Francis

I think of all the carping that goes on in this forum, the most annoying one sniffing that "puzzles are just too simple now". I know, I know, I'm a neophyte solver, but I think it's true that *constantly* being told that something is easy when one is failing at it. One of the things I *never* did as a chemistry professor is blithely over and over again how easy chemistry is, just because it was easy for me. And I think it would have antagonized students had I done so. It would have come across as arrogant. If I follow others in simply giving up on this forum, it'll be because my blood pressure just gets too high when the "too easy" complaints come out.

I haven't read any comments yet, but I will say right now that I want my obituary to mention my having solved this puzzle.

I would bet there is some solver out there who, like me a few months ago, had never successfully completed a Friday with no lookups or help, who came to this comment board triumphantly Only to find it full of posts about how "easy" it was. Don't listen to them, excited person. A Friday is a Friday and gold star is a gold star. Stay excited. Stay enthused.

Nice job, Rena! I hope this puzzle gets the enthusiastic reception it deserves, but there is a subset of crossworders who typically don't react well to any kind of trick--rebuses, non-linear answers, etc. If there are boobirds here, remember it's nothing personal--many just hate anything out of the ordinary. I've been thinking about just avoiding Thursday comments for a while, until my blood pressure is within normal limits again. I think I'll start today. But, once again, wanted to congratulate you, Rena, and good luck with whatever is next.

Good puzzle. Very good puzzle. But it did have its ups and downs

I just loved [Spanish uncle?] as NOMAS. The longer it takes for me to get it, the more rewarding it is. That's just inspired cluing. Really liked the rest of the puzzle, too. I've never heard of CANOEPOLO, but I would assume it's very tough on the horses, trying to maintain their balance in the canoe with a rider on their back. Marvelous animals, those horses. I wish I was a horse.

I really can't believe all these "it was soooooo easy" posts. I thought the body of the puzzle was easier than normal. BUT the clues to the four-letter word were brutal. I finally cracked it with the X in square four. I had the T, but thought it was ducT, because of "end of the road". It was not al all easy for me. This, for me, was a classical example of more than half my time finding one or two letters. Clever, but I really didn't enjoy it very much. Maybe I'm just grumpy because someone sold my country to someone else.

Kugelman. Ok, he's a big deal, so I'm not going to hold back as I would for a debut constructor. This is *exactly* the kind of puzzle that causes negatives posts in the comment section. Absurd amount of cuteness, lots of brutal crosses (I won't call them naticks because I no longer think I know what that means), plenty of foreign names and foreign languages, bygone rock bands, answers which are noted as misspellings... Nah, no fun for me.

Seems like DENALI appears a lot these days. Viva le Résistance!!!

I enjoyed this puzzle right up to the time I got to the comments. I was happy when I figured out the embedded clues. I thought that was quite ingenious, especially given the word within a word within a word all made sense. Then I hit the A in the cross of HAKE and MATRYOSHKADOLLS. I wish I had a solution for the balance between the "too easy" people who would seemingly want the puzzles to be unsolvable by 90% of solvers. I try not to complain when puzzles are too difficult for me. I wish others wouldn't complain when they are too easy for them.

What way is "Gaia/Gaea" going to be spelt tomorrow? Guya? Gia? Giaw? Gieia?

It's days like today I'm really glad I took up this hobby. What a great puzzle! What a great feeling to have solved this puzzle! So I'm enjoying today, because we're ever unsure of the morrow.

I assume it's going to come at some point. Some cynic, someone who can't see silver linings, who struggles to conjure rainbow colored unicorns, someone who makes you question the whole concept of "soul"... someone *entirely* unlike me... will point out that HR departments are not there to help the employees, they're there to protect the company from a lawsuit from an employee. Of course I would never take such a perverse, scornful view.

I hadn't really noticed the grayed squares until just now, as I was reviewing the puzzle. Oh, wow! Oh, wow! Oh, wow! Oh, wow! Oh, wow! Along with Pride Month, it ought to be considered Courage Month. Takes some guts in this environment.

