Josh M
DC
After a quick start, the middle of this grid was brutal--especially with the double Natick crossing SISI with two obscure words. The themers were fine, but the cluing difficulty felt wildly uneven to me. Glad to have this one in the rearview.
Tough one! A couple of on-the-border fills (TOGAE is *barely* fair, says this classics major), but a clever conceit and a lot of good stuff.
Looked like fun, but this one fell flat for me in the end. I thought I had to rotate the "locks" manually, then didn't manage to get the letters all back in the right spaces and spent the next 20 minutes trying to figure out which letter was wrong. If a puzzle is going to include an unchecked letter segment, it needs clear instructions to avoid miscues and avoidable frustration.
Quick for a Thursday, but enjoyable work from Mr. Gulczxnski. Glad that the rebus worked--couldn't find the right sign in the app!
Wow. Just wow. I didn't get the theme until I read the column, but my gosh. This is masterful. Congratulations on a great puzzle.
@Pat The first R is not part of the finger name ("ring") and so doesn't get doubled.
This felt refreshingly straightforward for a Saturday.
After quitting the Spelling Bee over Ezersky's ... idiosyncratic editorial choices there, I am unsurprised to see his name on this brutal slog. I'd say congrats on constructing this technically solvable grid, but I see that he's already taken care of that in his constructor's note.
Due north was a Natick for me. I'm not a plumber and multiple vowels fit between the L and the G and all sound schleppy. Tough Tuesday!
Extremely tough, but--unlike last Saturday--a fair challenge.
Spent a lot of time rerunning the eighth mile of the Boston marathon. After ten minutes of flyspecking, I realized that ALi Raisman isn't spelled that way. Fun puzzle except for the Hub 'burbs.
So THIS is what an evening in Natick is like.
@CS Yes--this was a bit Natick-y. Luckily there are only a couple of options, but it took me going over the rest of the puzzle with a fine-toothed comb to figure out that was a possible (and my actual) error.
@Barry Ancona Thanks--yes, that was my question. I guess it would've needed to be "Like Napoleon's hats" or similar. Anyway, that's the story of how my solve took five minutes over average instead of five under this week. ¯\_(ツ)_/
Trying to figure out syntactically why "BICORNEd"/"FALLTONEd" isn't consistent with the clues.
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