dana

least favorite puzzle ever.

i've never seen a puzzle where the rebus letters are completely different from the letter(s) of the cross-word/intersection word. it's supposed to reflect some kind of slight of hand? it wasn't magical for me.

spoiler alert! rebus wednesday - fun. i never heard of a shrinkray - so fun to learn a new word. it was the last clue i completed. fun puzzle!

Dear Will Shortz: We are thankful for you and pulling for your recovery.

hint, hint, this puzzle included a lot of great hints! fun!

aw, deb, i cried reading your column today. so beautiful. thank you. i'll be holding you in my thoughts as you grieve.

that was super fun!

spoiler alert!!!! (don't read it if you're not done) -- well, it turns out ittar and attar are the same thing, and ice also can not generally be returned once it's delivered... so, that kind of hung me up. i had to look it up - and of course, an ace is a much more fun answer to the question than ice.

i found this one challenging, and i'm annoyed i wasn't more patient / didn't come back to it later (sometimes a break helps me see it fresh). Instead, i looked up about 4 clues. 4! i usually don't need to do that. or when i do, it's just 1, or maybe 2. when i do that, i make a rule to only look up arcane fact-clues (ie a reference i just might not know) rather than thinking-clues that require clever interpretation of the prompts. (thank you will shortz for saying it's okay to do that.) i learn a lot this way - including being more aware of areas that are blind spots.

it was exactly a perfect wednesday puzzle! fun to do - challenging in spots, but do-able / took some cross-clues to figure some of them out; but nothing impossible! great job Jeanne Breen on your debut with Jeff Chen. You do realize with a name like yours, you need to do a puzzle that plays with rhyme/ slant rhyme. i bet you're already working on it!

Love the graphic at the end! Fun puzzle!

first time i needed to look something up on a tuesday... ever! (been doing this for years). looked up the polish runner. completed the rest, but i still am not familiar with some that i got right. enjoyed the tricky clues and puzzling it out, but obscure for a tuesday.

Fun puzzle!

well, i'm not too coy to say this was fun. i'm not sure if it was easy for a Saturday or if I'm just on the same wavelength as the constructor. Enjoyed the creative clueing.

well deb, at least i'm in good company. the theme was obscure - i usually get the themes but this theme was some Bletchley Park kind of stuff. it was very clever, once you explained it. but i had trouble enjoying the puzzle because i couldn't figure it out, and it was gnawing at me the whole time. i got the answers from the down clues/context, but the answers made no sense to me. thanks for decoding it in your article (which i never read until i'm done with the puzzle).

cute - enjoyed. answer for dry riverbed, i forgot, but then remembered. since i spend a lot of time in rivers, i appreciated the reminder. (the way i remember it, when i do, is that it's one letter off of a verb that might describe something you might do in a creek or a river.) i never heard of the answer for "follow instructions" before so that was new. enjoyed the "someone you wouldn't want to give a hand to." got a nice chuckle out of that one. on that note, giving you two hands/clapping for a great puzzle. well done!

totally fun puzzle! i had trouble with death because i spelled golem golum, and had luv for the down clue for a minute - i now realize gollum is how you spell the tolkien character - although it's all transliterated anyway, where the golem is concerned. but the rest was very do-able and fun! those momentary challenges are exactly what's fun about puzzling. a perfect wednesday! lots of fun cluing. love the kangaroos (have no idea how to put kangaroo emojis here) - feels like a fun separate game one could start - so bonus for today's puzzle - thanks!

ha ha ha, Deb Amlin - I hope he comes back, too! Awesome fun puzzle! amazingly playful first effort!

i really didn't get the fat finger thing (but did get the doubles) until it revealed itself at the end. a bonus gimmick! wee!

oh boo hoo, it was easy for a friday.

Fun puzzle. thought it was much easier than yesterday (a Wednesday).

This was pretty hard for a Monday. Was it like, here's a Monday puzzle - April Fool's - it's really a Wednesday! But i'm really here to write about connections - the emoji connections? Yeah, nobody liked this. Otherwise Connections is my favorite game. But i liked the ones that used to have Wyna Liu's name on them better (as the puzzle creator). Is she still making them? i love her brain!

cute. easy for a thursday, but fun!

today's experience was all up, no down... well except fictional prison guarded by dementors... maybe i live under a rock, but a lot of references elude me.

love the playful clues!!!

i still don't get 15a. how is that the answer for that clue?

well i always thought indigo was bluer. (so there, i learned something today - thank you puzzle!) so to me, one looked like violet and one looked like magenta - so i was thinking one was violet and the other was purple (since magenta doesn't fit) - so i struggled with the indigo corner the most. but i got it eventually. it was a fun puzzle today!

that was unbelievably clever!