New York Times, Tuesday, July 8, 2014

Two more CrosSynergy members on the byline today! Yesterday Lynn Lempel, today, Gail and Bruce. Nice. There are fifteen of us. By my math, three CS members will have written tomorrow's puzzle. Numbers don't lie.

One thing I like about good "word that can follow both words of X" type themes is when I don't see them coming. That usually means the themers must be snappy and not feel contrived, otherwise running across a made-up-sounding entry is a sure giveaway. I enjoyed most of the themers today, SPORTS NUT in particular. HIGH ENERGY is also a fun one, evoking images not only of energy bars but of yappy dogs and certain people on my Ultimate frisbee team.

COFFEE ROLL befuddled me, but it does appear to be "a thing." Perhaps I would like it better on a later-week puzzle though, as something that gets less than 100K Google hits when in quotes feels a bit esoteric to me. Generally, that's the bar that many of my constructor friends seem to use. This does serve as a good example of potential issues with this type of theme — there are only so many words that can follow BAR. Pairing them up into snazzy theme answers which will also fit symmetrically into a crossword grid can be tough.

As with all puzzles containing a central nine-letter answer, the fill is harder than average to execute on. There's sure some nice fill in the corners, which can always be tricky. And I absolutely loved what Bruce and Gail did with the SW corner. That's the way to fill an OPEN SPACE, not only selecting juicy entries like GUFF, JIFFY, EDIT OUT and RUN-OFFS, but tossing in a J without needing a glue entry to do so. Well done. As a solver, I appreciate having a couple of Scrabbly letters here and there. Spices things up. I'm not sure if this is a universal desire (probably not), but I do get the anecdotal feel that solvers generally are on the same page as me.

The north is a different story for me, when it comes to Scrabbly letters. It's fun to toss in a Z as a constructor. But having an awkward partial like RUE DE at the top of the puzzle, plus ARROZ crossing EZER... that would be tough for some solvers to suss out. It's one thing to know MEIR, and another to know EZER, methinks. And I think it's fine to expect a solver to be able to figure out some foreign words (especially in a Romance language), but ARROZ is pretty tough to derive. Along with URIEL, that north section strikes me as inelegant, especially given there are few constraints up there and plenty of other ways to fill that region.

As always, simply a personal opinion. During my solve I felt like there was quite a bit of the ASCAP, REATA, GAPERS kind of stuff (some of which is expected due to having five themers, especially given the center themer splitting the puzzle in half), and in retrospect, if that north section had been cleaned up, I don't think I really would have noticed the crosswordese overall. Anyway, I'm sure people will be writing in from the RUE DE la paix, saying that they both loved the Z and are aghast that I don't know who EZER Weizman is.

Finally, a comment on CGI. A friend of mine is in the computer graphics area, and when I used the term CGI the other day he got all riled up, saying that the proper term is VFX (visual effects). Terms and acronyms go by the wayside all the time, but I still wonder whether CGI is perfectly fine. Hopefully Tony's not reading this post...

CGI!