Tim Croce author page

Eye-catching grid, something so clock-like to it. Tim stuffed so many Scrabbly letters into the center mini-puzzle — a J, a Q, and three Xs, done with polish and finesse. And with such sparkly answers — SICK JOKE, AMEX CARD, HOT WAX, and RAGE QUIT — I can't remember when I've enjoyed a tiny subsection quite this much.

It is just one of five areas in the grid, however (sorry, Tim!). The layout chops up the square into pieces, making my solve go like a countdown from five to one.

Hey, maybe it is a clock mini-theme!

With each of the four corners featuring intersecting triple-stacked 7s in wide-open areas, it's a wonder that Tim got all of these sections to fall. After deploying so many of your blocks on the middle — with stellar results — you gotta pay the piper at some point. Surprisingly, Tim gets the lower right cleanly, with just ENTHUSE, which seems odd to me without a final D. Pretty impressive!

Ending up with answers like SLEEKED and DESTINE though, is not ideal. Neither of these words are 100% bogus, but on the bogosity scale, they strike me as above average.

Mike Shenk once said that the constructor's task is to devise a puzzle that challenges the solver, and provides a test that he/she can ultimately win. I felt like the top left corner was a game rigged against me. I loved the PAR FIVE clue (an "ace" is slang for a hole-in-one) and should have gotten ARIOSOS quicker. But I don't know that I would have ever gotten the RICO ACT / FOOTE crossing. I'm sure others will feel differently, but that soured my solving experience, as I struggled with that tiny intersection for 20 minutes and then realized that it was a waste of time, as I would never have solved it.

Being a constructor is a tough game. Should NYT readers know RICO ACT or FOOTE ... or both? Judging by Tim's reaction to FOOTE, maybe I really ought to have known that. And the RICO ACT does seem like an important piece of legislation. But with four basically random letters in RICO, it'd have been so much more satisfying for me if each had been crossed with non-esoteric names. (Who's to say what's "esoteric," though!)

So much great material with a colloquial bent. We often get a nice OH BOO HOO type of entry, but to have HOOK ME UP, YES BOSS, HUMOR ME … me likey! (I used to wonder if that last one was a bit offensive to Asians, but me likey it too much not to use in regular conversation.)

Themelesses featuring relatively short entries often make for very difficult solves, and this was the case for me today. With a grid-spanning feature answer, there are so many toeholds available to drop in a letter here, a letter there, allowing you to crack it. Even an 8-letter entry will often fall, as GUYLINER did for me, with just two crossing letters.

A 7-letter answer often provides only one or two easy crosses, and sometimes there's nary a letter to help out. Trying to get HEARTHS off just the beginning H, or ARUGULA off just the ending A, is a skill I still have not developed. Great brain workout, but very difficult.

As a cat lover, I have to point out the genius of [Himalayan food, maybe]. I wasn't aware of the Himalayan cat breed before. Oh man, that thing is funny looking! (Humor me, me likey.)

Some beautiful long entries today. The NW and SE stacks contain such goodness! Six answers, all pure gold. A colloquial bit in GOD I HOPE NOT, something newer in the ITUNES STORE, a hippish guy in STEVE CARELL and another one for previous generations in EVEL KNIEVEL (with its A+ clue!). That's some great feature entry work.

I ended up finishing with an error due to a devilish clue for TENET than made me outthink myself (not hard, really). [Canon element] had to be tricksy, right? Surely the printer brand Canon was hidden in plain sight at the beginning of the clue? So with the T and the N in place already, I plunked down TONER. I figured RELEASE DARE was one of those things I'm not hip enough to understand (that's a big universe). And it was so EVEL KNIEVEL sounding. D'oh! Fun to be caught by my own "brilliance."

Ah, the old issue of excessive three-letter words. There is one case where I actually like seeing a lot of 3s, and that is when going to such a high three-letter word count means that there's way more long fill in the grid than usual. If the average word length stays roughly the same, more shorter words means more longer words, yeah?

