New York Times, Monday, December 9, 2013

I am a retired college professor, living in Maryland near DC. After seeing the "WordPlay" film, I decided to try to construct a puzzle. Of course, it was a mess. I worked with Nancy Salomon for a time, and she was a great help. I constructed this puzzle in 2009, one of my very first puzzles as a raw newbie. I still like it, but would probably work harder on the non-theme fill now.

I've held this puzzle for 3-1/2 years, which is an unusually long time for any day of the week, but especially for a Monday. That's because I get a lot of puzzles with "words that go with" sorts of themes, and I try to space them out. This one I thought was pretty nice, because it has five theme examples, in addition to the "explainer entry" at 64A.

We don't see many of the "words which can follow X" puzzles these days. A few years ago Will said that he was cutting back or even eliminating this theme type because it had become overdone. Now and again I appreciate seeing a throwback for variety's sake, so I enjoyed this one.

In this day and age of crosswords rapidly improving across the board, jockeying against more and more competition for mindshare, puzzles must constantly up their game. For this theme type, that means using extremely strong themers and/or employing a new trick, perhaps using an unusual word to tie everything together or a clever revealer. On the first point, Nina does very well. In my solve, STRONGARM was a, well, strong way to start. LIONS CLUB, ULTRA HIGH, SPEAKEASY, UPPER DECK are all very well-chosen answers.

CHAIR as the revealer didn't quite do it for me though. As I mentioned, this theme type will tend to be judged at a higher baseline than others since it's been done so many times before. Not only are there many types of chairs that could have been used, but CHAIR's placement in that non-final position seemed a bit inelegant to me.

The fill reminds me of an interesting discussion on Jim Horne's blog. I like a lot of what Nina's incorporated today, notably TESSERA, NUT CASE, PEN NIB, NEBULAE, SPLASHY, PICASSO; stuff that we rarely see en masse on a Monday. But with almost any puzzle, there are tradeoffs to gain such tasty goodness. Entries such as ELBE and TYR have a Maleska feel to them, and newer solvers may have trouble with the ENIAC/JEU and the ADEN/ERTE crossings. My personal leaning is for Mondays to be super-clean, ones that I could pass to newbies as a way to get them hooked. But today's balance could easily appeal to a more experienced solver; someone looking for something harder in a Monday. Nice to have the variety.

All in all, it gave me four minutes of pleasant diversion.