New York Times, Saturday, March 29, 2014

My seed entries were the 3 bodies of water: HUDSON BAY, DANUBE RIVER, and OKEECHOBEE. Also, since I'm a big fan of music from the first two decades of rock and roll music, I frequently use songs from that era in my puzzles. This time, I was able to use ON A CAROUSEL although I wasn't quite sure Will would go for it.

Strong showing by themeless specialist Barry Silk. Today he utilizes a tough set of triple-stacked 11's, much more difficult to execute cleanly than triple stacked 8's or 9's (the more common choice in themelesses). Barry also does something unusual in that he breaks up his SW and NE stacks with a black square, resulting in double-stacked 9's instead of triple-stacks. I love it when a themeless constructor plays with grid shapes, so it was really fun for me to study this one.

And upon closer inspection, I really like how Barry has incorporated SIDEARM into the SW corner, and crosses the whole shebang with my favorite entry, SPHINX-LIKE. Now that's some good stuff. I might have preferred a harder clue for SIDEARM — what else could [Like some pitches] be besides OVERARM and UNDERARM? On the other hand, I appreciate seeing a constructor's preferences and tendencies in a grid, so it was neat to get an echo of Barry's proclivity toward baseball.

Although KTS feels like an inelegant abbreviation (chess players might likely disagree), I really liked the clue echo of [They often land next to queens] for two entries right next to each other. Very nice stuff, especially considering "queen" meant two completely different things.

One hitch I had on this puzzle was the handful of short "glue" entries like AMAH, AREAR, CIRC, RTE, ATNO. It's not a huge quantity, but because it's difficult to come up with mind-blowing clues for these shorties, they're often the first things I enter into the grid, thus giving me an impression that there are more than there really are. I can see Stan Newman's viewpoint in his Saturday Stumpers, not allowing certain short answers he considers "not Stumperable." I might put AMAH in that list, in that it's almost a gimme once you do enough crosswords. There aren't that many ways to clue "Eastern nurse."

Finally, my favorite Saturday-hard wordplay clue has to be the one for ALTERNATE. In itself, ALTERNATE is a pretty average answer, but [Every second] is brilliant. For some people, it might be too cute for its own good, but I loved how it messed with my mind. It wasn't "every second" as in "every second counts," but as in "every other one." Really neat how it forced me to think about a common phrase in a completely different way.