And if this isn't the case, I think the frustration of the choppy solve brought by excessive 3s can be mitigated by making them as unnoticeable as possible. Avoiding unsavory glue like ENE, GIE, ITE, NOE, and the curious BIS would go a long way toward that.

I usually don't mind one or maybe two things like S AND L and B TWO (entries which are never seen in real life this way). One is kind of fun; kind of tricksy, making the solver think outside the box. Getting two of the same type, B TWO and A TEN, was not ideal. I would have much preferred A TEN being clued as the (somewhat esoteric) Egyptian sun god, although I can understand why Will chose the riskier path, in hopes of squeaking A TEN by.

Some beautiful clues really enhanced my solving pleasure, though. OTTER's clue made me worried, thinking about a different type of "oyster cracker" and why it might be furry. Great repurposing of the term. And GOWNS, TREE RINGS, even ELS twisted my brain around, producing great moments of clarity when the answers finally fell into place.

All in all, a puzzle on one end of the spectrum, one with a lot of sizzling entries made possible by enough glue to hold them together.

Crosswords are like cars. There are some universal assets for both: great themes and strong fill for crosswords, and gas mileage and reliability for cars. But it makes a lot of sense for car makers to create "concept cars" to show off what might be possible. These concept cars may not be very practical, but they sure are cool to look at. It wouldn't be much fun if EVERY car were a concept car, but one every once in a while creates a lot of buzz.

Today's puzzle is in that vein for me. It's crazy-looking pattern. Eye-popping. Those giant white spaces in the top and bottom scream LOOK AT ME! As a constructor, I look at that and shudder for fear of execution difficulties, but for most of the NYT audience, I bet more of a "hey, you gotta come take a look at this!" is in order.

With any themeless featuring a lot of 15's, those grid-spanners must pull their weight, since they won't leave much room for other good fill. If you hit the "Analyze" button down below, you'll see that the longest entries after the 15's are only seven letters long. It's generally harder to come up with great IM IN AWE type entries when you're constrained to only seven letters. More often than not, more neutral words like SCOWLED or INSEAMS will fit in better.

Out of those six grid-spanners, I thought LIBATION BEARERS and I DONT FEEL LIKE IT and EARTH SHATTERING were fantastic. SEMI SOFT CHEESES and ARIZONA CARDINAL lean more toward neutral for me. And TAPPAN ZEE BRIDGE... yikes! It took every cross to figure out, and even then, TAPMANZEE (with MATTI) sounded reasonable. (I think too much about all the fun practical jokes I could pull if I had a chimpanzee. Even better if I had a tapmanzee.) Overall, not bad on this front.

Showy concept cars often have compromises in order to fit everything under the hood, and that's seen in some entries like DERAT, SOLFA and ARRAS and their crossing, the little corners filled with CPL / URI and MTA / SSN. Not what I'd like to typically see in a themeless. Additionally, the puzzle's flow wasn't ideal, being broken into three mini-puzzles: top, center, bottom. I was stymied by the top (which is fine, as I'm sure some people will know the TAPPAN ZEE BRIDGE off the top of their heads), without any way to break in.

That said, the overall effect is still pretty neat. I wouldn't want to see this type of puzzle every week, but a few times a year it provides for a great visual effect.

Finally, a few notes on clues. [They run up legs] for INSEAMS is awesome, exactly the type of clue that resonates for me, personally. (I was thinking about spiders running up legs, or better yet, miniature tapmanzees.) The clue for SCOWLED was less interesting to me, going for an esoteric definition of "scowl" (I looked up "scowl," and one of the last definitions was "lower." Then I looked up "lower," and one of the last definitions was "scowl." Some help, stupid dictionary.). This kind of cluing feels too SAT-ish and unsatisfying for me, but I'm sure others will enjoy it. Even prefer it.

Personally, it was a really nice touch to end on [Bright spots], which I thought were going to be something like HIGHLIGHTS, but was indeed, SOLARIA. Nice misdirection.

