New York Times, Saturday, June 14, 2014

In my four semesters at the University of Delaware, crosswords were, all in all, my biggest distraction. They were also the biggest thing I had going for me there, as my second published one (11/11/11) made me arguably the most famous freshman on campus. And even though I have left Delaware and regained focus on my studies closer to my home in Pennsylvania's Lehigh Valley, crosswords remain my #1 hobby.

Today's puzzle is one that I have been very proud of, ever since I completed it, clued it, and submitted it in October 2012. (I put it in the mailbox exactly four days before my fourth NYT puzzle ran so that I would not have nothing left in the tank, so to speak, after that puzzle ran.) I would have liked it to be supersymmetric, with 7's going all the way around the perimeter of the grid and rows and columns 7 and 9 being spans, but the switch to a mix of 8's and 6's made it much easier for me to make the four longest entries be fresh and interesting.

My favorite of the 12's is IDIOSYNCRASY, as even though it's the only single word among them, I find it fun to say! I also like CRANBERRY BOG a lot, as well as JOAN BAEZ (what a great 1A!), SCHERZO, DENARII, FINIAL, LAST EXIT, ISLAMIST, JILTED, ZONK OUT, KATMANDU, GO ROGUE, and CRONKITE. As for clues, Will kept almost exactly half of mine. Some of the new ones that struck me were those for 15A, 26A, 30A, 59A, 60A, 21D, 35D, 47D, and 55D.

Finally, I am truly amazed and honored to have set the bar for the cycle, now that I've had a puzzle published on every day of the week. Jim Horne noted that David Steinberg completed the cycle with his ninth NYT puzzle (3/9/13), and David Kwong matched the feat with the puzzle that Horne named his Puzzle of the Year for 2013 (10/31/13). Though I have now done it in only eight, Steinberg did it in less time than I did, and I now encourage anyone who wants to do it in only seven, the absolute minimum, to make an effort to achieve that goal.

I look forward to my next publication, but I will not lose focus on my studies. I hope you all enjoyed my puzzle!

This might look like a typical themeless construction, with a set of triple-stacked 8's in each corner, but it's not. Alex travels an ambitious road by adding two aspects, both of which make this construction much harder than the more typical ones.

First, note the four long entries crossing the triple-stacked 8's. EDWARD NORTON, POINT OF ORDER, CRANBERRY BOG, IDIOSYNCRASY, they're all great. We don't often see four EXTRA long answers like this, all intersecting each other in a windmill pattern.

And Alex could have made this easier on himself by blocking off some of the puzzle flow. Note how each of the four corners flows in either direction? Might not seem like a big deal, but it's so much harder to get a puzzle to knit together with an open construction like this. If Alex had blocked off the start of DENARII / TOSCA for example, his SCHAEFER / CRONKITE / HASTENED stack wouldn't have had to "turn the corner" there.

Given these ambitious constraints, Alex does a nice job. Starting with the four aforementioned long entries, all great, he expands from there into his four triple-stacks. I loved the NW one, with the Scrabbly JOAN BAEZ to kick it off, and INNUENDO and LETS DOWN are both very nice. The other stacks aren't quite as nice, but that's to be expected given the constraints. Typically I wouldn't consider NORTHERN, HASTENED, even OLEASTER to be great themeless entries.

And there are a few blips here and there, most interesting to me was that they almost all came from the "turning the corner" areas. EDER and SORBS. CHA and ENHALO. IVO and ELEC. DANO and ETERNE. Alex keeps the rest of the puzzle pretty lively and clean, but those small areas get tricky. Any time you have to knit sections together in multiple ways, things get tough. Alex does do a nice job of keeping everything solvable with fair crossings, although the F in SCHAEFER / FINIAL was a bit iffy for me. Big fan of everything from our local Manny's Pale Ale to Bud Light with Lime. (Only after long runs, I swear! Don't tell anyone.). But I wasn't aware of SCHAEFER. Perhaps someone needs to telex me some.

Some great clues today. [Provider of bang for the buck?] was a fun one, alluding to a buck using his antlers as weapons. [Sitter's choice] looked so innocuous, making me think about TV vs. movies while watching tots. Devious!