Ιασων

SARI is the new Oreo.

CRABLOUIE crossed with HOGAN and RIELS 🫤🫤 Not puzzling … quizzing. Never heard of the salad and history of golf is particularly esoteric. The fishing ‘trick’ was nice. The cluing reasonable for mid to late week.

Very nice puzzle. Felt fresh. Maybe being up at an ungodly hour helps 😀 Being anti fascist is not left wing. Did wonder whether FLY and FLYING off the same F was fair play but the gold star came before I could conclude. Only got the airline thing upon looking at the solved puzzle. Have a good evening/night/morning/day

DUDS ? I found it to be a fine Friday puzzle. It wasn’t fiendish but non trivial. The crowd that solves on Thursday night are often too critical. To the column: yes it can be called soccer in English english but it’s not. So really, in the whole world the only people calling it soccer are those who play football mostly with their hands. It’s not that we collectively can’t decide. It’s just you. I’m ambivalent about the World Cup. I like football just enough to watch some games but wish we weren’t remaking the 1936 Olympics. It wasn’t a good look then and still isn’t.

I know it’s a US puzzle but WWII started in the thirties. There isn’t a single decade.

What day of the week is it?

A great START for my Tuesday. Finally a correctly spelt puzzle. Thanks to the setter and congrats on the debut.

Just between us here in the comments: ONTHEDL was poorly clued and is very much a USAism. A normal Tuesday otherwise

He abides

There’s another OTT ?!!!!??!!???

I think that settles the difficulty issue. Sometimes they do offer a particularly chewy one. It doesn’t mean that they haven’t evolved but this one was a Saturday to remember. TSAPRE for non USAians was a leap. I spent a long time in the top left. Started with CANOE went to Kayak/skull, experimented Salon instead of SCALP (gave the L for the brilliant LORETTA) and of course not knowing WAZOO SWIFT took a while to land. in the end it was solved by pure perseverance Thanks to the setter and editors

I would have thought that the Decided in “Not yet Decided” would not be allowed for TBD. for TBC it would have been ok. Imagine KEN JENNINGS isn’t a person in your neck of the woods, TAKIS is not a brand anywhere you shop, AJA is unknown to you as are HOKA and KEGELS then you may consider this a fact loaded puzzle that is not easily solved by deduction from crosses. If you can imagine that then it was a Wednesday. Thankfully it could only be BEN or KEN and some surnames are guessable. The other K had to be run through the alphabet.

Maybe it is PLSD (Post Last Sunday’s Distress). I was unsure of even the straightforward answers and took my time. 🫤 A nice Monday puzzle. Thanks.

😄👏👍 for ENTHAPLY. This addiction that many have that is solving the puzzle is very strange. So many people here seemed to have voluntarily done something that they didn’t like doing. If the pleasure is in getting the star then enjoy that. Don’t complain; you won. If the pleasure is in solving then begrudge a poor clue or a trivia natik, but not the theme … for 😢 out loud I’m not a gamer, I’m also not a rap fan but I accept that the puzzle spans many interests. This was fine.

A hard puzzle can be a joy. It may make you think a different way or give you an AHA moment. This was just a difficult quiz. 🫤 I concurred with Andrzej twice and the emus ate those comments. The theme was inane and the fill a quiz of trivia. A very poor puzzle. Not hard. Just bad.

It never ceases to amaze me that DOULA, a word that literally means slave, has been co-opted to be used for assistant without anyone caring. The other day it was used on some podcast to refer to someone in any office helping out. This from the same crowd that has palpitations when anything that is mildly socially uncomfortable is pronounced.

I toiled until I MOILed Bites and Boria were are as likely as MITES and MORIA (I started LOTR when I was a teenager but decided to do anything else instead). At least Boria sounded like it would have come from the Greek for north 😀 Typical Saturday that is made hard by US specificities (yes I’m looking at you GORP crossed with TV characters) OBELI and a decent clue for TESLA were good to see.

If you can pronounce sorry sari then LON can be lawn 😀 Nice puzzle. No idea what an ARIZONA ICED TEA may be but given the current heatwave (I really think the climate scientists should have warned us) I’m willing to try one.

🎶🍾🎈OREO is back. Since civility is required and should be expected we can now use 4/4/26-1A as code in the comments when necessary. (One of those dates that works even in the backwards US format) I‘m wondering whether the setter‘s location close to CERN is connected to the BETATRON answer. Nice puzzle. Not hard rather interesting.

