New York Times, Tuesday, March 18, 2014

Another puzzle from the crossword magician! I recently saw "Now You See Me," for which David was the lead magician. Talk about a childhood dream to hand out business cards entitled LEAD MAGICIAN to Woody Harrelson and Jesse Eisenberg. Live the dream, David, live the dream.

Nice revealer today, A FAREWELL TO ARMS being both a perfect 15 and a way to describe wacky answers which had ARM removed. Usually the fun in these types of themes for me is enjoying the kookiness of the resulting phrases, but today I found the quest to understand the base phrase amusing. BURGLAR AL clearly starts with BURGLAR ALARM, but GENT DISTRICT was a little harder (GARMENT DISTRICT). Same with SNAKE ARMCHER, which was incredibly hard to suss out.

I jest, of course. Some say I charm. Mostly me, unfortunately.

So although DEATH WED OVER was the only one that wed me over — er, won me over, I enjoyed the wordplay and quest to find the base phrases. I did have an incredibly hard time finishing the puzzle, given the tough TORV and BWI crossing one of the harder to figure out themers. BWI I only know as the airport code for Baltimore's airport, and it turns out BWI also stands for Book Wholesalers, Inc.; who knew the Bahamas was such a literate place? Learn something new every day.

(British West Indies)

So given the tough entries and the difficulties I had in sussing out the phrases, I had my first DNF (did not finish) on a Tuesday in years. It's good to get a dose of humility every once in a while. I did appreciate some long fill like MOTOROLA (I still proudly show off my Razr, sadly) and RATTED ON. The construction is extremely challenging, given that the 9/12/15/12/9 represents a whopping 57 theme squares. All those interconnected areas produce difficult constraints, resulting in a few unfortunate entries such as NORW, AGOGO, SSW and ITA as direct results of all those necessary crossings. Perhaps a slightly less ambitious construction would have resulted in a smoother end product.

Finally, I appreciate when I learn something new from the crossword. I had never really thought of BUFF as a color, so it was neat to finally uncover. And I was supposed to have read Dante's The Divine Comedy in college, but I had a much more divine comedic college experience and failed to read past the title page. So it was fun to read up on the role Beatrice Portinari played in Dante's life!

ADDED NOTE: check out this blog post about the magic trick David integrated into the puzzle. Cool!