New York Times, Wednesday, July 2, 2014

DICK:

This puzzle was accepted for publication on June 30, 2013, before my Sunday collaboration with Jeff published last February was accepted. Thus, this is really my maiden effort at puzzle creation. The idea for the puzzle began with a triple homophone and clue that just popped into my head while coming awake from an afternoon nap, but that did not survive: LET THE BEE BE BEA, clued to refer to a Golden Girl (Bea Arthur) waving at a stinging buzzer, was the thought provoker, and I developed a list of similar triple homonyms and sent it to Jeff with the request that he co-create if the idea appealed to him.

As a total novice, I had no idea how to go forward with grid creation, fill, cluing or any other aspect of puzzle creation. There were, on my list, some ideas Jeff liked but no internal grammatical or stylistic consistency. Some had just 3 words, some 4, some 5, some in the present, some in the past, etc. If you are a fan of Jeff Chen puzzles, you know that such sloppiness of internal thematic consistency does not pass muster. He came up with the tabloid headline clue structure and the fill structure where every themer is only 3 words, and all follow the identical grammatical pattern. I had taken the first shot at cluing the non-themers and tried for Thursday level difficulty and misdirection. Jeff saw it more as a Monday or Tuesday puzzle and together we simplified the clues. None of this seemed to matter as Will accepted it as a Wednesday and rewrote what seems to me to be a very considerable number of the clues. Maybe that's the norm; I do not know. If you already know the answers, as I did, it might be hard to see a change upward in level of difficulty of the clues.

It's time for another edition of JEFF VS. DAN! For those of you who don't know of this magnificent contest, I race Dan Feyer, the reigning ACPT champ, at my own puzzles. In the past he's stomped me into dust, often by a factor of two (a factor of three, one time). So after a while, what could I do but up my level of cheating, going one step above knowing the answers? By studying the entire answer grid for five minutes and memorizing as many answers I could, I proceeded to trounce Dan (by two magnificent seconds).

So I decided to be the bigger man and give "the crossword titan" (note the theatrical air quotes) a handicap. I'm eventually going to beat Dan fair and square (by only knowing the answers — more than fair, really).

My time on today's puzzle: a blazing 3:56! My hand shall be victoriously raised!

Dan's time, listed at his blog... 1:49. Dagnabit! He beat me by a factor of two. The sun was in my eyes. And the clouds. And these grapes are awfully sour. Ahem.

BTW, fun to work with Dick on this one. We had a lot of back and forth, brainstorming and revising Dick's core idea. The grid came pretty quickly after finalizing the themers, as 15/14/14/15 is a pretty easy pattern to work with. And I enjoy the exercise of fitting in good short fill like ONE TWO, NO PROB, BAD RAP, R KELLY. BTW, I actually don't know who R KELLY is. I mean, I know the name. But if you put Eminem, Psy, Lil' Wayne, Yo-yo Ma and R Kelly together, you could easily convince me that they were The Village People. R Kelly is the construction worker, isn't he?