Samedi

Aw, that Saturday NYT by David Quarfoot was fun! (It'd be great if I could cruise along on the constructor's wavelength like this for every puzzle at Stamford.) The very first entry, MMMM GOOD, is a fantastic way to start a puzzle and also has a great clue ("Soup line"). Beneath the quadruple M, we have the triple A of AAA MEMBER—way cool. Two "sub-Saharan scourges" (MALARIA and TSETSE) provide a little education. The SW corner includes three X's. THATS TOO BAD and TELLS A LIE appear to be new entries. Some clues I liked were "Tender shoot?" for LOVE SCENE, "Olympic team" for DEITIES, "like a lottery winner, typically" for ENVIED, and "inclined...or flat" for PRONE. Sure, nobody's crazy about that many suffix/prefix entries (IERE, ATOR, and OPTO), but overall I thought the puzzle was a blast and beautifully constructed.

As for that other current obsession...I learned tonight that I'm definitely in Wordplay. I'm so excited to be in the same movie as people like Bill Clinton and Jon Stewart! (Um, and Ellen Ripstein, Tyler Hinman, Trip Payne, etc.) Going to Stamford last year was such a clever idea, wasn't it?

P.S. It's Delurking Week in the land of blogs. If you've been reading quietly, now is a great time to pop up and say hello in the comments.

Updated:

Today's Newsday Saturday Stumper by Doug Peterson took me a long time, but I'm not positive it was really all that hard. Or maybe it was; there are plenty of clues that didn't easily lead me to the answers, although the answers seem much more obvious once they've been filled in. Here are a few examples: "put back in" is REELECT, "crawled quicker than" is OUTSWAM, "pencil product" is EYELINER, and "recovers, in a way," is RANSOMS. None of those entries was obvious to me.

Saturday Stumper 9:46
NYT 4:23
LAT 4:something
CS 2:48