Dave H

Useless knowledge and lateral thinking. Right in my wheelhouse . Perfect for a Saturday.

Sweet TEA before sweet PEA. This Yankee has lived in the south for too long.

Proud/Embarrassed to be able to pull BERLE from memory with no helpers. Amazing trivia recall with no idea what I’ve had for breakfast.

Now this was a Saturday puzzle. All I can say is “Uh oh”.

Loved this puzzle. Took a few extra minutes to realize I needed the whole word for each direction, and those were the very last answers except for the Persian religion. That was a guess to finish it off. But a really tight puzzle. And a very enjoyable solve.

Tough Saturday that started with overly confident long answers. When the lights go out?- clearly HURRICANESEASON. No need to blame yourself?- ITSNOTYOURFAULT. Once I finally abandoned those, things got easier but still a tough one.

Fun and clever puzzle but diminished by too many Naticks - Japanese vegetable / curved line between musical notes (UDO / SLUR) - Belgian surrealist / backless stool (ENSOR / TABOURET) - Alex and / Iraqi city (ANI / SAMARRA)

Solid Saturday. Was pretty confident even after a mostly empty first pass. And then less confident on the second pass. It all came together in the end, although the R in RENEE was a guess for the last letter. Didn’t understand the clue until after the solve

Somewhere along the way I reached the point where I consider a puzzle solved properly even when I’m too lazy or inconvenienced to go box by box looking for what I fat-fingered. Today was such a puzzle. Felt good to get the all boxes filled in with confidence and then just no patience to investigate what was wrong. A quick “check puzzle today showed the error was in the very last row where I typed SIDD for SIDE, clearly knowing the right answer but succumbing to the routine problem of already having the letter in the puzzle in the right place, and then typing that same letter as my brain forgets to skip to the next one. I’ll still claim the win.

Took a long time to accept that LEGO wasn’t the right building block.

Very clever and well-executed theme. But quite clearly a lucky miracle that I completed it. Getting the theme early helped but I had SO MANY guesses I was genuinely surprised when my last entry completed the puzzle without flagging errors.

I can abide “dic” pronounced as “dish”. But “tock” as “talk”? That seems more than a bit of a stretch for an otherwise excellent puzzle.

I was not at all WHELMED or UNAWED by 28D.

Who decided that one’s first rodeo was enough? Maybe some people need more than one rodeo. Nobody ever says this “not my 5th rodeo”.

Was convinced I was going to set a Sunday Best and then had to play the theme game in the northeast corner because I didn’t know either Kafka characters or phonetic terminology.

THAT was an awesome Thursday puzzle. Great theme. Excellent clues. Wow.

It was my understanding there would be no math. Loved the puzzle.

Enjoyed the puzzle, although it took a lucky guess on the M for MAA to spin the dials. Makes sense now that I see an explanation. Mostly. One minor complaint for this extremely clever puzzle - each 4-letter dial should have spelled a word. It looked like that would happen with JEST, DONE, PALS and UNTO which spell words in order. And then BAYS which requires some shuffling. But then CMKW and KCLN didn’t happen. :(

Apologies for the off-topic post. Has any experienced having a different Connections puzzle than others? My wife and I each had a different puzzle today. Both indicated as #216.