Author: plusjeremy

34:10. After a not-particularly-strenuous week, I wondered if we might be in for a very difficult puzzle.

20:21. I’m not sure what I’ve done to deserve getting the easier Fridays. I was kind of hoping to get smashed by a real toughie, but it doesn’t seem like this is the one.

In which I pay the price for not being more well-read.

In which I try to restrain my anger.

17:18, indicating a gentler puzzle, at least by my standards. One answer seemed to speak to me directly.

DNF. Got almost all of these in a very reasonable 25 minutes or so, but got stuck on the last three for an eternity. Eventually made a guess on one, which was wrong (I hadn’t heard of the actual answer), and had to look up the other in the dictionary. Ah well!

39:50, though the time is irrelevant as the puzzle was solved by myself and three other (in?)famous NYC solvers, who will make themselves known if they wish. (Perhaps even photograph evidence will be supplied.)

52:13. I’m writing from the beaches of Southern California. Perhaps the distance from the motherland has dulled my solving abilities, but I think this was actually a tough one.

DNF. I was so absurdly off the wavelength here, there’s very little I can say. I labored to fill in as many squares as I could, but in the end, there were three clues I couldn’t get.

43:39. Well, that’s how I felt solving this puzzle anyway. Don’t get me wrong, there were a lot of absolutely delightful clues here (meaning surface reading, wordplay, word choice, etc), but I felt that a fair amount of the difficulty for me stemmed from using very uncommon synonyms or abbreviations. But let me parse the clues and I’ll get back to you.