giggle, Mr. Juhnke!

"Imaginary fiends", while a cute play on "imaginary friends", seems weirdly insulting to the large number of religions that teach the existence of supernatural entities. Of all the possible clues for DEMONS, I'm surprised that the editors chose one so unnecessarily dismissive of a belief common to several major faith traditions.

Once I got past the fact that these are the least rollable wheels in the history of wheels, I figured out the trick and solved the rest of it quickly. Great debut - I hope we see more from Kyle! Deb - my goodness, you'll be missed! As a retirement gift, allow me to share the earworm cure my husband and I stumbled across. (His lifelong love of music kicked off with a few years following the Grateful Dead as a young man, and I've been a working classical musician for nearly 40 years, so we have a wide variety of earworms available to us.) We fight earworms with ALL the earworms. Wheels on the Bus? Start singing bits of every earworm you can think of. Your brain will be like a toddler who has just been given more candy than they can hold in two hands. Then turn on music you actually want to listen to, and let your brain move on from the earworms. I can personally recommend the Kars for Kids jingle, the 1962 hit Bobby's Girl, Baby Shark (doo doo doo doo), Feliz Navidad, Uptown Funk, the chorus of I'm Gonna Be (500 Miles), and various bits of incidental music from the opera Carmen.

I rarely start off a puzzle with a 16-letter anchor, but when my first fill was CAUTIOUS OPTIMISM, I was off to the races! As a self-described realist (I think it sounds so much nicer than "pessimist") married to a self-described Pollyanna, I've long held that the primary benefits of planning for the worst are a) you're ready if it happens, and b) you have so many opportunities for happy surprises. This puzzle was a pleasant one indeed!

I admit that you are seeing me at my most finicky, so caveat emptor. But every digital clock I've ever owned has also been a clock radio on which you toggle between AM and FM. You don't toggle between AM and PM - you have to clickclickclick through all twelve numbers until you get to the time of day you want. "Toggle" (indicating that you can switch at will between both options) had me on the wrong path until the very end, when my husband and I finally wrestled "PREPAYMENT" into place. My husband wishes me to add that he was (I'm quoting here) "grumpy about it", and I will refrain from transcribing his additional comments, as this is a public forum. I do so love him.

I was momentarily thrown by the use of the word "metaphorically" in the clue for PARACHUTEIN, as the description ("arrive suddenly and from a distance") is literally true as well.