New York Times, Saturday, February 21, 2015

DOUG: Remember the recent kerfuffle about whether or not HELLO KITTY is actually a cat? I've done some research on the topic, and she is indeed a cat. But here's where it gets weird: Hello Kitty has a pet cat named Charmmy Kitty. Charmmy Kitty basically looks like a smaller, more catlike version of Hello Kitty. Somehow this is even more disturbing than the Goofy/Pluto dichotomy.

BRAD: I don't know what Doug's talking about; I've kept a couple of smaller versions of myself as pets for years. One of them actually edits the Chronicle of Higher Education puzzles.

This puzzle went through a couple of drafts before we arrived at this fill. Between versions, I actually pulled one of my seeds to use in a different collaboration with Doug, which you'll see here eventually. But we preserved Doug's nice seeds at 33D and 17A. His HELLO KITTY clue is great, as well.

Lots of gems in this challenging puzzle. My first pass gave me SALTI, CIA, EMMY, AUDI, INDY, and STEELE, followed by a tentative PAPYRI on my next pass. And then ... nothing. Not my best start. I finally clawed my way into the NW corner with CLOCK and CLASSTRIP, but the rest of the puzzle involved false starts, lucky guesses, mental time-outs, and a Google search or two. An admirable grid with thorny cluing — just what I like on a Saturday.

I tumbled down several rabbit-holes, chasing proper nouns and quotes through wikipedia and the like. Some of my favorite discoveries:

- HELLO KITTY is so much taller than I realized. At five apples high, she towers over the Smurfs, who are only three apples high. Using an average-appearing Honeycrisp as standard, I am just shy of 19.8 apples high. RALPH NADER is almost 21.5 apples high.

- Welcome to the database, Anastasia STEELE. I was surprised to find myself pleased by this reference for its lack of snobbishness. I've been guilty of rolling my eyes at 50 Shades mania, but if it gets people reading, then I'm all for it. If it helps women communicate their desires, even better.

- This was the first time that DEV was clued with a reference to HUD. As much as I enjoy the Cabinet departments, I'll always prefer a nod to Dev Patel, one of the more charming actors on the planet. Jai ho!

- Un crime de LESE-humanité was new to me. Lèse-majesté refers to high treason (literally, injury to the king), which makes un crime de lèse-humanité the crime of injuring humanity, or rather, a crime against humanity. I love learning this kind of thing from a crossword, even when the phrase is as somber as this one.