Being able to get LUDOVICOEINAUDI purely from crosses may be my proudest achievement in puzzle-solving yet.

Great puzzle from someone who is younger than most of my dental crowns.

Ok, here's the deal. I needed some real flyspecking to do this puzzle. But that doesn't bother me. It was the longest I've taken for a Tuesday in over a year. But that doesn't bother me. I finally, finally limped to the gold when I realized it's SELA Ward, not SELe Ward. (How could I forget--I've been in love with her for decades.) But that doesn't bother me, either. I got to see my grandson hit a home run in Little League tonight, so nothing, really, is bothering me.

YES! Greenland is Danish. Sing it out to all the heavens above and the earth below and the water over there somewhere. Why some of us think we should put our grubby paws on it, I'll never understand.

I post this sort of general comment once in a while when I expect a deluge of "too easy" complaints. Looks like it's coming tonight. I swear I'm starting to get a stomach ache when a puzzle is coming fairly quickly because I know we're in for "these puzzles aren't like the old days...". If you, for the very first time solved a Friday puzzle cleanly according to your personal definition of "clean", then congratulate yourself and be happy. Don't let all those who sniff at "too easy" Friday puzzles ruin it for you. A Friday is a Friday. Some are harder than others.

I use the crossword to octopi my time now that I'm retired. (Before that I was really kraken the whip.) (I'm auditioning to be the opening act of the Mike from Munster Show.)

Pardon my all too often back-to-back posts, but I wanted to say after having read the comments my appreciation for the ski slopes in this puzzle is sky high. I loved the Green bunny slope progressing the final double black diamond, straight down. Just terrific imagery. Stand up and take a bow, Mr. Proulx and Mr. Martinovic. I am heartily applauding.

Wow. That HAKA/AKELA cross was brutal.

My vote is for very enjoyable and quite the challenge. I was way over my recent Saturday times, More about that below... There were several times when after several minutes of my lasar-like focus, nothing would come up to resolve a region with an embarrassing number of blank squares. Then I'd widen my vision, and see that I had three other regions just like that. So I was fully prepared for a total flame out. But, gradually things came to me, as these seem to do. And sometimes things leave us. My rascally little Schipperke mix "puppy" died today. She was almost 16. I'm not doing this for sympathy. I just want to put a little message out in the digital world that will likely be there for a long, long time: "Holly, I loved you. You were a great little girl and I'll miss you every day."

I am very glad that the constructor put the O in the line over where the H's are, rather than H-O-H. Most of you probably know this, but the bond angle of the H-O-H bond is about 105 degrees. Not quite the right angle suggested here, but close. That makes all the difference. If the angle were 180 degree, as H-O-H suggest, water would have no dipole moment. It acts like it has a positive and a negative end. No dipole moment would have enormous effects. Water is incredibly unusual in that: 1) it has a *much* higher boiling point that it "should" compared o H-S-H and H-Se-H, so it is liquid at relatively high temperatures, 2) water can settle into a liquid packed just a bit more tightly than in solid ice. A given volume of ice weighs less than the same volume of liquid water. This means water freezes from the top, and the underlying layer remains at 0 C. Aquatic life can survive winter, if it doesn't get too cold. 3) water needs a *lot* of energy to change from solid to liquid, and even more to change from liquid to gas. Evaporating water gets cooler, and helps to keep us cool in hot climates. It's also why steam burns are so serious--not only is the water vapor hot, but it releases a huge amount of energy when it condenses into a liquid. Water has so many anomalous properties, if it weren't so common (and if life were even possible without so much of it) we'd consider it a laboratory oddity.

I used to love books but now they are defective. If I touch the page with fingers together and widen the distance between my fingers, the print doesn't get larger. Anybody else notice that? How long have books lacked that feature?

My opinion is that this is a fun, funny puzzle with a lot of puns that Andrzej will hate. In other words, a perfect Sunday.

I'm afraid to look. Do we *finally* have a Thursday puzzle that isn't going to incite a riot? Or is the *lack* or trickiness going to create a "too easy" backlash? We're a very hard lot to please.