★ A really nice change of pace today, a hugely ambitious grid that delivered a quality solving experience for me. A collection of "adjective as an animal" similes, Tim not only packs in seven strong ones, but does so in a 72-word grid that gives us additional long fill and mostly clean short fill. Quite a fun experience for me, both to solve and to admire as a constructor.

It's easy as a constructor to fall back upon standard methodology in grid design (or even just use grids out of a grid library), so I really like seeing constructors push boundaries. I'm not sure I would have ever come up with the same grid design as Tim, especially considering how he carefully packed everything in. Some crossings will be natural given the simple theme — themers crossed through part of the "AS A" is a natural way to do that — but look how Tim crosses FAT AS A COW and BALD AS A COOT and SLY AS A FOX. Very cool.

And with seven themers, it's altogether too easy to call it good once you can fit them all in. So I really like the extra step, squeezing in BASS ALE over LOCAL PUB and TRASHBIN and ART DECO, all nice answers. As I go back and study this grid, I still have a hard time wrapping my head around how Tim managed to get everything so tightly packed. It's a Tetris-like solution.

There are blips here and there, not surprising due to the level-ridiculous constraints. BIG AS A WHALE overlapping BUSY AS A BEE is naturally going to be problematic, for instance. The ?HS?? pattern is not particularly friendly, so the OH SAY partial is one of the only options there. Our crossword monkey friend ABU shows up too, but that's an impressively low number of glue entries. Tim's work in the west section is remarkably clean, only UGA raising an eyebrow, at least until I remembered how cutely ugly the UGA bulldog mascot is.

Not a mind-blowing theme, but a great example of how to pull something off with panache.

Perhaps the hardest Tuesday NYT I've ever done. It's pretty neat, not at all BUSHWA (my favorite themer by a mile!) to see 16 different synonyms for "Nonsense" — I had no idea there were so many of them, all colorful — but the opaque cluing sure made for a difficult solve. The 16 essentially unclued entries made it almost like solving the puzzle with just down clues, an exercise some of the speedsters sometimes engage in.

It's rare that Will allows a higher word count than the maximum of 78 (for a 15x), but there are definitely examples. Something like today's puzzle definitely pushes the envelope of construction, almost necessitating the push to 82 words.

It's also unusual to have so many unsavory short answers, but today we see ANIGH, DERAT, ROW B, AT YA, STELA, etc. With so much theme density, it's almost impossible to avoid these. I've highlighted all the themers so you can better appreciate how much their placement constrained the construction. Consider the east section, where TRIPE, BUSHWA, and HOGWASH sit, just as one example. There are limited options for where STRUNG sits, and once you place that word, that east region becomes very difficult to cleanly fill. Perhaps one of ANIGH and STELA would be fine for an early-week puzzle, but it's a bit unappetizing to have them in such close proximity.

I personally would have preferred slightly less theme density in order to clean up the fill, but I'm sure there will be solvers arguing that their favorite "Nonsense" phrase was left out. Overall, I always appreciate seeing someone push the boundaries, and perhaps this will stimulate other ideas for future disestablishmentarianism. Plus, BUSHWA!

★ Tim Croce is most well-known for his wide-open themeless grids, but he also works on themed puzzles, and today's is a stonker. GENERAL DISARRAY is interpreted as "phrases which contain GENERAL anagrammed", and Tim comes up with some beautiful theme entries, POTENTIAL ENERGY and NUCLEAR ENGINEER being my favorites (I'm a physics dork, so sue me).

At a certain point in their careers, most constructors tend to get comfortable with the basics of gridwork. Many stay at that point indefinitely, but some choose to push the envelope, trying to see what new and exciting developments can happen. I love Tim's effort today to give us a wide-open solve (only 70 entries!), imbuing the puzzle with a quasi-themeless feel. The theme itself doesn't contain the typical trickery we've come to expect from Thursdays in the Shortz era, but the addition of the wide-open grid really enhanced my solve.

