New York Times, Wednesday, April 2, 2014

1. A few months ago, I sent the White House a letter stating that, in 2005, I became the first puzzle constructor to use OBAMA as an answer in a New York Times crossword. With my letter, I included a printout of every Times clue for OBAMA to date (pulled from xwordinfo.com) because I thought the president would get a kick out of seeing it. Last week, I received a note in the mail that contained a handwritten message from President Obama thanking me for the memento. Good stuff.
2. If you like crosswords (you're reading this so ... you might), you should think about getting a book that's coming out this month called "TEDTalks Across, TMZ Down." It has 90 crosswords in it. And they're pretty good.
3. If you are a young person reading this (14 is young; so is 33) and you think you might, sorta, wanna construct a crossword, I strongly encourage you to do it. As a college student, I sent an embarrassing-looking piece of filled-in graph paper to Will Shortz and his response could not have been more encouraging. If you happen to publish a crossword, it will open doors for you. Do it, do it, do it.
4. I always love seeing Will's improvements to my clues. These originally-submitted clues are simply for your amusement: ORCA (15A): Animal whose name features the postal abbreviations of U.S. states it swims by during migration. POTOK (19A): Novelist whose name makes him sound like a proponent of marijuana legalization.

Okay, all you solvers out there who didn't understand the theme at first, raise your hands!

(My hand sheepishly raised)

After filling in the last letter, I was astonished that I got Mr. Happy Pencil, since WET HOODS looked so odd. It took me an embarrassingly long time to figure out that the theme answers were all anagrams of the phrase immediately following "... out of ...". Confused still? [Weapon part that's out of this world] means the weapon part is made up out of the letters T H I S W O R L D. Anagrammed, you get SWORD HILT. Same goes for (out of) THE WOODS and WET HOODS. I thought it was pretty neat, once I got it. A bit of British cryptic crossword leaking over into the US.

"Wacky" phrase puzzles can be hit or miss. They usually need to be really funny, or at least produce an odd mental image to be successful. I liked most of the themers, but none of them spoke to me in particular. I did enjoy that SWORD HILT is a real thing — what a cool coincidence that THIS WORLD and SWORD HILT are anagrams!

I also appreciated some of the lively fill in David's puzzle. I GOT NEXT especially feels fresh and snappy. And it's rare that a four-letter entry will impress me, but I really liked the up-to-date NSFW (not safe/suitable for work). Nice job in adding to the NYT crossword's SFW lexicon.

There were some rough patches here and there. For whatever reason, four-letter random Roman numerals irk me, but that's simply a preference. Some people actually like them, in that they can be inferred, thus providing a toehold in a tough-to-solve section. If they must make an appearance, I usually prefer a crazy math problem, like XXXIII * XLVII or something referencing the fact that 1551 is palindromic. Then again, I'm a dork (and proud of it!).

Not a surprise to see a few glue-y entries in those wide-open NW and SE corners. But if all I have to pay for SEE PAST, NIPS AT, I GOT NEXT, ASTHMA is the partial TRY A, I'll take that most any day. Even better is the NW, which features a bevy of beautiful answers for the price of IT ON, SKEE and DIA. What made it totally worth it to me was my favorite clue/answer: [Paper tiger, e.g.] for ORIGAMI. I always struggle to remember what a paper tiger is (something that seems threatening but really isn't), and I got a big smile on my face when I realized I had been bamboozled.