Connections
Puzzle #1151
Purple was leftovers.
Connections
Puzzle #1151
Purple leftovers worked out, but messed up green vs. blue.
Connections
Puzzle #1151
Entered them as I found them. I danced all around purple but didn’t quite figure it out. Still counts though.
Thursday. Purple was never going to happen.
Puzzle #1152
Connections
Puzzle #1152
Had no idea what Barclays Center was so purple was leftovers.
Connections
Puzzle #1152
I cheated because I saw an obvious Americanism in Barclays Center and looked it up, which gave me the last one that connection. Also, to me a Jacob’s Ladder is a fun sparking electrical gizmo not a wooden toy.
Connections
Puzzle #1152
solved blue right off then almost lost it.
Connections
Puzzle #1152
Made every possible mistake today. Fell for a red herring that left me with bad leftovers, avoided what I thought was a red herring but wasn’t, then wasted the rest of the moves looking for wordplay when there wasn’t any.
Connections
Puzzle #1152
Yeah, I didn’t care much for this one. Cup-and-ball is a magic trick, and Jacob’s Ladder is what @MrDibble said. Looks like a lot of us bit on the same red herring, too.
I got blue and yellow pretty quick, and then found enough wrong connections in green and purple to run out of wrong guesses.
And for those wondering about Jacob’s Ladder, it can also be a toy made from thin blocks joined together with ribbons. When I was a kid, we called them “flip flop blocks”. It’s also the principle behind the Rubik’s Magic toy.
Oh, and for @Wheelz , cup-and-ball is a wooden cup with a handle and a string attached to it and a ball on the end of the string. You hold the handle and swing the ball and try to catch it in the cup. Sometimes the ball has a hole through it and there’s a spindle on the other end of the handle, so you can also try to catch the ball on the spindle.
It is Friday in my house. So easy, I overthought it and missed one.
Puzzle #1153
Connections
Puzzle #1153
Blue was leftovers. I saw that the words went together but couldn’t get the exact answer.
Connections FRIDAY
Puzzle #1153
Easy.
Connections
Puzzle #1153
Avoided the red herring by the simple expedient by already having one of them categorized before I noticed the RH.
First thing I saw was that buckyball had to be a wordplay, but I never did actually get the category correct. I was thinking violent things animals do.
Still got a clean win, though.
Connections
Puzzle #1153
An easy A+ today
Connections
Puzzle #1153
Today is a bittersweet day. NYT thinks my streak is now 77, but it somehow lost my previous streak of 288, which means I would have gotten my 365 badge today but for a database error. 
(No, I didn’t miss a day. My Strands streak extends across the gap, and while I have sometimes skipped Strands I never skip Connections.)
Connections
Puzzle #1153
Yellow vs. green gets me. Again.
Connections
Puzzle #1153
This game has trained me to look at the beginnings and ends of the given words, and that made purple an easy first get. I utterly failed at the Reverse Rainbow, though, as all the others seemed about equally likely to be any color.
It’s the weekend! Saturday’s was easy peasy.
Puzzle #1154