Typically, most constructors would break up rows 1, 2, 14, and 15 into three entries apiece, but Tim has split them only into two entries apiece. This gives us the juicy TIA MARIA, MESS TENT, EMIRATES, OLD SAW, etc. And in addition, RAN RAGGED and SEAFARERS appear in the NE and SW; excellent entries. There are a few prices to pay, notably IERI and BEGEM which both seem to me like icky bits, but overall the trade-off is well worth it to me.

And there's the combination of ANAL and AREOLA clued as a site of some piercings. Buh-bye, old Gray Lady! I'm sure there will be some whose sensibilities are rankled by this, but count me among those happy to see more cheekiness mixed in. I also appreciated the vibe of the cluing, notably "Brobdingnagian" for LARGE and "Search for, in a way" for GOOGLE. A really fun solve today.

Neat Tuesday offering from Tim, playing on the cross-referencing that typically occurs in crosswords, delighting some solvers (who appreciate the linked answers) and irritating others (who grouse about having to jump all over the grid). Typically I groan when 1-across is cross-referenced because it messes with the flow of my puzzle solve, but I did a double-take when I saw 1-across was cross-referenced to... 1-across. Clever idea!

With themed puzzles, there's a certain beauty when the theme answers jump out at the solver just by layout, and a bit of inelegance when the solver must hunt to figure out which answers relate to the theme. Today's sort of theme, which incorporates a lot of short answers, typically falls into the latter category, but because all the theme answers are clued with the "With (this answer)..." style, it works well. Very nice way to make the themers stand out; typically much better than a simple asterisk trying to tell the solver which is theme and which is not. I also appreciate that the theme answers are the only ones with cross-referencing.

I highlighted all the theme answers to show the symmetry, putting the doubles in tan and the triples in green. There was something bothering me as I solved, and this exercise helped me figure out what it was. I really liked that most of the themers were doubled, with the kicker of a few of them being tripled. But I would have loved to see all the tripled answers symmetrical (note the location of LOCATION). A minor issue, to be sure, but one that deducts slightly from the puzzle's elegance.

Another small nit came with the idea of less is more. Specifically, PETER PETER stood out to me as a partial. Everything else felt fun and complete, great entries such as HEAR YE HEAR YE and SAME OLD SAME OLD. The puzzle would still have its amazing theme density without PETER, and that would have allowed Tim to work his magic, perhaps giving us even more juicy fill in the center. And perhaps take out OSAMA, which is kind of a bummer to see in an otherwise uplifting puzzle.

Cleanly filled, with good stuff such as WEE UNS, TB TEST, THE OMEN, RIO LOBO, and a minimum of ugly entries; a real feat given the tremendous theme density and all the overlap of said themers. Great change of pace Tuesday; enjoyable solve.

In addition to the usual criteria for judging a themeless crossword (lively entries, lack of crosswordese/partials/abbrs., fun cluing), Will hits upon an topic we don't often have a chance to discuss: grid aesthetics. By itself, I found the grid stunning, not just because I shivered at how difficult it would be to fill cleanly, but for its sheer visual artistry. Jim put together a gallery of Grid Art that caught his eye, and this one's also a beauty.

Tim not just flirts with the lowest word count record but does so with a relatively clean grid. And compare it to the other 11 58-word puzzles, noting how much less segmentation it has. Low word-count puzzles often depend upon splitting the grid into four quadrants so each can be worked on individually, but this one has a massive middle white space with high connectivity to four swaths in the corners. Daunting.

Usually the knock on low-word count puzzles is that they're inelegant and/or no fun because they depend on too many "roll-your-own" words (carrying an artificial RE- prefix or -ER/-ERS suffix). There are some of these here (I see you, RESEES) but surprisingly few. I'm mixed on TOOLER — in my first career as a mechanical engineer, I worked closely with moldmakers who we occasionally called "toolers", but that seems pretty esoteric.

Finally, check out the good stuff Tim throws in: SOLO HOMER, LETTERMEN, SMART ALEC, KNEE PATCH, all intersecting in the center. To those who might argue that this doesn't have any super-snazzy answers (or call it a "stunt puzzle"), at the very least this puzzle is a great change of pace to the usual 68 to 72-word themeless puzzles. A close second for the POW!