Lori

I had a moment when I was trying to figure out how to make “The Aunty Jack Show” start with a j. Then I realised that ABC was NOT the Australian Broadcasting Corporation but the AMERICAN Broadcasting Company. Too funny.

What a gloomy slog. Not a fun way to spend a rainy afternoon.

Shorta? For black heart, I’m not making the connection. And all my time in the UK, I’ve never heard anyone called a “hoser”. Most baffling was “headscarfed” the cross revealed “zombie movies” and that’s when I realised it was ‘head scarfed’ which is a bit clever, unlike ‘headscarfed’ which indicated that the person was wearing a scarf on his head. Leaving out the space, takes the clue from clever to dishonest. Misdirection can be fun with clues, but dishonest clues aren’t fun at all. I’ve been solving NYT crosswords long enough to remember how annoying it was to adapt to Will Shortz’ style as editor. (Change is always annoying at the beginning) But, really, Mr Shortz is a lovely man and it didn’t take long to appreciate and enjoy his style. But I’m not sure I can adapt to the proper name-heavy, slightly dishonest clueing in the recent weeks. I do crossword puzzles for fun, if they stop being fun, why bother?

Dark Shadows! Thank you for recalling some delightfully scary afternoons.

So sad to see the end of the Vertex today 😢 my husband and I really enjoyed it. It was a bit of zen in our days.

What a delight! I’m going to get out my pink gin and some olives and enjoy this crossword. Thank you for the fun solve.

I did get quite stuck with tombstone for 47 across. Eventually I headed in the right direction. Clever puzzle.

Thank you for a delightful solve. And Euler too. You made my Pi Day :-)

Jorts are a portmanteau of “jeans” and “shorts” so they’re just cutoffs given a new name. lol

It’s a clever crossword with lots of challenges but entering ph/f into the rebus was no fun at all. That put a real damper on what should have been a fun solve.

Hill-adjacent field is poli-sci. My question is (as a non-American) who is Hill? Thanks!

I thought this was a fun puzzle. But it was made a bit easier for me when I forgot about the time difference and accidentally read the answer for Highfalutin. Wait, what? This isn’t the crossword I’m working on. Oops. Time change and now it’s the Wednesday puzzle. I still enjoyed it and got a laugh out of the unexpected clue.

I really enjoyed this puzzle but I wasn’t clever enough to figure out the theme. I had to read the column and then double check the clues (Oooooh, now I get it!) I do a lot of the archived puzzles (as I imagine many people here do), usually the puzzle itself reveals the theme but for this one, perhaps when it is archived capitalise the first two letters to help out future solvers. ARrange makes sense as Ozarks, but arrange, it’s not so clear. I don’t think the columns are linked to the archived puzzles so some future solvers might be as baffled as I was.