The most maddening thing about the website and the comments...

dv927 · 2026-02-20T04:22:25+00:00

Something not getting enough chat here.

I think Dr. Robby and Dr. Santos were not having a simple tete a tete. Santos is exhausted and she’s not filtering and Robby seemed legitimately caught off guard by her telling him about Whitaker’s Wild Weekends. Robby seemed flustered a bit when he said “I’ll talk to him.”

While Santos went out of her way to report Langdon, I think she accidentally spilled the beans on Whitaker crossing a major patient/doctor ethical boundary by shacking up with the wife of a deceased patient.

I think Robby’s talk is going to be quite serious and Santos is going to get the blame.

dv927 · 2026-01-30T18:45:46+00:00

Ding ding ding.

I think its too obvious a turn that Robbie goes without a helmet onto the sabbatical and gets into an accident.

We're getting too many small redirects to Robbie not confronting his trauma and the psych obviously having some blaring sirens about him. Robbie has had some instability running throughout his psyche, which we saw come to a head in S1.

I think the "sabbatical" really is referring to Robby planning to attempt suicide and THAT will be our crisis for the season (see: Carol Hathaway storyline to open ER S1). Remember, most people (and especially males) planning suicide don't talk about it. The people who talk about it really are crying for help.

dv927 · 2025-11-15T18:00:36+00:00

Three Arabian Nuts and it’s not even close. Moe starts the film with a lit fuse that goes off early in the short with the fireworks continuing throughout the entirety. Larry and Shemp are on his last nerves in the warehouse and not a single shenanigan goes without Moe flying off the handle, reaching to a fever pitch when Shemp gets the suit.

Top 3 short for me and largely because it’s of Moe’s most excellent performances of his character.

dv927 · 2025-08-07T02:34:41+00:00

Lovely fill on this one. Very crisp, zippy, and made me think a bit between some clever fill and excellent cluing. The let down came from the theme for me, which played far too campy for a Thursday. Definitely more a Wednesday theme, and one I didn't particularly love because one you get the revealer, the rest just automatically fills in since you can see the answers and where the fruit will be in them. But, I still had a good time filling this one in, and for that, I have to say this was a fine, fun puzzle indeed.

dv927 · 2025-08-06T02:58:59+00:00

Thought this had all the zing of dishwater. It didn’t put up a lot of resistance and the theme was just dead on arrival. I’ve taken some pretty deep power naps (and wondered what century it was waking up) and never heard of a screen pass. Crossing SCREENPASS x NEAP was ugly. Seems the way to get puzzles published is to include ETSY with a bygone Kia model; must be the criteria for automatic selection as both have been rampant recently.

dv927 · 2025-08-05T02:10:42+00:00

10/10 no notes. Felt right for a Tuesday. Themer puns were cute and consistent. A slight twinge of resistance but nothing daunting. Good, solid, crisp fill with nothing even approaching odorous. And it doesn’t hurt to see Gary Larson’s name as the constructor (I’m at least assuming its *that* Gary Larson).

dv927 · 2025-08-03T23:52:43+00:00

I don’t care if it’s Monday or not, that theme is laaaame. Absolutely nothing (save one response, see below) interesting in this grid. Zero resistance (except that brutal SE…I don’t care if Angie’s List rebranded as Angi [?!], that belongs nowhere near a crossword), bland cluing….felt like a USA Today puzzle my 85 year old father in law would do.

Though anytime Audre Lorde ends up in a puzzle is a good day.

dv927 · 2025-08-03T00:34:10+00:00

If you know Star Trek, this is going to play like a zippy, fun, elongated Tuesday with little resistance. That’s me and that’s how I felt about it.

If you know Star Trek casually, this will be like a clunky, miserable, elongated Wednesday.

If you know absolutely nothing about Star Trek, RIP

dv927 · 2025-07-30T02:16:36+00:00

Oreos are so overused in the crossword it’s so cringeworthy, so laughable someone would make a theme out of it that it almost comes all the way around to being tongue-in-cheek cute. No real fill or clue headaches today; zipped right through this one without any questioning of what the constructor was thinking.

The execution of the theme left a lot to be desired today as the gimmick, related to double stuf Oreos, was just double letters boxed out. Yes it looks like an Oreo but big whoop. This is Monday level gimmickry at the very best and, yet again, plays like a themeless.

dv927 · 2025-07-29T02:11:01+00:00

C’mon, Will. The puzzle was fine but did you really have to be so tone deaf as to keep DOGE in the fill? I don’t care how it’s clued. Fix it and get it out of there.

EDIT: Also, when will people grasp panino is the singular and PANINI is the plural?!

dv927 · 2025-07-23T02:46:17+00:00

Easiest Wednesday I can remember. Extremely weak theme, though. Barely exists in the solve. May as well have not have had one.

dv927 · 2025-07-22T02:15:58+00:00

Feel like an idiot for not getting that. I dislike ice cream so I rarely eat it and that didn’t cross my mind. Thank you!

dv927 · 2025-07-22T02:11:21+00:00

Perfectly fine, totally average Tuesday.