BIG sigh of relief on 46A ["My life is over"] At that point I had IMxUxxED. My first guess was not IMRUINED. For a minute I thought the NYT had completely become unravelled after yesterday's "screws" and "nails".

I gotta say I especially loved Deb's intro today, concerning attitudes towards puzzling.

Please allow me the reverie of taking a mind's eye trip to NAIAD, the tiny moon of Neptune which is barreling along just barely over the top of Neptune's clouds. Naiad is only about 30,000 miles from Neptune (compare the 240,000 mile distance between the earth and the moon), and the view of the planet from it must be one of the most awe-inspiring views in the entire solar system.The massive and gorgeous blue Neptune taking up a stunning amount of Naiad's sky. I hope to visit there one day.

Ok, for all of those of you who only see the gloom and doom side of me--I have a story that is coming close to warming the cockles of my heart. Whatever those are. I looked out the window onto my back yard a couple of weeks ago, and I saw a deer. That's not really that unusual, but this deer was in the process of delivering a fawn. So I got to see the little guy's first attempts at walking, his first feeding. Since then, the mother and her fawn have come back to the yard several times. The mother munches on our hostas, and the little one runs back and forth in the yard, sometimes kicking up his back paws. In my more pensive moments, I like to think of this as a metaphor the universe is playing out to try to cheer me up. Renewed birth. Rising up from the ugliness. That kind of thing. I don't know if it'll work or not, but it does make me feel there's hope, somehow.

To me it's nearly incomprehensible to even approach creating a crossword puzzle. But to then do so with the requirement that all the "A"s in the puzzle make one giant "A".... ...it just beggars belief. I've never used "beggars belief" before, but it seems just the perfect words for this moment. My belief is beggared. That doesn't sound quite as cool, somehow.

My cup runneth o'er! With dark energy! What a great Thursday puzzle. Neat tricks with missing, excuse me, dark letters. (Is that an anti-rebus? Or would an anti-rebus square be left blank? Or have negative entries?...ooh, I like that). Anyway, an engraved invitation to talk about cosmology. You guys are so lucky. Dark Energy may be what most of the mass/energy of the universe is made of. And we really don't know what it is. And if we don't know what it is, it may not be real. Most I can tell you is that whatever it is "dark energy" is, that's probably a bad name for it. Werner Heisenberg of the famous Uncertainty Principle is said to have remarked that "Not only is the universe stranger than we think, it's stranger than we can think."

No, no, no, no, no. A thousand times no. I will not tolerate yet *another* constructor who could quite easily be my grandchild, or great grandchild. It just isn't right that such a terrific puzzle is produced by someone who is decades younger than my crowns. I won't stand for it any more.

Enthalpy. Physical chemistry, which I taught, is really made up of three main areas: thermodynamics, quantum mechanics, and statistical mechanics, which ties thermo and quantum together. Enthalpy is one of six fundamental measures of a system: Enthalpy, Entropy, Gibbs (free) energy, Helmholtz (work) energy, Temperature and Pressure. The reason Enthalpy is important for chemistry is because in a chemical reaction done under conditions of constant pressure and temperature (the most common case), the heat released or absorbed during the reaction is the change in Enthalpy. Some chemical changes produce heat, like burning methane or hydrogen in the presence of oxygen. These changes are called exothermic. A few changes absorb heat. These are called endothermic, and the reaction uses heat from the surroundings. The heat absorbed or released in these reactions is the enthalpy change. An example of a heat-consuming chemical change is the phase change from liquid water to water vapor. That consumes a large amount of heat, and is why we perspire. The water evaporating from our skin uses our body heat to turn liquid water to water vapor, thereby cools us off. It's also why steam is so dangerous. When water vapor condenses on a surface like our skin, it releases that heat, causing burns even more severe than it would otherwise. I always had trouble making thermodynamics interesting. This is the best I can do.

Here's a thought to cheer you long-time solvers eager, AGOG even, for a chewy Sunday puzzle: It *may* be that because of your perseverance in the comments, they decided to leave the circles out today for the tricky squares, just to make it a touch harder. If so, well done!