Ian MZ

Quite a brain teaser! This was the classic "step away and finish with fresh eyes" puzzle for me. I was completely stumped by the NW corner last night but this morning realized "locks" probably meant hair and "blues" was probably about the color. I love when letter combinations start to conjure words. 4D almost felt like a 7-letter Wordle game because I had xxxxxGN, leading to the "aha!" moment and arriving at FOREIGN. I also love a solved puzzle reward when you throw a coin in the well and hope a letter is correct. I, like many others was stumped on TSAPRE (I still don't get the CRONIES cross?) but graciously that was the only square in my way in the end.

I got hung up in the SE corner, but thankfully EGGHUNT and ERIE were set for me (despite initially falling into the prejudicial assumption that 50D’s London was the one across the pond – not the lake!) This helped me toward a proper spelling of MNEMONICS. Sadly, I had PLAstics for longer than I should for 34D but was glad to see them replaced with PLANKTON! Great grid!

TIL that EXACTA means “a bet in which the first two places in a race must be predicted in the correct order.” This nearly broke our streak before my wife realized we had TMeN. Felt DITSY not remembering ALEX Morgan! Such a fun puzzle, but that one clue had us stumped!

A rare South-to-North solve for me thanks to 1A to 50D jump out of the gates. The neighbor solve of YOGIS and TALC helped me suss out the VEGAN start to 57A and I was off to the races. I tried to brute-force 1D but had something else wrong somewhere in the fill. I threw a coin into the well and changed LiNGU to LONGU and then was able to solve CANARD. A relatively breezy Saturday that left me feeling accomplished but still in the dark about some of the answers!

Couldn't figure out what I had wrong for the life of me. Then noticed I had ADHEsE instead of ADHERE for 15A. The Spanish in 5D didn't help as I initially had DREXaL for 17A and EsaS seemed right. ACH!