New York Times, Thursday, February 6, 2014

Just some standard puzzle-making techniques today; placing the revealer (57-A) as the final theme entry and stretching the grid to 16 columns to accommodate the even-length center entry of an 8, 9, 10, 9, 8 layout.

Those who enjoy this form of word play should get a copy of the 1967 book Mots d'Heures: Gousses, Rames — The d'Antin Manuscript ... It has something to do with Mother Goose rhymes in French.

Any time I see Joe Krozel's byline, I set aside extra time to solve (and go grab a beer). Perhaps more than any other constructor, Joe pushes the boundaries of puzzle construction, sometimes coming up with ideas I would never have imagined if I had employed a million monkeys typing at a million workstations. No, I've never employed monkeys to generate crosswords for me. Yes, those are all my banana peels.

A phonetic puzzle today, phrases that sound like Japanese words: WASABI, ARIGATO, SUDOKU, and KARAOKE. Light, playful theme, one which actually helped me in my solve today because the rest of the puzzle played like a themeless. In fact, look how much themeless-type material he packs in, thanks to his unusual grid design: OH BROTHER, MOM AND POP, PHARAOHS, and an incredible amount of 7-letter fill. Typically 15x15 xws don't have much long fill due to theme constraints (this is 16x15, FYI), but Joe's shorter than average theme entries allow for more goodness in the fill.

Typically it's desirable to make grids easy to get from one subsection to the next, because it can be a little tricky if there's only one way into a particular area. That happens in the NW and SE regions today, so it's a good thing that the phrases OH BROTHER and MOM AND POP are both lively and clued easily. Still though, it would be nice to have a secondary way in (or out) of those sections.

One aspect of Thursday puzzles that make them slightly easier to fill is that one can use words and phrases that probably wouldn't fly on a Monday. Note ALAMORT in the NW, kind of a head-scratcher with just a couple thousand Google hits. I'm sure there will be some French scholars clapping their hands out there, but how big is the overlap in the Venn diagram of French scholars and Greek scholars (ELEA)?

Enjoyable solve with some fun linguistic play.