New York Times, Friday, September 16, 2016

Patrick had me at the clue for ENGINEERS: [Scientists dream about doing great things. ENGINEERS do them.] It's something we all know to be true, deep down in our hearts, isn't it? Admit it! If James Michener said it, it must be true. Ipso facto, Q.E.D.!

No? Dammit Jim, I'm an engineer, not a logician!

Speaking of engineering, what a great job of engineering in this grid. Typical themelesses rely on a lot of three- and four-letter words to hold the longer material together. Without the shorties, the constructor is forced to work with giant open spaces, the likes of which often prove unfillable — unless you resort to a lot of neutral or flat-out ugly entries, that is. I rarely tackle any sort of quad-stack, since I've found that after dozens of hours, I end up relying on a couple of ugly little bits, along with some ho-hum space-fillers. That's not the kind of solving experience I relish.

None of Patrick's four corners is absolutely perfect, but they all get pretty darn close. The SW stood out for me, so much great material packed into that stack. COIN PURSE / HONOR ROLL / JET SETS are all excellent, with just ENGRAFTED a bit blah. But with KING JAMES running through it all — along with no liabilities down there — that's some incredible work.

Patrick uses a construction technique today that I've slowly picked up on over the years: it doesn't look or feel like he's segmenting the grid into quadrants, but he carefully places his middle black squares so that he can very nearly work on each section by itself. Once you place the S of ACHES, the S of PRATES, and set KING JAMES in, that SW can be tackled independently of everything else.

It's a tremendous advantage to be able to work on a subsection without worrying about the rest of the puzzle. And since there are enough entrances in and exits out of each corner, the puzzle still breathes. Great trade-off between the constructor's and the solvers' needs; very smart placement of those central black squares.

I wasn't aware of OLD BAILEY, a British criminal court, but I enjoyed learning about it. Along with some fantastic clue / entry pairs — [Life preserver?] getting at Life cereal in a CEREAL BOX, e.g. — it's a beautiful piece of grid engineering. Most weeks I'd easily give it the POW! but later this week there's another one I liked even better.