QuillxWords

Time: 48:53 Average Sunday: 50:33 Best Sunday: 21:55 I've spent probably 18 of the last 24 hours drifting in and out of sleep, with the rest of the time eating breakfast, enjoying the hotel gym, and working on this crossword. When I put it like, I think I can do more than ROLL WITH IT . It's quite appropriate that the theme of this puzzle would be disturbed sleep, even if there's not a word about a jet lag in here. Initially as I was working through this puzzle, I thought that this is another puzzle with an awful lot of theme. MATTRESS , PRINCESS , and PEA ? Of course, the four rebus squares with "pea" were the only bit of trickiness, with the other elements falling into place for a charming "aha" moment. BELLE , LEIA , XENA , and ANNE lie directly atop QUEEN ( OF MEAN ), FULL ( BODIED ), TWIN ( SISTER ), and KING ( SOLOMON ), respectively, each with a rebus "Pea" below those that, you know, might disturb or ROUST them from sleep. Also, ...

Time: 20:45 Average Saturday: 39:53 Best Saturday: 20:09 40 hours after walking out my door in Bloomington, IN, I checked into my hotel in Islamabad, Pakistan. Travel went about as smoothly as I could have expected, but two 6-hour layovers in a single itinerary is absolutely something to be avoided. Boy, did I BOTCH that travel planning! But I did watch quite a few episodes of The Americans on my IPAD PRO while in Bahrain. Somehow, wildly sleep deprived, travel weary, and unshowered (i.e. a HOT MESS ) seems to be my ideal crossword state because I once again came close to a personal Saturday record while sitting in the lobby of the Serena Hotel waiting for my room. I loved the layout of this crossword with a couple long downs breaking up four 6x5 squares (more or less in the case of the NE/SW).While my first runthrough produced maybe just three answers, this was a perfect puzzle for hacking away with lots of inferrable mid-length answers. It seemed like quite a few brand name...

Time: 15:33 Average Friday: 28:59 Best Friday: 10:21 Good morning from a random but mostly empty lounge in Frankfurt Airport where I'm about a third of the way into the first of my six hour layovers. I'm always nervous starting a Friday puzzle when I'm sleep deprived and more so when the first clue is something like "Suzanne Somers's role in 'Three's Company.'" It's CHRISSY , as it turns out, and I'm sure that's an easy clue for many, but it is way out of my wheelhouse. I stayed nervous until I came to "2001 Destiny's Child #1 hit with the lyric 'I don't think you ready for this jelly" and now I'm just singing BOOTYLICIOUS to myself in this lounge. Follow that up with "Figures in the Edda" and I'm able to put in NORSE [something] anyway; DEITIES was clear once I had a couple more letters. Just reading RESCUE DOG and I miss my big puppy already. TRUST FUND BABY is another fun answer, w...

Time: 12:10 Average Thursday: 26:35 Best Thursday: 10:18 Greetings from the Indianapolis Airport, site of my first crossword blog entry! Despite my wildly more complicated upcoming itinerary, I'm hoping that this series of flights will go substantially more smoothly than last time. I took care of this Thursday crossword fairly quickly on the airport shuttle, finishing strangely enough with my favorite clue of "Starbuck's order giver" for AHAB . Give me a Moby Dick clue any time and if it's also a clever play on First Mate Starbuck's name, even better. I also enjoyed that SEA LEGS is just off to the side of the Pequod's captain there. ALAS , I can't say that I enjoyed this theme very much and I'm actually hesitant to even call it a theme. So, we have unclued long entries that all have some kind of visual motif in or around the squares that are, in effect, the clues. I was able to write in FILL IN THE BLANKS based on those lines once I ha...

Time: 20:08 Average Wednesday: 17:45 Best Wednesday: 7:24 We have a celebrity crossword today with Melinda Gates co-constructing with Joel Fagliano. I'm actually impressed with this stealth tricky Wednesday theme of doubling stand-alone letters in phrases to produce wackiness. XX FACTOR : "Part played by women and girls?" CC SECTION : "Area below 'To:' in an email?" BB COMPLEX : "Group of buildings housing a King?" EE READER : "Lover of Cummings's poetry" These are some of the driest ? type clues that I've seen and I think that's what I enjoy about them. Overall, this entire puzzle has an old school liberal arts feel to it,with the assumption that you'll know Audre LORDE , JM BARRIE , and what a BLUE ROAN is. I'm vaguely familiar with horse colorings, but would never be able to name that particular one. I also just Googled CYCLADES and now I want to go check out the ruins on these islands just from ...

