New York Times, Saturday, March 8, 2014

In September 2012, I noticed that I had a lot of 9-letter seed entries lying around, so I decided to throw some of them together into a high word count themeless grid. I was particularly happy that JAILBREAK and CANDY SHOP fit into the upper left corner and that GOOGLEBOT and SEXY SADIE fit into the lower right. In the other two corners, I especially liked COKE ZERO, CLARITIN, JUST DO IT, and MOJITO. ARIOSI, AIOLIS, and LLDS weren't (and still aren't) my favorites, though I was pleased with how the fill turned out overall, so I wrote up the clues and submitted the puzzle to Will.

Will liked the puzzle but had concerns about BIG HOAX sounding a bit contrived; luckily, though, he decided to let it stand. When I first saw the edited version of this crossword, I couldn't tell which one of my puzzles it was, since Will's brilliant "Cooler idea?" and "One stocking bars" clues completely eluded me! I had clued JAILBREAK in the sense of jailbreaking a phone and CANDY SHOP as the 50 Cent song, so it took me an embarrassingly long time to identify the puzzle, because Will's clues for these entries were completely different. Enjoy my puzzle, and I look forward to seeing some of you at the ACPT (perhaps even solving this crossword!).

Sometimes I'm not on David's wavelength because he's roughly 130 years younger than I am, but I sped through this puzzle. A bunch of very nice entries, SEXY SADIE not surprisingly being my favorite, closely followed by GOOGLE BOT — in the same stack!

I was at Stanford a few years before Sergey Brin and Larry Page (of Google; slightly more famous than me). One of my favorite stories about GOOGLE BOTs (warning: this may be apocryphal) is that a marketing person told one of the high muckety-mucks that they needed to spin how much better Google's search engine was than the competition. The reply: if Google's algorithm wasn't the best out there, they didn't deserve to win. That's a philosophy that deserves a huge amount of respect. You go, GOOGLEBOTs!

A lot of good stuff today, along with a couple of AOLERS and STEARIC kind of answers, which makes me want to point out a thoughtful post David put up regarding what makes a puzzle stand the test of time (it's toward the bottom of the post). The key observation is:

"But when I encounter a theme I've never seen before, a trick that was brand new at the time, or a particularly impressive theme entry interlock, I slow down and admire the puzzle and the constructor for trying something a little different. If the fill has an entry or two I don't like, then so be it. The puzzle is still highly memorable and successful, in my opinion, for holding interest more than thirty years later."

I appreciate how he stands up for a philosophy that sometimes gets unfairly derided in the blogosphere. Wise beyond his years. Honestly, I'm not completely sure where I fall in the spectrum, but I think having two pretty iffy answers is well worth the price of having so many great ones.

I'll finish off by pointing out two beautiful clues, exactly the kinds that tickle me as they should on a Saturday. [Popular line of footwear?] for JUST DO IT and [It's flown in] for AIR SPACE. The former is a great piece of wordplay, "line" referring to an advertising line, not a line of clothing. And the latter is my favorite, misdirecting the solver to think about what types of objects get flown in (as in shipped in). I love that it doesn't give itself away with a question mark!