Certainly not soporific. An excellent Wednesday puzzle. Thanks

How come what I find to be tricky clues are never in the column …. Spent almost half the time on BAGCLIP and CREEL. BADE felt right but with some niggling doubt, the rest was good but the C was arbitrary. I still don’t understand but then again it’s but a puzzle. I should take up fishing I guess. 😀 It went past quite fast.

Pedantry requires to note that there are no major or minor galaxies. You can have dwarfs, ultracompact dwarfs, elliptical, spiral, lenticular, barred, starbursts, BCGs, … and many others but not major ones. cluing ANDROMEDA as our nearest neighbour that isn’t named after Magellan would have been better. The clue is wrong — waiting for the usual suspects to excuse the editing and/or proofreading teams, — by saying that Wikipedia describes it do. :) Nice puzzle. I don’t get the fuss about SCHEMA crossed with a proper name. Perfectly legal misdirection. Happy Birthday US Americans. Hope you restore yourselves. A restorative period of calm democracy may help.

I always had the impression that US english made verbs of nouns (to medal, to podium, … I’ve heard few worse than those) and as Calvin told Hobbes “verbing weirds language”

For all the “too easy” folks here’s a slightly different view. I preface that I solved it in an average time (just below). DWADE is esoteric. MARTIN Gardner is not universally known. I’ve flown in DFW but it is not a no brainer — other airports are available. BAMA is sports trivia for a game only played in the US and not even first league trivia. As CLE would be. Metro was a car in the UK but it was made by Leyland which doesn’t fit. Blitzed doesn’t mean drunk anywhere. If anything it reminds one of the weather or war. PARD is not a word, and ‘over well’ only possibly describes 🍳 in the US. So for the rest of us where all of these had to be deduced rather than being taken as ‘gimmes’ this was a decent Saturday.

I thought it was a Good Friday puzzle. The clever bits were clever and the trivia getable from crosses. It provided fair resistance. Visiting the Grand Canyon was one of the best experiences of my life. Beauty beyond belief. OOHAAH indeed if you stay at the top. Ouch ouch if you walk down and back up …

Just saying RiverStyx has the same number of letters as PURGATORY

Never heard of it being referred to as RYAN. Many names, few pleasant but never RYAN.

This was tortured… I guess pretty clever to create, certainly pretty simple to solve but one felt the whole thing was belaboured

I completed it with no lookups so I’m feeling rather pleased that I persevered. It took for b… ever. It felt like the absence of black squares was so pleasing to the setter/editors that the clueing took a back foot. I believe the rule should be that the setter shouldn’t lookup any words they use in the puzzle. If this was the case then chapeau A battle of wits is fine, but in a computer assisted puzzle (as the setter owns up to) it shouldn’t end as a battle of dictionary knowledge. Pitting myself against a machine I don’t need to pay for. Others have whinged about the upper left already. It was dreadful. The rest of the puzzle was ok.

Defeated by the US spelling of PATRONIsING and my inability to spell GALOOT correctly. Gave up after some flyspecking. Never mind … the rest was a good Sunday puzzle.

27A could have solved to ALFAROMEO If you insist one should spell a phonetic alphabet ’correctly’ (even for this pedant possibly a step too far). A decent Thursday.

I’m guessing there’s a pool at the editorial office with bets on which plural will drive the commentariat up the wall. If you can have octopi you can have alumni 😀

I interpret the clue as an AI that provides advice to an actual doctor. If humans prefer to self diagnose by listening to advice provided by an algorithm that is tuned to the whims of internet billionaires then I’m sorry but I’ve run out of pity.

I really enjoyed having a bit of a challenge. Too straightforward for Thursday. An excellent Wednesday. Thanks.

CRASHBLOSSOM made it a Saturday. No complaints on difficulty. A great puzzle.

DCON/CHOCULA was absolutely a natick for me. Too UScentric. I don’t think I have used the expression to HASH anything OUT but that seemed as a reasonably old Americanism. The rest of the puzzle was a reasonable Tuesday.

ADP and TESS were unknowns so the bottom left used up a lot of time. The rest was elegant and very much Thursday level for me. The trick and the double use came relatively quickly and brought a smile Thanks

Clever

A fine Thursday puzzle. Offered the right amount of resistance. Only ECOTEUR was 🫤 I would love to know where the photo in the column is. I have a sneaking suspicion that it’s Monemvasia in the Peloponnese. A place that is well worth visiting whether you approach from the sea or land.