Time: 13:56 Liz Gorski changed the name of this puzzle from "Network" in order to ditch the association to the Lumet film and instead went with the innocuous, for her, "Networking." However, for me, that word just makes me think of one of the sillier elements of my job, at which I'm pretty sure I'm simultaneously brilliant and atrocious. I suppose if the people networking want to talk about crosswords or ultimate (i.e. not about work), then I'm GRAND at networking! Maybe they'd like to hear a YARN about the New Mutants. Hopefully, they're just a NERD like me. CHANNEL FINDERS gives an alternate title for the theme and, sure enough, if you look at the end of the longer across clues, you'll find PERSONAL HISTORY , SLY AS A FOX , SURFIN USA , and ONCE IN A LIFETIME . There's something charmingly quaint about these older channels that reminds me of my cable box from the 90s. So, I got really stuck in the absolutely brutal west centr...

Time: 10:25 Average Tuesday: 13:49 Best Tuesday: 6:10 Well, I was on pace for a record time for Tuesday on this puzzle as I was absolutely flying through, dropping AMY POEHLER , MANSPREADS , and SLEEP APNEA into place for the long downs without any need for crosses. I've learned not to bother even reading referential clues on my first pass through a puzzle and this saved me quite a bit of time not trying to parse clues like "With 12-Down, places where a thoughtless person 30-Down." Huh? There were a fair amount of those and, of course, they all fit into the manspreading theme in the end, but as clues they are deeply annoying. To fill out the theme, we have the SUBWAY TRAIN locale and then the word "man" in circles and spread throughout the puzzle. I was just working on getting my e-visa for my trip to Muscat, so OMANI was beyond a gimme for me. I'm always thrilled to see CALVIN , "Comics boy who says 'Reality continues to ruin my life,...

Time: 5:50 Average Monday: 8:46 Best Monday: 4:41 Well, if RAGTOP is going appear in the crossword, then I'm going to be singing Gillian Welch to myself all day, since "Look at Miss Ohio" is the only place I've ever heard that particular bit of slang for convertible. Honestly, it's stuck in my head most of the time anyway.  I'm also not going to complain about a JEOPARDY and WHEEL OF FORTUNE themed puzzle. I was always a bigger fan of Jeopardy because it's, well, more interesting, but that back to back time slot is strong, even when it competed with Simpsons reruns in my youth. The constructor fit in everything he was supposed to by making sure we had hosts ALEX TREBEK , PAT SAJAK , and VANNA WHITE all represented. It seemed appropriate to have so many nations and nationalities in there too with SERBIA , QATARI , and NEPALI . Overall, a nice theme with probably a few too many boring 3-letter words, but nothing that I would call garbage fill....

Time: 40:09 Average Sunday: 50:35 Best Sunday: 21:55 Wow, there is an impressive amount of theme crammed into this puzzle. And since I spent the entire puzzle telling myself that I have no idea what the TREACHERY OF IMAGES is, my aha moment was particularly poignant. As the pipe filled itself in on the NY Times app, I thought that of course I know "This is not pipe" (Ceci n'est pas une pipe) by MAGRITTE from Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics ! I will say that I may never have bothered connecting the dots and creating the PIPE LINE , so the fact that the app took care of it did ELICIT a bravo from me. Good job, NY Times! I'm just reading a book about crossword construction at the moment, so I'm becoming aware of the difficulty of creating a theme-dense puzzle. I will say that the fact that the painting is stored in LOS ANGELES would qualify as a bit trivial, but I'm not going to complain much about that. I was busy hacking away with no idea ho...

Time: 27:05 Average Saturday: 40:16 Best Saturday: 20:09 I get tremendous comfort along with a tiny thrill when I can enter a grid-spanning answer with certainty without a single cross. I have fond memories of watching the first episode of THE TWILIGHT ZONE in James Welsch's room with a group of fellow college sophomores. As the protagonist entered each empty setting, several of us would simultaneously utter "hey, where is everybody?" Also deeply worth watching is Rod Serling's pitch for the show that reassures potential sponsors that viewers will buy their products. Since I don't know the names of dances, I was worried that I'd just never get the "Dance in which 'you bring your knees in tight," but once that W fell into place, so did THE TIME WARP . I was also really satisfied when  HERCULEAN EFFORT  became clear, especially because those short downs like  PARSER  and  PEE DEE  weren't ever going to come to me on their own. As y...

