This is the crossword puzzle thread

I never heard of it before and didn’t mind it myself that much but can see why you would.

Natan Last appearance today!

Seems like you are his biggest fan on this thread.

Anyway this puzzle today was indeed a good one.

always enjoy natan last's new yorker puzzles

Today’s I liked

And today. From Claire Rimkus and someone else I am unfamiliar with.

Natan Last seems like it should be a palindrome of some sort. My first thought every single time I see that name.

I mean an anagram. Either that or a palindrome.

Nast T. Anal

Thank you! That must have been what I was thinking of

Today’s puzzle was okay although I got tripped up in the Eastern Lower Center.

But really I came to say that Bob Klahn is still the greatest although I am not sure when he last published a puzzle.

I definitely fall on the Rex Parker end of the continuum and thought today's was dumb, and I'm saying that as someone who enjoys puns.

Yeah, I'm not necessarily recommending it, maybe I was just in a patient mood this morning.

Isn't this the fundamental problem with having to have an opinion about the puzzle every single day? Xwords kind of depend on crosswordese and bad puns, or so it seems to me, therefore complaining about them can seem to be beside the point, unless there is a particular egregrious example, which maybe today's was, although I was immune for whatever reason. It does seem like the Next Generation such as Erik Agard and Claire Rimkus is making some kind of progress. On the other hand sometimes even somebody like BEQ's attempts to vajazzle it up sometimes fall flat, to me anyways.

Full disclosure: Years ago I used to enjoy talking to Claire's dad, Pete, along with the rest of the Connecticut Contigent at tournaments and I set right next to Erik at Lollapuzzoola one year. Think Andy Kravis was on the other side of me.

i appreciated the pittsburgh penguins content

otm

Took me a while, but I liked today’s puzzle. Nice grid.

I found it harder than usual, especially that NW corner.

It was definitely on the hard side but I didn’t mind doing and it managed to finish it without spending on eternity so all good for me.

I managed

yeah that played harder for me than maybe it should have

hated the long rhyming answer tho

Oh yeah, never heard of that.

This crossing I did not know: KYLO/UZO

Kind of a good puzzle I thought, hard (for me) but solvable. At least it wasn't full of US brands (one exception I think) or TV show networks, which are pretty much impossible for foreigners and have to be picked off using the crosses.

Yeah, I liked it. Still don't know what the Four Different Answers meant.

I thought it meant there were four different solutions - mouthwash, hand sanitizer, window cleaner, salt water

sorry, I should have hidden that

it wasn't hard but i didn't get why some (but not others) of thursday's acrosses had the marginalia letters

thought it was clever, it fitted a 6-word clue into a 16 x 16 puzzle - 1,3,3,3,3,3

1,4,7,10,13,16

I'm not an avid crossworder nor even an especially committed one, but it gets my goat when the clue indicates the solution is a slang term, but when I finally arrive at the correct word or phrase it is some sort of made-up pretended "slang" that no one has ever seen used or heard spoken by anyone ever. A recent example was "netman" for a tennis player. Fuck off, you failure of a crossword-devising person!

Xp

Both seemed like good gimmicks to me. Thursday's trickery was allowable (because I expect trickery on Thursday). So was today's trickery (because I expect trickery on April 1).

One of my spare-time pursuits is going backward into the archive, and I recently did a puzzle from a previous April 1 (2011 maybe?) that had similar shenanigans, and reader, I lolled.

Today’s puzzle quite challenging. Couldn’t quite finish the Lower West Side but still enjoyed.

In other news, the tournament is on and you can watch some of it on the YouTube channel if you are not there in person if that grabs you.

Wordle guy is there along with Spelling Bee guy. My friend told me he hung out with the latter and presumably gave him his list of wrongly rejected vocab.

Or maybe my friend got me with an April Fools.

No, not an April Fools.

Looking at the list of competitors. Interesting that Erik Agard is not there.

Finally cracked the SW in today's puzzle by realizing one of the answers was sillier than expected

Still don’t totally grok the way 40D works. I sort of see it but still.

Me neither

Searching for it seems like there are about a half dozen sites that merely echo the answers and the clues every day with no commentary.

gtfo with 56A

Never heard of that either

No Jon Delfin at the contest either.

re 56A Sometimes it seems as if constructors are poring through lifestyle magazines trying to find cutesy terms that will be recognizable only to an extremely limited in-group and will be used by no one whatsover in a year's time. It's all a big cuddle puddle.

Stuck in SW, very possibly a DNF as I sit on 999 puzzles solved.

wait so you are on the cusp of a 1,000 day streak?

Also:

Best of luck, all ye who dare to enter the Marriott of Stamford!

Seriously, I miss you all already, but please have a blast and remember: "No sleep till Puzzle 5" ❤#acpt #acpt2022 @StamfordMarriot pic.twitter.com/VdfGEBmmyA

— Deb Amlen (@DebAmlen) April 1, 2022