Nice Tuesday NYT by Nancy Salomon. Lots of fresh longer entries to liven things up, and a tight theme. In honor of OLEO's second appearance in a puzzle today (the other was in the Monday NYS), I am compelled to mention how appalling it was to find only margarine, no butter, at the Drake Hotel's Sunday breakfast buffet. Margarine! At $21 a person! The horror, the horror.

Nice Tuesday NYS ("Apostrophe Catastrophe") by Randall Hartman, too. But it appears that Blogger is having technical difficulties tonight, so even if I came up with something clever to say, I don't know when anyone would actually read it. Alas.

Updated:

It was only after I finished Ben Tausig's latest puzzle, "Mental Blocks," that I looked at the black squares and saw that they were all Tetris pieces! Maybe not all the fill was up to Ben's usual standards (OFF A, ON NO, AERI, FMS), but in addition to the five theme entries and the theme black squares, he managed to use ANXIOUSNESS, THEBRONXZOO, and—for the first and possibly last time—MIERS ("short-lived Bush nominee").

Tausig 4:52
CS 4:05
NYS 3:23
NYT 3:06
LAT 2:50