Time: 44:52 Average Friday: 29:11 Best Friday: 10:21 I got brutally and embarrassingly stuck in the SW and that accounts largely for the 15 minutes beyond my average today. For the rest of the puzzle, I was hacking away at a decent pace, but the layout with the NE and SW essentially isolated from the rest of the puzzle really slowed me down. I finally broke the SW open when I grokked STRESS ATE , cleverly and deliciously clued as "Took courses under pressure." From there, I remembered that a CAPE is a thing that Elvis definitely wore. I eventually remembered about PISA as a place that Fibonacci could be from, which was slowed because I'd had cASsIS as the "French apertif" that I'd barely heard of, which had to replaced by PASTIS , which I've never heard of at all. I should have remembered TATAMI MAT sooner, but it escaped me right up to the end. I'll put down COSSETS , a synonym for "coddle" or "mollycoddle,"   as the wo...

Time: 29:59 Average Thursday: 26:35 Best Thursday: 10:18 I think I struggled with this one more than I should have. The theme was straightforward enough, especially with the helpful note in the app that "the clue at 53-across indicates an answer that begins in the first squares of the 12th row." After spending a moment dumbly counting down the side, I guessed that these single squares would, in fact, connect with Across answers somehow. Only after I finished did I notice that the parts of words that INTER LACE   were all things that could be sewn or woven or whatever. STRING SECTION and MESSAGE THREAD were the other two, although the simple answer could have simply been MESSAGEs, which threw me off for a time. Is it not a problem that the INTERLACE answer just trails off into the rest of the puzzle? That seems like a construction problem to me. My struggle came mostly from the unfamiliar fill and what I'd call an excess of three word answers, which always elude...

Time: 11:09 Average Wednesday: 17:43 Best Wednesday: 7:24 I stupidly wrote in wINeBAR instead of MINIBAR for "Fancy hotel room amenity," despite spending a fair amount of time in fancy hotels these days. However, I dutifully ignore the minibars for obvious reasons, while of course helping myself to all the fancy free SOAP . I enjoyed the YIDDISH theme today, especially the exclamation OY GEVALT with its rather uninspiring cluing of "Jeez!" I was generally familiar with the six Yiddish phrases (if not always the spelling), mostly from encountering them in other crosswords, except for MEGILLAH for a "long, involved account." Now that I'm looking it, however, and I see it stated as "the whole megillah," I'm vaguely recalling coming across it in pop culture more than a few times. Now I know what was being said. I'm impressed that this puzzle manages six theme answers plus a revealer while keeping the fill largely above average...

Time: 9:46 I'm also enjoying the beginning of Autumn in Indiana so I immediately appreciated Liz Gorski's missive today. Have I mentioned that you should join me by making a Tuesday Tradition of Crossword Nation ? When I see "Paradise" singer, I go straight for John Prine, but I'm almost equally happy to see the slightly more crossword-friendly SADE . I'll save my eating ice cream with John Prine story for when he makes an actual appearance in a crossword. I keep seeing SELA at the bottom of the grid and thinking Islamic Central Asia scholar Ron Sela? Oh, I've never seen TV's "FBI," so Sela Ward is more obscure in my mind. The Falling LEAVES theme today took me a moment to parse, but now I'm seeing that the last word of the long downs are types of leaves, falling because they're Down answers, of course:  SECOND BANANA , THE DOCK OF THE BAY , GILBERT GRAPE , and AFTER DINNER MINT . Another nice clean theme for your Tuesday...

Time: 16:35 Average Tuesday: 13:51 Best Tuesday: 6:10 Sometimes clues seem so entirely directed at me that my first instinct is to doubt myself. I was much too excited about "European capital whose name most people incorrectly accent on the second syllable," which is probably a few too many words, but OMG I know one of those! After living in Bulgaria for 27 months (and always subtly, without a SNEER , correcting westerners' pronunciation of SOFIA ), it's actually difficult for me to pronounce the name Sophia correctly. Still, after reading this clue , I checked to see who the constructor was and now I'm wondering if Greg Johnson lived in Bulgaria as well. It's just too specific to not be something that annoys him too. The actual theme for this puzzle is chemical compounds of various gases, I suppose. You can see the chemical make-up (I assume, haven't checked) of AMMONIA , CARBON DIOXIDE , and METHANE in the circled letters, which is fairly fun, I...

