New York Times, Thursday, September 24, 2015

The original version of this one had BALTO TO TOTO TOME at 17-Across. That would've led to the tighter clue "One volume of the Encyclopedia of Movie Dogs?". Unfortunately, Will thought Balto was too obscure in his own right (as the hero of the original Iditarod), let alone as the star of the 1995 animated film "Balto".

That film was getting heavy rotation in the Collins VCR back in the day, as in the late ‘90s our four preteen girls were deep into a) dogs, and b) animated movies. About that time our family was passing through Cleveland on our way home from a family reunion. We stopped at the Natural History Museum. Imagine our surprise when we turned a corner and stumbled upon the real Balto, stuffed and standing in a plexiglass box. Our youngest daughter flipped out. Why a famous sled dog from Alaska ended up in Cleveland is a mystery to me. There's also a Balto statue in Central Park in New York. Another mystery to me.

If you were really to make one volume of an encyclopedia of Movie Pets and Sidekicks from Tonto to Toto, I think you'd have a hard time filling an index card let alone a tome. Therein lies the humor, I guess.

This puzzle was finally accepted last February. After a second and third revision (both involving TONTO for BALTO), it was decided to revert back to the second version. The third version had fewer three-letter entries, but overall the fill wasn't as good.

Nicely consistent theme; a pair of letters repeated exactly four times (total of five instances) within a kooky sentence. I AM A MAMA MAMBA gave me a chuckle — it would make a great seed for a picture book! LEND A DAD A DADA was a neat exercise in parse-ology, forcing me to struggle to figure out where the spaces went. Entertaining.

I always appreciate getting some long pieces of fill in a crossword, and Pete hits my wavelength today with six long entries. SMOKE ALARMS, NEXT IN LINE, PHOTO ALBUMS, and RATTED ON are all strong entries in my book. And although SANTA MONICA is average-ish to me, the "Three's Company" clue brought me back to the days when Jack Tripper was my boyhood hero.

Sad, isn't it?

Note how well Pete spaces out his long downs. None of them are piled up against each other, and they're all separated by a good number of black squares. I personally use similar arrangements of six long downs all the time, as it makes for surprisingly easy filling. All this extra material for the price of only an EDE and a minor AGRI = good execution.

Great to get even more sparkle in ONE SEED, too. I dropped in TOP SEED, but ONE SEED is a term I hear all the time during the NCAA basketball tourney.

Will's mentioned that all he's looking for out of a Thursday crossword is for it to be harder than a Wednesday. One way to do this is to simply crank up the difficulty of the clues. Take [Tots] for example. It took me forever to figure out that it obliquely referred to "totals up," not "little kid." I personally find it much more satisfying to have the theme concept of the crossword difficult, not the clues, though. Once I cottoned to this particular trick, looking for letter-repetitions made it too easy for my taste to fill in the theme answers.

The clue for ABA gave me a middle-schooler's tee-hee — the last part of the [Org. with red, white and blue balls, once] clue made me think of something very different. Ahem.