New York Times, Saturday, April 30, 2016

According to my records, it's been about 4 years since my last submission to the NYT — but then I've always been a streaky sort of constructor. The last few years of my puzzling spare time I spent digitizing old crosswords for David Steinberg's ambitious Pre-Shortzian Puzzle Project, from the NYT newspaper archives going back to the debut of its puzzle in 1942. It was a diverting time, moseying through the passing decades of Americana and reveling in the ever-changing usage of our language. And once that was done, it seemed natural to submit some new ones.

This is the first of several to come. FACE PLANT with the clue [Result of a bad trip] was the starting point. The fill flowed from there without a hiccup, which rarely happens. Did upgrade the lower left from FANATIC crossing FALLOVER, AGUILERA, NELLIGAN in an initial version to the more lively (and less name-laden) SHOPVAC/SLAPJACK, otherwise not much heavy massaging was necessary.

Will's acceptance email included: "The fill has a lot of tough vocabulary, but it's all fair game. It should make for a tough test for even the sharpest solvers." Hopefully, it didn't cause much 61-Across :).

Mark has done some amazing wide-open themelesses, which tend to be incredibly difficult to solve. It's no surprise that Will chose one of his puzzles for the finals of the ACPT this year, a 60-worder using no cheater squares. You can still order it. Well worth the price.

Today, Mark stays at 68-words, but he tackles one of the harder challenges in themelesses: the 9x4 chunk. Executing on a 9x3 — a triple-stack — is hard enough to do with cleanliness and snazziness, and a quad-stack is maybe five times as hard. I like what he's done with the NW corner in particular. HE GOT GAME is one of my favorite Spike Lee Joints, featuring the great Ray Allen playing Jesus Shuttlesworth. AMENHOTEP is an important name in history (and a cool one at that), and FACEPLANT is a great way to kick off that corner.

STATIONER … that's one of my quibbles with quad-stacks. It's so tough to get four great answers. STATIONER is fine, I just wouldn't personally count it as an asset.

Same goes with AVERAGING and EROSIONAL in the opposite corner. I do think AVERAGING was elevated by its clue [Doing mean work?] — but innately, I don't find it that colorful.

Some of Mark's entries remind me of Byron Walden's style — an incredible wealth of great answers, but some that make me wonder if they're really legit. SHOP VAC is fantastic. So is SLAPJACK (quite a painful game I used to play as a kid). GOBANG … yep, it looks like it's a thing. GAOLER … a jailer in England? MAGNETOS … huh. When a mechanical engineer scratches his head, it's likely that others will too.

Still, there was enough strong material that I really enjoyed the challenge of solving those big 9x4 corners. Mark's puzzles tend to be the type that really stretch me to become a better solver, and I appreciate that process.

Speaking of appreciation, I also want to say a personal thanks to Mark, who's been instrumental in catching some typos and scoring discrepancies in our XWord Info Word Lists. His help has been great.