Time: 4:41 Average Monday: 8:48 Best Monday: 4:41 For Mondays and Tuesdays, I'm prioritizing PACE over anything else, which is more of an exercise for myself rather than something that actually makes the solve more fun. As a result, there are often clues that I don't even read because I'm just activating the autofill portion of my brain. I wouldn't advise anyone to be overly concerned about their crossword solve speed as anything more than a curiosity, unless you're getting into competitive crossword solving, which is not something I aspire to. That said, I'm happy to have broken my Monday record this morning! Regarding the word BOSSY , I just want to say that there is no way to read that term as anything other than sexist. I present my argument simply by asking if you've ever heard a man described as "bossy." I certainly haven't. In fact, I think I've heard it exclusively as a disempowering term and I'm sometimes amazed that I...

Time: 39:09 Average Sunday: 50:44 Best Sunday: 21:55 Sunday morning in the hammock with a BEER and crossword. It's a funny dream that I have these days but if this the APEX , I'll absolutely take it, especially since I got my dog here too. SNOOD is a type of a "hair net?" Sorry, but I only know it as the computer game that everyone was playing in the computer lab when I was in high school. The theme title this week is "Uh, What?" which obviously means that familiar phrases have an "uh" sound added in to produce some wackiness. So you have OREGON TRANSPLANT (organ transplant), SENATOR OF GRAVITY (center of gravity), RIOTING ON THE WALL (writing on the wall), etc. These mostly worked for me and I was impressed that they all involved a change in spelling beyond simply adding a vowel somewhere, except for PROJECT RUNAWAY (Project Runway), kind of spoiling that consistency. I also didn't care for KING JAMES BUYABLE  because I only vag...

Time: 25:56 Average Saturday: 40:32 Best Saturday: 20:09 I don’t think it gets much better than a Saturday crossword solve from a hammock overlooking a lake with a beer in hand. Blogging from my phone in the same setting is a bit more awkward. Thomas ALVA Edison, or as he’s never known as far as I know, TAE , invented the MIMEOGRAPH . So, that was my least favorite part of the crossword, even if they fell pretty early. It’s good to see SAME SEX MARRIAGE in the puzzle as an “equal rights subject,”as well as a pretty easy long across to get a Saturday started. I’m not sure what it says about my work as an admissions officer that my first guess for “Admssions might give one away” was “Scholarship!” CAMPUS MAP makes more sense. I wrote in “Fresh start” for “New Year, metaphorically,” which slowed me down until I finally got CLEAN SLATE in there. Finally, I’M A FOOL is hilariously formal for “D’oh!” but fairly accurate, I suppose. 

Time: 20:19 Average Friday: 28:58 Best Friday: 10:21 Friday puzzles are probably my favorite, as they're fairly consistently just challenging enough to give me a scare. Usually I'm able to nail a long answer or two to start out a Friday and that gets me going, but this one really worried me when I only had four answers entered on my first run-through. Fortunately, I was able to get Sarah KOENIG of "Serial" right off the bat and I very much doubt I was alone in that in crossword-land. That said, even though I love "Serial," I always get a bit irked because far too often when I say that I listen to podcasts, I get the response, "Oh, podcasts! Have you listened to Serial?" Yes, I've listened to the most famous podcast. IMAGINE THAT . The answer that finally got me going was SWISS CHARD for "leafy vegetable related to a beet." With that string of first letters, I was able to march across the puzzle west to east. HUNT AND PECK i...

Time: 20:31 Average Thursday: 26:32 Best Thursday: 10:18 Rebus squares in crossword puzzles are squares that have more than one letter in them, usually according to some kind of theme that becomes apparent as you solve the puzzle. These were the toughest for me when I first started getting seriously into crossword puzzles a year ago, but once you've done enough crosswords, you really start to get a sense of when something is wrong. Also, Thursdays tend to features rebus squares or some other kind of trick, so you usually know when to expect it as well. This rebus theme might be as straightforward as they come, since the revealers of INBOX and OUTBOX tell you that the words "in" and "out" will appear in boxes. That is a clear revealer. The rebus squares are also relatively easy to find since they're placed in the long-ish answers. THE FOUNTA(IN) OF Y(OUT)H and FROTH(IN)G AT THE M(OUT)H are both nice centerpiece answers to illustrate the theme.  I...