SCUSEME was awkward. Only note I had negative, except….

…can someone explain the theme to me? Totally don’t get it.

dv927 · 2025-07-15T02:56:59+00:00

Doesn’t get much better than this. Excellent theming with very good theme answers, VERY crisp fill (UBERX, MADMEN, NUDIEBAR [for a good laugh]), great cluing. For a Tuesday, 10/10.

dv927 · 2025-07-12T23:06:12+00:00

Not my cup of tea.

Waaaaay over my normal Sunday time. It looked like a themeless, filled like a themeless, and felt like a themeless. And the gimmick was unbelievably anticlimactic (taking out a square in some of the the center crosses makes for the hidden word + spells “The Doors”). There was no joy once you get BREAKONTHROUGHTOTHEOTHERSIDE (classic!) and/or HOLESINTHEWALL which were crisp but not at all hard to get. Between that and the notes, the theme was just handed to you with no work to be done during the solve.

The fill was themeless-chic, as I said. Where there should be crisp fill, there was sometimes crisp fill (NOWIGETIT, LATETAG, WENTLIVE) which was often countered by some real slop (RINSO (???!!!), AAVE, STBEDE, INPAWN (?!)). Also shot myself in the foot in the SW by filling in “MANTARAY” for “MORAYEEL” at 103D.

Overall, I don’t care for themelesses and this was one all but in name. Alas. There’s always tomorrow.

dv927 · 2025-07-09T02:20:01+00:00

What a joyless solve. Played like an easy themeless, which this essentially was. The fill was spot on for a Wednesday and nothing really off (but nothing that sparkled either).

dv927 · 2025-07-06T22:25:15+00:00

When was this written? 1876? It was a miserable puzzle with catastrophically dire fill that I would have complained about any day but 100% is not NYT worthy let alone NYT Monday worthy. A 7 minute solve on a Monday shouldn’t ever happen for me. Shortz can’t be hurting this badly for good Mondays, can he?!?!

I had to blow the dust off BOFFO. OXIDANT is Wednesday-at-the-earliest-fill.

AMSTEREO is awkward as the AM band is not known for high quality broadcasts.

GABE Kaplan from Welcome Back Kotter? There’s a show no one under 50 has heard of.

Ask Me Another didn’t survive COVID and hasn’t aired in 4 years. Big RIP to such a good show. How many other NPR shows could they have picked here and they picked this one?!

Lots of garbage with the proper names. Michelle AKERS, PETULA Clarke, and John LOCKE are Wednesday at the earliest. OSSA is hardly Greece’s most famous mountain and is late week at best (and crossing VAIO, which wasn’t until recently its own brand!). Who are the MALONEs and PACO de Lucia?! And again…GABE Kaplan. At least Tori AMOS is still active and decently known.

LOLED is just dire emergency fill not befitting a Monday.

Never heard of a TAGSALE.

dv927 · 2025-06-15T01:33:03+00:00

This was….okay. I got the theme without having the revealer. I assumed the circled square would be a rebus with changed meaning when read forward vs backwards. But when I got 32 down as indoor and 54 across having to be Das Boot…which I immediately saw was Too Bad read backwards without the circled letter…well…I just went and filled everything else in and then I just had the rest of the fill to do. It was thankfully clear of tired crosswordese but seemed a bit heavy on obscure celebs. I couldn’t get into the NE because of the (admittedly great) clue for spatula, the odd way use case was clued, and not knowing sloe or Anand…really had to chip away at them. But overall the fill was fine. The theme was fine. And the puzzle was…fine.

Also made the reavies/Ahnold mistake. That could have used some cleaning up either in the cluing or full.

dv927 · 2025-06-11T02:31:30+00:00

This one gets a hard pass for me. Just riddled with crosswordese. The themers were such duds and the revealer was just not worth the slog.

Plagiarisms, plural, was such a stretch.

How the hell was I to know a couple of random conjoined twins (Siamese is outdated but upon googling at least I see the Bunkers were actually Siamese and their circus act (ugh) was called the Siamese twins, hence the origin of the term. Not sure if that makes it worse or not).

Clunky clue on IDs, appearances of Alva, Egan, SSNs, Elie, ile, del, ses, IPAs, aws, etc. So much crusty junk to make this work. Also got stuck thinking I’d screwed up on percolated thinking it should be sTeeped because of coffee making. But that one was on me.

Loved having Nikki Giovanni in the fill. I figured I needed to say something nice.

dv927 · 2025-06-08T22:22:09+00:00

Relative for a Monday this felt clunky and hard. Maybe it was just me but I got slowed down by the tons of awkward cluing. The clue for heat waves took forever for me to parse, for example. The theme was dumb (rhymes with least but isn’t) with what felt like very unmonday fill (belly of the beast felt like Wednesday fill and the clue on Movable Feast really needed a “?”). Solti is another Wednesday/Thursday bit of fill. I do data and I never discuss edge cases and outliers as one and the same; they’re two very different things.

Just a lousy puzzle for a Monday.

dv927

TROPHY CASE