New York Times, Saturday, December 7, 2019

KEVIN: I hope my co-constructor Erik Agard won't mind when I say that he is a genius. I witnessed clever clues pour forth from him the way that melodies sprang effortlessly from Mozart's fingertips at the piano as he improvised for his audiences.

The producers of "American Ninja Warrior" have a tough job. Ideally, you want fewer and fewer competitors to make it through each stage, a gradual winnowing until you're left with the final one or two people standing.

Early on, you should knock out some people who don't have great balance. In the middle rounds, you have to ratchet things up, maybe tossing in a salmon ladder.

And you ought to end with an incredibly difficult series of challenges that only the best-trained uber-athletes can complete — a wicked wingnuts to a crazy cliffhanger to a flying bar. If all goes well, a small handful of competitors will make it almost all the way through, and maybe one will even hit the buzzer.

Now that, my friends, makes for dramatic TV.

One thing you want to avoid at all costs: an obstacle that knocks everyone out. No fun to have something impossible! Today's puzzle wasn't quite that, but it was wicked wingnuts that you had to do while on a flying bar, landing on crazy cliffhanger-sized ledges.

I did like several of the feature entries — great stack in IT CHECKS OUT / BETA RELEASE / ALARM SYSTEM. Along with I MET SOMEONE, WRAP PARTY, COMMISH, TRES CHIC is an appropriate description!

So much of it nearly went over my head(bands), though. If you don't know what a "do loop" is (a programming construct designed to iterate until a certain condition is met), the cleverness of a "(hair)do loop" is lost. Similarly with BETA RELEASE and concept of "patches" applied to buggy code.

"Barrier to entry" is common MBA lingo (element that hinders competitors from entering your marketplace). Even if it is something that solvers should at least be familiar with, it's too literal a description for ALARM SYSTEM. Something like [It might ring a bell] would be a better wordplay angle.

Along with SEATO (?), the never-spelled-out-except-in-crosswords GSIX, and the baffling opposite of alt = NEU? (old and new in German), my solving muscles won't be the same for days.

That said, this is the exact type of training that one needs to become a stage 4 solver. A few years ago, I would routinely fail on Thursday salmon ladders, and now I'm finishing punishing Saturday crazy cliffhangers. Mount Midoriyama, I'm coming for you!