Time: 18:58 Average Wednesday: 17:48 Best Wednesday: 7:24 Yeah, so I don't know FRENCH CHEF terms at all, so this one was going to be difficult right from the start. HORS D'OEUVRES , yes, I've heard of them. Now I've learned and will probably forget that PETIT FOURS are small bite-sized confectioneries or savory appetizers, BOUILLABAISSE is a fish stew from Marseilles, and MILLE FEUILLE is a vanilla or custard slice, also known as a Napoleon. My three years of high school French helped me fill in a couple letters here and there, but for the most part I was reliant on the crosses, which weren't coming easily either. I'm also not so knowledgeable about cars, so the Chevy AVEO was just a collection of letters for me. That A was the last letter to fall as I ran the alphabet in the square. 17% of the land in Holland is RECLAIMED (from the sea)? NEAT . If you're interested in a quick ASIMOV read, definitely check out The Last Question . His short fic...

Time: 9:54 I'll continue to plug Liz Gorski's Crossword Nation  every week, again not only for the brisk, solvable puzzles, but also for the tidbits that come in the delivery email. This week, Liz refers to this type of theme angle that she used to see employed in the 80s and 90s, but since I wasn't doing crossword puzzle in those years and don't really know many crossword theme types yet, I'll confess that I don't really know what she's referring to. I'm guessing that it's something along the lines of 3 or 4 answers to a certain clue, in this case the clue being "JULIA" and yielding, as the title suggests, three ladies and gentleman. CHEF CHILD is straightforward as is BEATLES BALLAD "Julia," but I've never heard of the JANE FONDA FILM "Julia." ACTOR RAUL Julia apparently plays M. Bison in the Street Fighter movie, so I'm filing that away! Really, the main takeaway from this puzzle is, I'm guessin...

Time: 7:23 Average Tuesday: 13:50 Best Tuesday: 6:10 I was slow to parse METADATA at 1 across ("information about other information") and didn't get any immediate help from 1 2 or 3 down and thought, "this is going to be rough for a Tuesday." From that point on, however, it was just see clue, write answer all the way, even grokking the FLOWERY LANGUAGE theme to get my head in the right place for the long answers. My only snag in the end was GAWP , which I guess is a word along with gawk and gape meaning more or less the same thing. I love a nice reversal of the standard crossword clues, so when I saw "Elevator innovator Otis," all I could think was, "Fair play, Timothy Polin." I've written "Otis" into crosswords a hundred times, but nope, I couldn't have told you his first name was ELISHA . The invention of a "safety device that prevents elevators from falling if the hoisting cable fails" is just such a fi...

Time: 7:35 Average Monday: 8:50 Best Monday: 4:51 Although I finished with a decent time in the end, this one played as more difficult than an average Monday for me. Maybe just having pLOd instead of SLOG for a solid minute was the main thing slowing me down. I'm pleased to have BURL IVES ' name in my head now. When "'Cat on a Hot Tin Roof' actor" was not Paul Newman, I was pretty sure that I would need every cross to get the old man who delivers the word "Mendacity" with such aplomb in that film. It may be one of my favorite Tennessee Williams devices to have your actors repeat a random word with conviction over and over again, like Marlon Brando saying "Napoleonic Code" maybe 10,000 times in Streetcar. I had no idea that AL ROKER was the "Guinness world record holder for longest live weather report," but I also know him only from his brief appearance on My Brother, My Brother, and Me  (one of the best podcasts) in w...

Time: 45:40 Average Sunday: 50:55 Best Sunday: 21:55 I enjoyed the LOVE/HATE RELATIONSHIP theme of this puzzle, but it cost me about 7 minutes trying to figure out how to enter it in a way the app liked and then realizing that I had a typo on WORDS TO THAT EFFECT and having to run through the possibilities again. In four squares, the letters LOVE would apply for the acrosses and the letters HATE would apply to the down answers. I knew there was something going on when I saw the "Islamic state" clue but couldn't fit CALIP ( HATE ). I was also fairly confident that there was no country bordering Hungary with only five letters, which turned out to be  S(LOVE)NIA , whence I'm bound for the first time in November. Something about the clue "Result of a photographic memory" leading to TOTAL RECALL  made me think there was some kind of film theme happening, but I suppose that was just a one-off, of sorts. Can I say that I'm officially sick of seeing ...

