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Munich, Germany
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Munich, Germany
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.
A great START for my Tuesday. Finally a correctly spelt puzzle. Thanks to the setter and congrats on the debut.
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
@john ezra the last paragraph has made me start the day with a smile. Thank you very much.
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.
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.
@Francis I’m guessing that many people here mistake civility for affirmation. If all that we are supposed to say here is how great the puzzle is and how fabulous the setters are then this is a fan club not a comments section. Saying you don’t like something isn’t rude nor an insult. I know people work very hard and enthusiastically to generate and edit these puzzles but we can also have opinions about that work. After all we do pay. The interactions here are almost always very civil and at worst people seem to get irked by something that can be looked up in a dictionary. It’s a good space and a good space should be inclusive.
🎶🍾🎈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.
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 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.
CRASHBLOSSOM made it a Saturday. No complaints on difficulty. A great puzzle.
@Getting Better or eating OREOs
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
I saw pong paddles in the grid art and remained perplexed until I read the column. The puzzle itself was solved with the normal early week effort. A pleasant morning. Thanks
Is it only in the US that red is right and blue is LEFT ? Certainly in every other country whose politics I’m aware of pink, red, green are progressive (centre to left) and black, blue, yellow are more conservative (right). A nice puzzle. A few trivia that had to be inferred but that’s part and parcel of my solve since I’m lousy at retaining useless information.
Can you RIFFLESHUFFLE twice and get the same order of cards to get from 16A to 73A? I believe it is possible but you’d have to do it perfectly. Clever puzzle. Like Sam Corbin I was pleased that a new clue for Ψ was sought. Not sure I agree that she should have allowed the choice 😀 Unclear on COO even after the explanation The puzzle was chewy. More deduction than usual for a Wednesday but welcome.
@Francis if you were Be8 you’d be a bottleneck in nucleosynthesis and making the sun glow. But if you were the doubly magic Ni56 (also all alphas) you’d also decay (somewhat slower 7.7 days) but you’d be powering Supernovae and producing almost all the iron in the universe.
@Mental State the norm in this puzzle is that using any word that refers to a toilet and combining it with something quintessentially British will translate that word (eg john) into LOO or sometimes LAV The cultural gulf across the pond is a chasm.
Not knowing what a BIGBOXSTORE is didn’t help. Is a LOWESTIMATE really conservative? I’m guessing it depends on which side of the deal you’re on. A good Thursday puzzle.
@Kevin lots of us hate it. When it first appeared there was much complaining. It seems they are just going to wait until we just ‘accept’ our fate. There is no indication that the puzzle technical team has user feedback in its workflow. Almost certainly by doing it this way the app becomes a self standing entity that can be tested and used without dependencies (eg which is the default browser of the user).
@Elbridge Gerry if you include the women’s World Cup Japan, Norway and the USA. Spain and Germany are already in the list
@Allen Rebchook the teacher could have said that the real numbers run east-west and the imaginary ones north-south and now you can move on a map just using numbers that mix the directions. Complex numbers … one of each. Every single day you use them.
Should’ve kept it for April 1st 2030
@Andrzej α are helium nuclei, γ are photons, and β are electrons. So a betatron is a machine that makes electrons go very fast by making them go round and round in magnetic fields.
@Chris I don’t see how the other letters work as a name.
@Bill in Yokohama this is the kind of detective work I come to the comments section for 👏👍🙂
I was fairly sure that bu**ers wouldn’t be ok in the NYT but then again … The bow tie clue was particularly obtuse for those who call them Farfalle The American handball clue was a bit esoteric. Adidas competitor proper answer is PUMA <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dassler_brothers_feud" target="_blank">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dassler_brothers_feud</a> A very good Thursday
@Matt forgetting most puzzles almost immediately ensures the enjoyment/disappointment is fresh … 😀 It helps having a leaky brain.
Gave up on the streak for ANON (had Aeon) I flyspecked for quite a while and then I lost the will to carry on. A fresh lease of life 😀
I spell it MANOEUVRE and not knowing STINE I was thus unsure how to reorder the OEU to make it fit. The VRE to VER was easy. NITTANY is certainly USeteric … OUTIE stood out as poor (noted by the columnist in more gentle terms) The theme was good.
@Francis asking questions to humans like shopping in shops is a great experience. The online world has its uses but the side effects are not necessarily good. We are a social species. 😀
After yesterday’s well stated and, I felt, well received plea for civility they FLIP us THE BIRD 🤣🤣 Nice puzzle. Could have been brilliant if the birds worked both ways for the down clues (with different answers for the same clue obviously). I guess just too hard to set. Nice puzzle. Thursday difficulty due to the trick. Thanks
@Erk I agree that it sounds awful.
@Andrzej I spent almost half my time at the bottom of the puzzle. Not being sure of AC/DC and for some reason thinking that OLGA was Onur didn’t help. Perseverance paid off in the end.
Fine puzzle, double rebus. I enjoyed the work out. Average time. But there’s nothing nuclear about it. I must be missing something.
It would have been an easy Wednesday so it landed on Tuesday. A tad chewy. Maybe the preparations were on the counter a tad too long…. The MISSEENPLACE was totally gettable from the crosses for those of us who don’t love kitchens (me). Only SAL was naticky and very little so. Other than L nothing else makes any sense. A fine puzzle. I agree with Andrzej that the column could have saved a Wikipedia search but they are always entertaining so …
K_N_E_E_ crossed with RIESEN and OSTER was a tad unfair. The knee was part of the puzzle. That’s ok. The second K and the Y were fairly clued. The brand names could only be deduced from what would be reasonable choices. Naticky. 🫤 Otherwise a good Sunday puzzle. 😀👍 I spent some time thinking what the tv host Conan had to do with a THINKPIECE. He is famously Harvard educated but it turned out the puzzle had an Austrian theme.
The ineptitude of EPT irked. I believe the setter/editor were so pleased with themselves over MANE for “Trigger hair” that the E absolutely had to be used. Took longer to get to the M in MÉLANGES than it should have. The rest of the puzzle was Saturdayesque. Perseverance was necessary. I didn’t know HAGEL, ZARFS, EVICO, WHOTEL, EMMET, nor that UCLA beat Washington in 1955 and will let them SEEP out of my brain with no regrets. NOVA is a bright new star in my world. I have no real clue what a CHIAPET is nor really care but I have to say all of them came out in the wash so just a hard puzzle. Not unfair.
@Andrzej if you allow the Brie to ooze then scooping it up on a cracker can be yummy. 😀
@LBG I guess eventually you did not take the advise to DO NOT ERASE 😀
@Andrzej I agree that the many Os block was not fun. LITE was cleverly clued. The rest was just a slog.
I would have circled only the C. The father words were complete and very clearly clued. I wasted some of my youth reading Hemingway. I should have saved him for later when possibly it would not have been a waste.
The E in DIRE REMY was naticky given my ignorance of rap and extinct North American fauna. A normal Tuesday morning puzzle. Thanks.
@Nancy incoherent light has many colours in it and the waves of light can have their crests pretty much all over the place. Coherent light has a very very limited colour spread and all the crests are synchronised to arrive to you at the same ‘phase’ An analogy with coherent speech and incoherent mumbling may help.