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Jim here, sitting in for Jeff Chen, who is playing a small role in a superhero movie.

One way to make a Saturday crossword challenging is to include words you might not be familiar with. Recent Saturdays have asked us to know the technical term PETABYTE, the modern novelist/poet OCEAN VUONG, and the recent slang word ZHUZH.

That's not the strategy today, where mostly common answer words could easily be clued at a Tuesday or Wednesday level. The difficulty is all in the clues, particularly those that play on initial assumptions.

• "Some budget graphics" isn't about inexpensive line charts. They're graphics about budgets.
• "Supergirl, eg." isn't looking for details about that specific superhero, only that she's an ALIEN.
• "It resurfaces after 20 minutes" doesn't refer to some denizen of the deep who emerges for oxygen after a long dive, it's about the machine that resurfaces the ice after a 20-minute period in hockey.

Wait, what? ZAMBONI is a common answer word?

This explains why it's difficult to judge the difficulty of any crossword or write about it. It's natural to assume your common knowledge is, if not universal, at least common. If you grew up in Canada or if you love hockey, ZAMBONI is a delightfully clever answer to a misleading clue. Otherwise, it's just a string of letters in a disappointing puzzle.

Zamboni or not, today's (mostly) common words means that your experience depends more on your ability to think creatively. If you like this sort of thing as much as I do, don't ignore the Puns and Anagrams and even the Cryptic crosswords that appear every few weeks.