Time: 39:19 Average Saturday: 40:50 Best Saturday: 20:09 I think I've discovered the cure for jet lag and it's playing five games of ultimate from 9am to 4pm in the wind and rain. It may not always be possible, but I certainly feel like it got the job done.  Of course, all this ultimate on a Saturday has seriously delayed my post for the day. More's the pity, because today's crossword comes from the mind of Andrew Ries, my favorite crossword constructor! If you'd told me a year ago that I'd have a favorite crossword constructor, I would have laughed at you. But Andrew Ries really does stand out, especially if you check out his bi-weekly Aries Freestyles . Ries tends to avoid proper nouns out of principle and instead focuses on wordplay, which means that although his crosswords are brutally difficult, you can generally make your way through them with time if you're able to screw up your mind into his way of thinking. And you usually won'...

Time: 19:08 Average Friday: 29:05 Best Friday: 10:21 I've been cruising through jet lag so far and even got to the office early this morning for my first day back (and a Friday!). So, I'm back ON THE CLOCK and in need of  LUNCH MONEY , definitely not sinking in ABOMINABLE QUICKSAND ... OK, maybe I am a bit jetlagged. Today's puzzle was a fairly ideal Friday themeless, with a lot of intuitive long-ish answers, which you have a chance at just dropping in or certainly should be knowable with a couple crosses. That said, there was some trickiness. I absolutely wanted raNT for "Go on Tweetstorm, say" rather than VENT . "Country" is nice cluing for RUSTIC . It took me forever to parse TOW for "Fate worse than a ticket" since a WET CELL battery, apparently the original type of rechargeable battery, wasn't really familiar to me either. I had no idea that DORY was a type of flat-bottomed boat. I'm also really weak on Latin, so IPSE ...

Time: 33:30 Average Thursday: 26:38 Best Thursday: 10:18 Wow, this one gave me a lot of trouble. Part of it may be the jet lag and I'm also now feeling the pressure of not being 9.5 hours ahead of my reading audience. More than that, however, the cluing was pretty tricky and I didn't find the theme revealer to be remotely intuitive. Fortunately, there's only one phrase involving icebergs, as far as I know, so once I had the end of the revealer, I could easily complete TIP OF THE ICEBERG , which gave me a lot of letters to work with. I thought maybe that the black squares in the middle represented a tip of an iceberg, but couldn't figure out what that would lead to. Eventually, there was enough wrong in the north that I started adding letters to the top of words, yielding the following answers: (I) SLAM (C) OVER CHARGES (E) MERGES (B) ARES (E) ASTERN (R) ENUNICIATION (G) UN IT As I said, I'm not sure the revealer quite works, but I'm happy enou...

Time: 8:47 Wednesday Average: 17:47 Best Wednesday: 7:24 As far as my brain is concerned, it's 5PM in Delhi, but my body currently occupies 7:30am in an airport lounge in Newark. Sadly, I've left the world of NAAN (really appears in a lot of crosswords, doesn't it?). And I just spilled my coffee, so maybe I should switch to ALE . It is 5 o'clock somewhere and I happen to know exactly where. Today's theme of TEAM BUILDING affected my solve, I suppose, in that I noticed that NFL teams seemed to be forming from the crosses and I ended up ignoring the "some thing + something else"cluing. "Butter square + Hilarious people." Yeah, I don't have time to parse that, but hey, it's PATRIOTS in the end. Got it. Meanwhile, we have the weirdly banal answer to "Stanley Cup matchup, e.g." as NHL GAME . Yawn. About as exciting as DSL MODEM , I suppose. However, I really liked this puzzle because. well, I suppose it was nice to get a ...

