And to Joon. (And to anybody else who won I might have missed or whose names I don't recognize above.)

I'd stopped believing you recently when you called a puzzle hard. I'm a believer again. Congrats to Dan above.

Not sure I buy New York being the cultural or intellectual capital of the country. It used to be, I think, but I don't think we have one anymore. On account of the internet and all. [Insert additional sociological opining bullshit here.] If crosswords are more popular in the Northeast (which I have no reason to dispute, being a guy who doesn't leave his garage), I'd guess it's because people ride trains up there. Right? Y'all ride a lot of trains, don't you? It looks that way on TV shows, and John Cheever always had people riding trains in his stories. Down here, we drive, and it's hard to drive and do a crossword and shoot at stuff all at the same time. Ingenious little puzzle today. I enjoyed it mightily.

I used to watch those two Linklater movies back to back, drinking whiskey and crying about what might have been, then sobering up and realizing that none of that stuff ever actually happened to me. Finished this puzzle in 21 minutes with one wrong letter! So, score one for the guy on the couch. Continuing the Linklater theme, McConawhoever was born in Uvalde (like Cactus Jack Garner) but grew up in Longview (where the utterly awesome documentary "Hands on a Hard Body" was made. You gotta see that movie. For real, it's a must-see-tonight-movie.) Thought Paul Weller was Robocop. That was Peter Weller (and the movie was directed by Paul Verhoeven. Just looked that up.)

No idea on this one. I just haven't memorized the names, much less the spellings of the names, of all the women Tiger has bonked. 43A had me wondering if he might have porked Eugene V. Debs, but it turned out to be one letter short.

Hmmph. Didn't use my Albert Collins clue for F minor. A bit hurt about that but I'll survive. 13-minutes flat on a BEQ rates it as an easy in my experience. I like this one very much--all kinds of cool stuff (though I don't really know what Four Square is.) The Soprano clue was awesome. Didn't know the Red Grange trivia. I'd have thought he died in the forties. I went to law school with Slingin' Sammy Baugh's granddaughter.

The snatch is a weight-lifting movement, like the clean and jerk, the deadlift, etc. It works the deltoids, a/k/a the "delts".

I was wrong, you are right: There is no d-apostrophe in Champs-Elysees.

Holy crap, that was hard. Only complaint is WIZ (and I thought Champs needed a d-apostrophe before the ELYSEES.) BOXING CLAY is great. All the theme answers were very good, though I confess I don't get the theme. CL changes to D because when you write a "cl" in cursive it looks like a d? (Mine does anyway, which is why old friends from elementary school call me Wackle.) Or is a Roman numeral thing?

Maybe you emulate puzzlemakers, but you emASCulated this puzzle-solver with your medium rating. U-TWO! Can you do that? Even after giving up, I kept reading that as UT-WO. Embarrassing that I had most of SWINE FLU VACCINE, including the U and all of "vaccine," and still couldn't complete it. Kept trying to do H-ONE N-ONE or soemthing there. F-minor--I think that was Albert Collins's key. He kept his guitar tuned open to some weird chord like that.

Thought 21D was ATE CROW, then ATE SHIT. Was glad when it wasn't ATE SHIT. I'm getting old, and I have kids. Didn't notice the theme until I came here. Nothing new about that. I'll always be a philistine about puzzles.

Hey, I've heard of yacht rock! That's, like, the first time I know one of those phrases that I assume everybody but me knows. I was surprised as hell when I punted on the last two squares (the C in TRECOOL and the B in KLIBAN) and saw the happy pencil man appear. Took me 23 minutes, but still. (I don't get the "Blue soldier" clue, either.) MAO JACKET is a cool answer. Took me forever to see it. I know yacht rock!

Yeah, tough one but gettable all around (though Rex is right: B and E is a burglary, not a robbery). 3/4 was tough but real smooth, and the last bit (same as everybody else's) I had to work real hard for. Biggest hangup was getting MEDIA_ _ _ and of course reading that as some kind of compound word (media cop? media dog? media pol?) UTAHAN! That's insane. Head desk is also foreign to me.

They probably smoked it.

I didn't know any of those horses except Rosencrantz or whoever, and that wasn't because of Quixote but because that was what Steinbeck named his camper in "Travels with Charley." I couldn't get a couple of them (Strymon and Katonka) from the crosses either. I'm much warier of your mediums and easies than your hard ones, I'm finding.

I liked this one very much and also found it easy in a particularly satisfactory way. My early guesses on long entries all paid off, which is always exciting in that mildly exciting way of crosswords: Robert Gates, Anasazi, caesurae, brasserie--all those got cashed in quick. Also wanted CHEEK (right next to ASSET would have been nice, since a set of cheeks make up an ass.) Ask Jeeves was the tuggiest for me, becuase was thinking Alta Vista or something (is there an Alta Vista search engine? Why are there any other search engines if there's Google? Does anybody in the universe use any of the others?)

I think that's Yo Yo Yo Yo Ma Ma.

Now, if you could have worked Mediterranean in there . . . .

Man, that's pretty clever. You oughta go pro. (Or maybe I'm just not very clever, because it took some head-scratching after the grid was done before I saw the theme.) Re: 66A, Todd Snider has a song called "If Tomorrow Never Comes," which is a fine song, but it's the intro he gives (on the album "Live at Grimey's") that's classic: "So God made Adam and Eve. That's two people, right? And they had Cain and Abel. That's four people. Then Cain killed Abel. That's three people. So Cain goes away . . . and he comes back a few years later with some chick? So this song is about, where'd she come from? And why's everybody always pushing me around all the time?"

Man, I suck at these, how you say?, "crossword puzzles." I almost had this one, but it took me several advances from several directions, and I still had about four wrong squares (went from FOOT RACE to ROAD RACE but never made it to ROAD RAGE, much less ROID RAGE.) Ellen, I don't know Lady Gaga, either. I do know that the tooty-fruity folk at Central Market sell salsa made with papayas. None of the taco trucks I frequent do. (Nor with GABAYA, which was my first choice there.)

Great puzzle, and I agree with the rating. That Roman numeral clue gave me fits. I kept coming up with 1400 and thought you'd transposed the LX. I knew you were going for the band the B-52s, but the puzzle had me convinced they were from some Ohio town (I couldn't shake XENIA, which I think was in one of your recent puzzles.) First rate.

Obdurate? I am so there. The Joseph O'Neill novel, "Netherland," which was justly praised when it came out a year or two ago, has cricket at the center of its story. This puzzle went on nearly as long as a cricket match for me, and I still didn't finish. Wheel out the tea-cart for this loser.

At first I didn't understand the essence, however on re-reading I enjoy your analysis. This is entertaining advice and information. Sorry, that was me echoing the spam I get in my blog comments, usually from .ru folks. I didn't know there were puzzle-creating programs. I guess I'd have guessed that, but there you go. I feel better about my puzzle-skills today. This went pretty steadily--didn't make me feel smart or stupid, just competent, which is what I am shooting for lately in all my endeavors. Thanks for the "for some" qualifier in 4D. Usually I'm made to feel guilty for not liking traveling.

All of that can mean only one thing: You got the shine.

Happy anniversary. Fall of 96 is also when I started doing the NYT puzzle. Spring of 09 is when I stopped, mostly. And dang, it must have made me rusty, because I had a hard time with this one. Some good straight-up misdirections (if that makes any sense). Had WEEDERS for SEEDERS, LIKE for POKE. I don't get MAMA'S BOY, or the "masked" part of the clue anyway. That SE corner gave me fits.