Sunday NYT: "Cry Me a River"

Call me a geography nerd, but I really enjoyed the way Joe DiPietro's theme flowed. Sure, the puns could be pretty awful (LETS GO YANGTZES? THAT OISE SO GROSS? Ouch!), but that's the nature of punning. And you've got to give DiPietro credit for packing that many theme squares (I counted something like 127—that's a lot, isn't it?) into a solid grid filled with other crisp stuff (HEH HEH and TEHEE, BAZOOKA, GARGLE, A GOGO, WEEZER, RICOTTA, INKJET, DIECAST, NOSTRIL). So many fantastic clues, too—my favorite was "One may be overhead or underfoot" for RUG.

I wasn't home right when the puzzle was released, so when I saw the slower-than-usual times already posted on the leaderboard, I feared I was in for a fight. The puzzle fell a little faster than most Sundays, though. Were there technical problems earlier, was I just tuned to the right wavelength, or am I more of a geography nerd than I thought?

NYT 8:35