Variety: Acrostic

I missed this acrostic last week! I totally lost track of time and forgot it was acrostic puzzle week. Glad I remembered this morning -- what a great puzzle. You know I love themed puzzles -- almost all of my American Acrostics and CynAcrostics puzzles are themed -- so this one was right up my alley. Plus, a Sherlock Holmes theme? Fabulous! Loved the quote, loved the clever clues. It was a quick -- but very satisfying -- solve. Like Chris P., I usually solve the NYT acrostic puzzle on the XWordInfo.com site. Just a personal preference. However, I also enjoy solving on paper -- I actually find transferring the letters back and forth by hand to be very relaxing. I do almost all my work online these days, so it's nice to do some things the old-fashioned way. :) Thanks, as always, for a great puzzle EC & HR.

gimmes include: HERO TIT FOR TAT TAUT INDEFINITE FATHOM EVIDENT. should have gotten DR WATSON and SHERLOCK quicker since I suspected it! Usual pattern of slowish start followed by rapid solve. I do it online. go to ARCHIVE. click on Acrostic and then Play.

"especially if you are solving online". How do I do that? I would love to start doing acrostics online. Thanks

Deb suggested completing acrostic puzzles on line. I have the crossword subscription, but can’t find the acrostics. How can I access the variety puzzles?

A wonderful acrostic. I needed several passes before I had enough entries to go on: CAPOTE, Y CHROMOSOME, EVIDENT, TAUT, GET HIGH, TIT FOR TAT. Then, toggling back and forth brought out a quote that -- being a life-long SHERLOCK Holmes enthusiast -- I remembered almost word for word. Who could blame DR WATSON for romanticizing? He had just fallen in love with Mary Morstan, his future wife. I loved the way our talented constructors included entries related to the citation and its subject, DETECTION: AXIOMATIC, OPEN-AND-SHUT, EVIDENT, TAUT, INDEFINITE, FATHOM, OBVIOUS, and – post-SHERLOCK – Y CHROMOSOME.

Not many gimmes, Y CHROMOSOME, FISHEYE, EVIDENT and OBVIOUS. The last two, I wondered if they could be swapped with each other. Had fly HIGH before GET. Looked up CAPOTE because my brain was stuck on HELLER which I knew wasn't correct. Others that started to come were TIT-FOR-TAT and INDEFINITE. A slow start with the quote, but kept chipping away at it. My breakthrough came when I saw that the last word of the title was probably Four, and the hints of a chronicler and man of mystery made me consider Holmes, Watson and The Sign of the Four. I plugged it all in and it worked. I wouldn't call this one easy. Probably got it solved because I've been an avid watcher of the Jeremy Brett series on PBS for years; I've seen them all multiple times. Most enjoyable.

Not a lot of gimmes on htis one, but it made solving all the more satisfying.

Fun, but at least for me the theme jumped off the page. After a tentative Dr. Watson, then a more confident Capote, the answers flowed. I finished in under nine minutes, with no external sources. I expect to spend around a half hour or more solving an acrostic. This was a little too easy for my tastes. Don't know if others had the same experience, but perhaps we could have a little more challenge.

Here is yet another wonderful quote from the Sherlock Holmes adventures, which are favourite reading grounds of mine. (See how I added a little colour there?) I recognized the quote early on, though I didn't know it verbatim. That gave me a leg up which made today's acrostic much easier than usual due to a generously congruent wheelhouse. I recall solving the "...Musgrave Ritual" quote in 2014, but the 2000 example from "His Last Bow" was before my time as a NY Times solver. Once again (as always, it seems), Cox and Rathvon hit the sweet spot for a high-quality solving experience. This would be a good weekend to wish them a hearty thank you. Keep 'em coming, guys!

“Winding Down” is always one of my favorite “middle” puzzles. This one was easier than they often are, and what seemed unusual was that one of the paths was filled by only three answers.

The _R has to be "OR" statement must be asterisked - because "PR" and "ER" and "HR" are all remote possibilities. Every so often our constructors will spice up a quote with an unexpected element like those. I am still on the side of non-digital, slog back-and-forth solving. The online solving, which I do now and then, makes it too easy to miss the pleasures of the puzzling. When you have to transfer each letter from one place to the other (either way), you have time to consider the local environment and the possibilities raised by it. The electronic solve is like eating a good dinner in the car.

EC & HR are ahead of you by their including the question mark in clue E. Can we read about the Acrostic cum Acrostic without editorial asides?

A personal note: I’m so happy to be back online after dealing with computer problems for quite some time. Otherwise, I hate it when I have to give up on an Acrostic and reveal the solution, but this was the second time it happened in recent times. [SPOILER ALERT] This situation occurs when there are very few answers which are specific facts that can be remembered or searched for. The only exceptions were CAPOTE and OCTOPUS (which I got wrong as MOLLUSK). The only others I got were TIT-FOR-TAT, ECCENTRIC, HERO and GET HIGH. Did anybody else find this one to be extremely difficult?