Nancy

Should I be completely honest about the way I felt almost the whole time I was solving this puzzle? After all, the filled-in result is not nearly as awful as the process seemed at the time. There are some deviously clever non-trivia clues like LEANING TOWER; FEMININE SIDE (where I wanted rEMINIscence, didn't you?, only it didn't fit.); CARNIVORES; FACE TATS and ORANG. All things considered, it's quite a grown-up grid and the pop culture names weren't nearly as numerous as they seemed at the time. Nevertheless, I was planning to throw the puzzle, SPLAT, into my wall during the entire solve (once I finished with the very easy NW) as I'm thinking: "I can stare at this clue until the cows come home and I'm never gonna get it. And this one. And that one." The one thing I wasn't tempted to do was cheat. Cheating is what I do when I'm having great fun with a puzzle and need to cheat in order to be able to continue the fun I'm having. When I finished -- miraculously without cheating -- and realized the puzzle was mostly pretty good and I simply had found it much too frustrating to enjoy, I asked myself: Would the constructors have had any way to know that? After all, you can't test-solve your own puzzle since you already know the answers. And I thought: No -- they couldn't possibly have known that. I have a hunch that this puzzle will prove as "divisive" as yesterday's pizza topping. Some will love it and some will definitely not.

A clever theme with a great revealer -- and MUCH harder than most Tuesdays, which in my book is a good thing. I solved it as a themeless -- especially since there were plenty of other things to think about other than trying to find a common thread. I wonder if I would have picked up on the homophones if I'd gone looking for a theme. So they call them CUBE FARMS now. They were merely cubicles in my day and we hated them. Of course people didn't work much of the week from home the way people do today; if you were in a cubicle, you were really IN it. I always felt that office productivity could easily be tripled just by putting everyone in an office with a door that could be closed. Rant over. For "tissue sample test" I wanted something like PERSON WITH A BAD COLD BLOWING HIS NOSE AND SNEEZING. I never thought of that kind of tissue. Can you imagine? Such a good puzzle. Sam -- but why do you have five (5!!!) pop music clues? Why would you cross two of them, OASIS and ALA when both entries can be clued in a zillion ways without using a musical reference? Yes, it's a musical-themed puzzle, I get it, but there are only so many pop music trivia clues I want to see in a puzzle. When USSR doesn't work, I doubt there's anyone under the age of 65 who will get CCCP without all the crosses. Bur once I saw that USSR wouldn't work, CCCP came back to me in a rush. An excellent Tuesday that would have been even better with less trivia.

The bottom line is that I couldn't anticipate ANY of the theme answers without crosses. They ranged for me from the fabulously funny THIS BEARS REPEATING...to the rather tepid THE MUMMY RETURNS...to the what-on-earth PAIR OF PANTS. "Hubba" is many things, but a PANT it isn't. It's usually shouted, in fact. I had DOUBLE CLuCK for "tsk, tsk" before I had DOUBLE CLICK -- and mine is funnier, even though it's not a phrase. And the worst themer, I thought, was ALLOWS. A paltry two "ows" does not an "all" make. Nevertheless, I thought the puzzle met its burden of providing a pleasant Sunday diversion. And it was pretty name-free too -- always a welcome plus.

Re: OLIVE. I've never fought anyone over OLIVE because no one else I've ever shared a pizza with ever thought to order it. You say PINEAPPLE is the best answer, but I'm not sure how many pizza joints in NYC even offer it as a topping. The correct answer is ANCHOVY. I like anchovies, but no one else I know does. Lo, the poor ANCHOVY. You can't even get it in a Caesar Salad anymore. Now they just wave the anchovy bottle over the salad and call it "done!" -- sort of like waving the vermouth bottle over the shaker of gin in an ultra-dry martini.

Read the clue for 14A. Doesn't it read like a hilarious parody of an arcane pop culture trivia clue? The actress who voices another actress's mother in some movie you never saw? From now on, every time I want to make fun of pop culture clues, I'll simply use the shorthand notation "14A is SANDRA OH." You'll remember, won't you? After all, it can't be any harder to remember than remembering what actress voiced another actress's mother in a movie you never saw. So many names! I almost threw it against the wall, but I actually ended up finishing it, I think*, and without cheating. I left out the HUNTER ?AYES/?EDER cross, but I plain didn't care. *Going back now to see if GEDMEN or GADMEN or GODMEN are a Grindr thing.