Thursday, 9/28

NYS 5:58
NYT 4:01
LAT 3:44
CS 2:47

All righty, I'm gonna go with dry, link-free descriptions of the Sun and Times puzzles on account of an overpowering somnolence overtaking me. The first of these is...Kevan Choset's Sun crossword, "Call Me Ambiguous," with four pairs of tangentially related men who share a name (the first name for one and the last name for the other). One thing that threw me off here was the clue, [Its members may have spent their allowances on eight-track tapes]—I was born two years into the GEN X era, and I'm not so sure that people a mere two years my senior were buying eight-tracks just before my peers were buying vinyl. Any 41- or 42-year-olds out there who used to buy eight-tracks?

The NYT puzzle's by Richard Chisholm, with a GREAT DANE theme of great Danes. It's either cool or off-putting that there are unrelated geographic names (SIBERIA, REYKJAVIK) and a Swedish store (IKEA) within the grid. There are JESUS and a pope, plus JERUSALEM and MENORAH, not to mention LEB (short for Lebanon). Okay, I've decided I like those entries.

Raymond Hamel's CrosSynergy puzzle's called "By the Numbers"—another mathematical theme. (I think it's time for clever literary themes, don't you?) I liked the payoff from the last theme entry in Jesse Goldberg's LA Times puzzle.