Time: 9:33 Like the NY Times Tuesday this week, this one had a theme that did not affect my solve whatsoever. However, when I took the time to see it, it elicited a pleased "oooooh" instead of an indifferent "huh." The crossword title "I Get Around" and the theme revealer "Side Eye" show that all of the border clues are phrases with the word eye. PRIVATE eye, ROVING eye (less sure about that one), GLASS eye, BUCK eye, DEAD eye, TRAINED eye, SLEEPY eye, BULLS eye, EVIL eye, and PINK eye. Smooth and satisfying.  The last clue to fall for me was "Mel Blanc has one that says 'That's all folks.'" I believe I knew that he had that classic line on his GRAVESTONE , but it had disappeared from my memory and I'm so glad to have it back.  I'm also pleased to see KERI Russell since I'm just beginning my re-watch of The Americans and remembering why that show managed to practically trademark the term...

Time: 6:14 Average Tuesday: 13:54 Best  Tuesday: 6:10 Strangely enough, I completed today's puzzle while stuck in traffic in Delhi, which made up approximately 5 hours of my day. UGH .  I need to remember OLLA as an earthen or ceramic pot, because on other days, I won't get it entirely on crosses and barely notice it.  "One involved with a grand opening?" is a clever clue for PIANO TUNER .  I was also completely unfamiliar with the term ANCHOR TENANT , referring to a large brand name store in a mall meant to draw broad crowds. However, it sounds plausible. That answer, along with ALL TOGETHER , ATOMIC THEORY , and AIRPORT TERMINAL (whence I'm bound in 30 minutes), make up the theme of THE EIGHTIES . What do those things have to do with the 80s, you ask? Absolutely nothing. It's a phonetic clue, so AT's, sounded out, and look it's a phrase where one word starts with A and the next starts with T. This can be filed away with the...

Time: 5:05 Average Monday: 8:51 Best Monday: 4:51 I'm a little proud of getting close to my best Monday time while solving in a car winding down the road from Mussoorie to Dehradun in a STORM . I also enjoyed the simple Monday theme, which I suppose could be described as the progression from sitting to running, with SITTING DUCK , STANDING ORDER , WALKING PAPERS , and RUNNING JOKE . Nothing much else linking the answers and the clues are simple and straightforward, but it works well enough. I'm familiar with Laurel and Hardy, but never knew them as Stan and OLLIE . Perhaps that's because my knowledge of them is only cursory. Just this moment, a waitress in the Marriott lounge recognized me from last year and got me some food from the kitchen even though I missed the happy hour free food. Such a strange life I lead. I will INHALE this food now before continuing to write. ( GROAN ). I bet crossword constructors are happy to have "Crazy Rich         ...

Time: 30:56 Average Sunday: 50:59 Best Sunday: 21:55 I'm not sure Sunday crossword solves get a more pleasant backdrop than staring out into the fog from a manor house in Mussoorie while sipping coffee. Not only that, but this crossword seemed so perfectly within my wheelhouse, especially the theme entries. The title/theme, which I so often forget to check, was "Going Head to Head" with themes clued as various showdowns. The answers are head to head in that the first showdown participant is spelled backwards, yielding the following: SUESEHTMINOTAUR : "Showdown in Greek Mythology" (Theseus and the Minotaur) OIRAMBOWSER : "Showdown in classic video games" (Mario and Bowser) NOTLIMAHBURR : "Showdown in American history" (Hamilton and Burr) EKULDARTHVADER : "Showdown in cinema" (Luke and Darth Vader) YPOONSREDBARON : "Showdown in the funnies" (Snoopy and Red Baron) DIVADGOLIATH : "Showdown in the Bible...

Time: 55:20 Average Saturday: 40:52 Best Saturday: 20:09 Another Saturday and another absolutely brutal time. This time, my mistake was not in the corner that I expected, so I spent about 20 minutes messing around in the Southeast, mainly because I was not remotely confident about PROLE (like proletarian) being a synonym for drudge and not at all sure enough about PRIVET , TALENTS , or PRADA to leave them in peace. My mistake? With - AMBIA in place for “smallest country in mainland Africa,” I thought “Zambia doesn’t seem right, but I suppose that must be it. I also didn’t know the “Mean Miss of The Wizard of Oz” and z ULCH sounded as likely as anything. So that mistake just sat there, again, for about 20 minutes. Friends, GAMBIA is the smallest country in mainland Africa. I plan to remember for next time.  Contributing to the frustrating solve was my personal setting, crammed into a tiny seat on a bumpy plane ride out of Delhi. I am no CONTORTIONIST and my knees a...