New York Times, Friday, May 30, 2014

It's not the prettiest-looking grid in terms of the arrangement of black squares, but hopefully the fill looks a bit better. I started this puzzle in the NW, seeded by OVERSHARE. The other main seed entries were TAKE A STAB / HERSTORY in the SE.

One thing I'm excited about here is the clue for ALES. Old Brown Dog is a great brown ale from Smuttynose, a brewery in my hometown, Portsmouth, NH. Pick one up to enjoy on your Friday evening!

A lot of strong entries in the grid today. I like it when I can't quite tell what the seed entry or entries would have been. Sometimes there's a feature entry at 1-across which is much stronger than any other piece of the grid, but James has quite a few goodies in for us today. That top corner of BEAT POET / LADIES MAN / OVERSHARE, now that's the way to open your puzzle strong.

Although the grid looks a little unusual in its pinwheel-ish shape, it retains a usual structure of having four sets of stacked entries in each of the corners. The one hangup I had on the grid design is that is does choke down at two points, at SAPPHIRE and MUST READ, making it feel a little like I was solving two mini-puzzles. Minor issue, though, as it didn't greatly affect the quality of my solve.

With triple-stacked 8's, 9's, 10's, or 11's, there's often a tradeoff of awesome entries vs. shaky crossing fill. Up the awesome factor and you'll often up the shakiness of the crossers. The NW stack is so good, so snazzy, but it does pay the PES price. Oof, a clunker, that one. Still worth the price of admission up top, but it sure would have been pretty if that first stack could have been clean as a whistle.

Contrast the SW corner with its JAMES DEAN / UNUSALLY / DISPERSAL stack. Extremely clean, just a beautiful set of crossers, none of which are remotely ugly. MUST READ runs through them, too! However, while JAMES DEAN is someone I'd almost always love seeing in his full name format, the other two long entries in this corner are a bit dull in comparison. One-word entries, and not terribly snappy at that. Often times a plebian word can be saved by an amazing clue (Patrick Berry is the master at this). Not really in this case though.

I liked the little mini-theme of GRENADA / FIJI / GHANA today. I often find it entertaining to get a "clue echo," two entries clued in similar ways, so to see this triad with clues along the same sentiment was really nice. Themeless puzzles can often run together for me, one appearing awfully similar to the next, so I appreciate these small touches.

A side note, KIPS to me is a fine entry if it's related to pull-ups at the gym. We climbers give each other a hard time when we see someone kip (flail their body in order to propel themselves up, instead of doing it in a controlled way). No kipping for you!

James has had quite a few themeless puzzles in the NYT recently, and I think this is his best yet. A lot of strong entries, some good clues ([Old pitcher of milk?] = ELSIE the spokescow = my favorite), and best of all, only a very small amount of PES-like entries. Tough to get quantity and quality of long answers while keeping your glue-type entries to a minimum. I have a feeling we'll see a continued progression in James work to X-out the TELE, ACU, SSE type fill in the future.