New York Times, Monday, November 18, 2013

While this theme is a variation on a familiar one, it has a fresh twist and is consistently done. The vocabulary is easy, too. So ... a good Monday. Among the nontheme entries I especially liked AMOUR PROPRE.

Amusing start to the week, famous people with an S inserted between their first and last names to make wacky possessives. ARTHURS MILLER made me chuckle with the image of Bea Arthur knocking back an MGD. I'm hoping a clever constructor does something funny with BETTY WHITE, because her commercials and cameos as of late crack me up. Challenge issued!

Interesting construction difficulties today, given that each of the four theme answers are what Patrick Berry aptly calls "inconvenient lengths". Typically the first theme entry goes into row 3, but consider what happens if you tried to move GREGORYS PECK up one row: you create a stack of two-letter words in the top of the NE corner. No good! So in row 4 it must go.

Note how that compacts all the themers. HARRISONS FORD and ARTHURS MILLER are separated by just one row, and there are seven down answers that cross them both. I imagine Edgar started his filling process from the center since it's so constrained, and having OSAMA / OGEE / INST is okay (although I'm not a fan of putting OSAMA in crosswords), but starting already burdened with a little subpar stuff puts so much pressure on the constructor to be super clean the rest of the way. It can be harrowing to have that hanging over your head, but sometimes pressure is a good thing. In this case Edgar does all right, escaping with an ELIA and an OBERON crossing EBAN. That's going to be an awfully hard cross for some people.

For a theme like this, my personal preference is to make it more elegant by choosing themers that are tightly related. Gregory Peck, Harrison Ford, and Sharon Stone fit well together, but Arthur Miller sticks out a bit as the lone non-movie star. Minor issue though — it's good to remind myself that I (and much of the online community) am a very small portion of Will's total constituency, and most will never even care about things like this.

Finally, well done today to avoid the use of excessive cheater squares. 13s are extremely awkward, because they often necessitate a chunky pattern of five black squares (at the end of ARTHURS MILLER) but Edgar has done a nice job to avoid that, running long downs of PARENTHETIC and AMOUR PROPRE at the ends of the 13s. This is a tricky thing to do. I'm not a huge fan of AMOUR PROPRE on a Monday, but I did enjoy looking it up.