Cardinal Crossies

Time: circa 4 minutes (messed up a letter and didn't have the patience to try and figure out where my typo was but ballpark) Hello Card Nation! (cringe) Back at it again with a fairly easy and pleasant Monday puzzle. Theme for today is short and sweet, solid Monday fare that's reasonably inspired—two-word phrases that mean "[Get my innuendo?]". Nice themed answers, and only quibble is that I've personally only ever heard 17A "NUDGENUDGE" and 37A "WINKWINK" uttered in one breath, not as their own individual phrases as this puzzle implies. In principle, I don't think they belong apart, but there's definitely plausible deniability. As I finished this puzzle, I was reminded why I find Monday puzzles, which are meant to be the easiest, a little stressful. I've had a handful of really lucky Monday times that have been sub-4 minutes which have (sillily) made me feel pretty good about myself. Though that's nice and good, it's had th...

Saturday, 2/10/2024, by Zhouqin Burnikel Time: circa 13 minutes (website bugged out so I lost a lot of progress and had to restart from 0:00, driving the time down because I already knew the answers to a bunch before the clock even started) Hello! I created this blog a few years ago at the height of the pandemic, but never got around to writing anything. The idea was that I would just offer some commentary on the NYT daily crossword puzzle, Monday thru Saturday (and maybe Sundays, but I think they're kind of boring), royally ripping off Rex Parker's successful xword blog. While reading Rex's blog today, I happened to remember that I had the infrastructure in place to start a blog of my own, figured I'd actually try to take a crack at it. I've been kind of idle for a few weeks and need some sort of project to keep me sane, so here's an attempt.  Today's puzzle was pretty straightforward. Slightly themed holiday puzzle without too many bad parts, but I just re...