Christo

proper noun swamps promote trivia knowledge over skill. not my favorite style.

a certain amount of proper names (or trivia about pop culture figures) are expected, but overuse can leave a bad taste in one's solving buds. its a shame to dull the experience of such a clever construction, but this puzzle was the most excessive ive analyzed so far: proper nouns suzie camilla zion tsai chinese yuan adeleh rhone uzi sela phil ivey kenya belle gibb agee hrh nin weird/unused alb poetries

while i appreciated the snarky rendition of Frost's most famous, i didn't enjoy this solve due to the overuse of pop culture references that could not be filled on crossings: ocean leia* mama yung ack ras smoove nas* alpo* egan paired with a few weird/unused word senses: tosh noes peg of course i got some of these, and of course some number are part of the game and expected, but it felt like too much, and i see i was not alone. i would say leia/nas and probably alpo are fair game since they're very common nyt answers, but they do strictly fit into the category.

after failing on the Tuesday (?!?!?) and Thursday 2wks ago i must say my confidence has been somewhat shaken, and when i completed my first pass through across & down i had so little to go on i was sure my 1week streak would be broken....but this was perfectly clued to what I've come to expect as Thursday difficulty, slow but steady progress over 55m got me the solve.

hue and cry. good one.

considerably more pun/puzzle clues than the Tuesday norm made this a soooooooooolve.

wow. impressive constraint solving.

i solved the whole puzzle with one eye closed and one hand tied behind my back. (no offense intended to one-eyed or one-handed persons, it just an old expression)

pleasantly surprised by the winning eye candy, evoked a smile

would have been a good opportunity to get ken to comment as co-author, deb. i believe he's a nyt games fan and does the xword regular-like.

uh oh. 10m Wednesday puzzle...conspiracies will rise...

i loved this puzzle and theme. perhaps my favorite of all time. many years ago i played a lot of sweeper. it was so enjoyable to solve both the word and mind sweep problem.

11:34 solving time. 4m faster than my avg. im impressed by how unusually difficult for a monday this seemed at the start, and how everything fell into place like an abstract painting, ending up being a faster than usual monday solve. i think i was done in four, successively shorter, passes. C.

overall good and like the magnetism. literally not a fan of altho.

canine was super tough. i had madres for a while, maybe theres nine sierra madres ? and organist, what a clue. tough but fair. this goes in my hall of fame.

is this the first mention of a Republican president in the NYTx ever? good thing it came on a monday or i never would have gotten it, its a pretty hard and fast rule for the 6 years ive been solving...

i solved down to two squares very fast, but unfortunate crossings at toe/roan and nolo/rohe required guessing for me. i never saw the spirals were city names until reading the column... still dont quite get "croc's tip". i guessed at "toe" since of course ive never heard of roan chapell, despite roan being an unlikely name.

how do you get "sega" from Peter Gabriel?