New York Times, Friday, November 21, 2014

All NYT crosswords have grid patterns that are symmetrical when you rotate them 180 degrees. For this puzzle, I decided to start with a grid that would also be symmetrical when rotated 90 degrees.

The longest answer has length 8, which is kind of short, but there are 12 of them. I keep a list of words and phrases that have never been in a NYT crossword, so I pulled that out and looked for length 8 possibilities. My three favorites on that list were JONESING, BUTT DIAL, and LOCAVORE, so I started with those.

I seeded the puzzle by putting JONESING in the NW, BUTT DIAL in the NE, and LOCAVORE in the SE. I didn't seed a 4th entry in the SW because I figured the fill would flow into that area, kind of like squeezing a tube of toothpaste, so I waited to see what entry would go there naturally. I felt lucky when it turned out that HOW'S THAT would fit there.

I like the intersecting 7's in the middle of the puzzle (PASSION, BAY AREA, LOBSTER, DESIREE): BAY AREA is nice for me because I live in the San Francisco Bay Area. DESIREE is a good one because I'm a big Neil Diamond fan. He's one of the few musical artists that my dad and I both like, and we've been to see him in concert together a few times.

A few more things: LET ER RIP is fun, as my son plays baseball and it sounds like something you would say to a kid when you're telling him to swing away. I find EPIPHANY to be a colorful word. I like ARIZONA because I have two sisters, and one lives there now, and the other used to live there although recently she moved to Florida. EMOTICON and USER NAME are nice because they both evoke the computer driven world we live in.

Overall, I'm happy with how this puzzle turned out, and I'm glad I was able to get the pangram without doing anything too unnatural.

Interesting grid today, one that perfectly embodies a standard and timeless themeless-building principle: use four triple-stacks of 8's, separated out into the four corners. Visually, a pleasant grid pattern, easy on the eyes. There's something so pleasing about its symmetry, as Kevin described above.

Nice stacks. The NW corner is particularly fine; JONESING / EMOTICON (Do people really say EMOJI now? Kids these days.) / RED SAUCE. I might have preferred the more colloquial JONESIN', but that's splittin' hairs. Nice that Kevin managed to take pretty good advantage of his eight-letter slots, even the single-word entries carefully chosen to still give some oomph. CATALYST is a strong entry, and STREAMED gives the puzzle a bit of 21st century feel.

I'd make a funny comment about INDIANAN being a middle-of-the-road entry, but Will is from Indiana. More importantly, so is my wife. And Bloomington, home of IU, is quite a nice place to visit. Not to mention IU's basketball team has the most ridiculous warm-up pants ever. (I may or may not secretly want a pair.)

This layout doesn't have other long (i.e. 8+ letter) entries, so Kevin has to take advantage of his seven-letter slots to gain more assets — often not an easy task. I really like NBA GAME with its fun clue (and schadenfreude against the often big-headed Heat), and BAY AREA spoke to me, as it's where both Kevin and I hail from. It's too bad that the rest of the 7s were just neutral, i.e. PASSION, OPEN ERA, etc.

For non-stunt grids, I like to see five or less glue entries, so getting CDT, SOR, SST, ASST, A TRY, ESAS, NITRE did feel somewhat inelegant. But overall, a nice array of eight-letter entries helped make up for that.