New York Times, Monday, June 23, 2014

I love weeks like this. Hardly a puzzle that I didn't consider for the Puzzle of the Week. This snappy Monday was no exception.

It's a rare Monday that brings the joy of "oh hey, that's cool!" and that's what I got today. I used to be quite the yo-yo master (surprising I wasn't more popular in school, huh?) and getting the YOYO TRICKS revealer after wondering what the heck all these nice long answers had in common = cool. I didn't recognize FLYING TRAPEZE at first, but a little Googling made me remember what that was.

BEQ's skills are impressive. Putting together a crossword with five long them answers (10/13/14/13/10) is a Herculean task. There is no way to avoid a ton of answers crossing two or more theme answers, and when you have multitudes of constraints all in close proximity, it's bound to cause problems. BEQ goes to an unusual 15x14 grid (one shorter than a normal 15x15) in order to accommodate the central AROUND THE WORLD. And he does a great job placing his themers (down, like a yo-yo string!) and his black squares in order to spread around his constrained sections. Note that there isn't one big block of white space that stands out as bigger than others.

A word count of 75 might seem audacious, but for a 15x14, you'd except a maximum of 75 words. Consider the bottom row of the puzzle: three words. If you were to extend the puzzle to 15x15, you'd add three more words to 78.

You might think the west and east sections would be the hardest to fill? I actually think the NE and SW hold that honor. Those two single black squares floating out in space help break up the west and east a bit, giving BEQ more flexibility in those regions. And the results are smooth. I'm not a huge fan of ARTY, but it's legit. Both the west and east come out so nice

Where a few blips crop up are in those NE and SW corners. BEQ does well to place two sets of cheater squares to relieve some pressure, but when you have so many crossings to take care of in an open corner, there are bound to be issues. The ORONO / ORSAY crossing is going to be very tough for some Monday solvers, and there's the MDI / UP MY and YWCA / ASSN region in the opposite corner. Very difficult to fill with total smoothness.

That reminds me of a thoughful note I got from Erik Agard a few weeks ago. I tend to be persnickety about reducing partials to (ideally) zero, but he reminded me that they can actually be a positive, especially for a Monday solver. And certainly, I can see how ["Nothing ___ sleeve"] could help a novice solver gain traction. I still prefer reducing partials to zero, but I'll think twice when it comes down to A TRIP or ATRIA.

Enjoyable solve, neat that BEQ was able to find four common YOYO TRICKS that could be disguised as other things.