Wayne

Yikes. I see at least one silver lining here: the next time a puzzle has a 59-word note explaining how it works, I’ll move along right away and save myself a lot of time and frustration.

I can see it’s brilliant, but I’m giving up about halfway through, which rarely happens. I would need way too many lookups. Maybe it’s just my mood today. Looks like I’m very much in the minority. Ah well.

Very nice (and unforced) theme entries, and it all hangs together happily. Good one!

Good fun, and I really enjoyed the fill and openness. Thanks!

Definitely knot going to break any records for number of comments…knot that there’s anything wrong with that. Thanks for the puzzle!

Bizarrely, while waiting for an appointment this afternoon the last puzzle I solved was from May 1/2017. Then this comes out tonight. A small feeling of deja vu. Thanks for an interesting construction.

A corker of a debut puzzle, indeed. Loved it, and somehow I also finished in just over 18 minutes. Many thumbs up!

Was getting nowhere fast (only ROB and ERE), but eventually got there unaided in only 6 minutes above average. A 26-black-square beauty.

This took me almost an hour (way slower than average) but after a very meh personal week I’m mostly glad I kept going on it. Unsurprisingly, the grid is a construction-and-a-half. In the end I was only stymied by ARIE…funny how “Luyendyk of racing” would have made that a complete gimme for me. Onward :)