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Another one from the J.A.S.A. Crossword Class, led by Ian Livengood. It's really cool in itself to see a group of retirement-age folks come up with a crossword puzzle worthy of the NYT, and even more so that they integrated so much right-up-to-date terminology.

A snazzy themeless with a current feel, especially strong work in the tricky seven-letter lengths. My favorite was K THX BYE, which if you don't know, typically is slapped onto funny cat pictures, also known as LOLcats. The rumor that I spend 2.34 hours browsing I Can Has Cheezburger and YouTube videos of cats on treadmills is wholly and utterly not filled with liesome truthiness. Ahem. I've not seen K THX BYE used in chat / texting as much, but it's a certainty that every one of the J.A.S.A. Class members is cooler than me (I still use my 2002 Motorola Razr), so I defer on that point.

I did notice the preponderance of three-letter words today, 16 of them. Most themelesses keep the count down to 12 or so, as three-letter words tend to be a little dull, as most all of them have been used so often for crossword glue. I usually don't mind a little more than normal because it usually means I get more great long answers, but today the NE and SW bothered me a little. Having four three-letter words in a row is a bit visually unappealing to me — totally a subjective call — and the tough clues for them made unearthing K THX BYE very difficult.

Everything came easily to me in the SW, although now that I look back at it, having PDF, AVI as a prefix, JDS, and ACH isn't as elegant as I would like. Perhaps if AVI had been clued as the Newbery Award-winning author? I would love to see the day that Young Adult and Middle Grade authors get the recognition they deserve when it comes to crossword fame. (Avi's "Poppy" is a favorite of mine.)

Finally, a clue/answer pair that stumped me so bad I had to look it up after I finished: Tony Danza is one of my favorite sitcom characters (on "Taxi"), but in this case, "danza" is the Italian word for "dance", which is an ARTE, the Italian word for "art." Tricky!

Looking forward to more from the JASA Class! They're just a Monday and a Wednesday away from hitting for the cycle.

– puzzle by Ian Livengood & J.A.S.A. Crossword Class

Today gives us two Oscar winners / nominees smashed together to create quasi-wacky, quasi-realistic phrases. I was slightly confused at first because AIRPORT TRAFFIC was one of the first themers I uncovered, and I thought how cool it was that a regular phrase could be formed. But then ROCKY WITNESS came into view, which helped me cotton to the wacky aspect of it.

Two full grid-spanners (21-letter entries) and a central 17 anchor this puzzle, and with a total of seven themers, it's a toughie to construct. Alan does a nice job of separating his themers from each other pretty well, especially so given that he's used only 136 words today. The difference between 136 and 140 (the maximum Will allows in a 21x) may not seem like much, but it's tremendous. It does allow Alan to work in such long downs as FORCEFUL, DONT ASK, MAN ALIVE, PINPRICKS, etc. That's a lot of good stuff, making the solve more colorful as I went.

It's so hard to create a super-smooth Sunday puzzle at 140 words, and the stress of going to 136 words shows up a little today. A couple of AN ASS, EAU DE type partials by themselves are par for the course, but there were a few crunchy areas that will give some real difficulty to even intermediate solvers. Not sure if there's any way to save the AARE / AKERS crossing with easier cluing? Even though I've seen AARE dozens of times, I paused, wondering if AIRE / IKERS was right. BAFF was also a head-scratcher for me, even though I'm such a bad golfer, I really ought to know the word BAFF. (I have no idea who left all those divots, BTW.)

So an interesting continuation of Will's experiment, using lower word-count Sundays which hopefully snazz up a solver's experience through a higher-than-average amount of good long fill. I might have preferred to break up a pair or even two of the long downs in order to enjoy smoother fill, but to each his/her own.

The solving audience for the NYT xw is likely several million people, and I believe it's a diverse crowd, with greatly differing preferences. This one doesn't break any new ground in the crossword art form, but my guess is that it will cater to a large percentage of Will's audience. Sometimes it's nice for people to get a familiar theme idea, something that won't break their brain as they try to figure out what's going on.

ADDED NOTE: A reader, Angela Osborne, wrote in just an hour after the puzzle went live: "A movie buff, I loved this puzzle. As a member of the Writers Guild and Directors Guild I vote in those categories. Those two guilds have their own awards and are not part of the Oscar votes, but they may influence members of the board that vote for the Oscars. The only problem is I was having so much fun doing this puzzle today that I have no puzzle to do on Sunday."

– puzzle by Alan Arbesfeld

Fun theme today, all "wacky" phrases based on a (word(s) ending with N) + (same word(s) without the N) pattern. FREE TOWN FREE TOW was genius! And DIVAN DIVA elicited images of Katey Sagal as Peg Bundy from "Married with Children," saying "bon bon." Amusing, enjoyable Monday.

Nice construction today, with some really good long stuff. Chris CHRISTIE makes an appearance along with ESTROGEN, plus a nice STANZA and HINT AT, which always reminds me of the Monty Python "nudge nudge wink wink" sketch. A couple of standout clues as well, my favorite being the one for SLANG. It's hard to come up with inventive clues for a Monday since it's designed to be the easiest puzzle of the week, so clues like this add spice.

Ah, the pangram. Andrea and I have different philosophies on pangrams, and I think both have merit. I personally place a lot of value on smooth fill vs. Scrabbly letters, but I know several solvers who really like seeing pangrams. I hadn't been aware of that until a few months ago — it surprised me to hear it and caused me to change my thinking about "right" and "wrong" when it comes to constructions. I'm sure there will be many solvers who like seeing the X up in the NE corner. It didn't do a lot for me because of the awkward partial THE X, but that's okay. It's Andrea's decision, and like almost all constructor choices, it will please some and not please some. Can't win 'em all.

Finally, I hadn't picked up that an N was at the heart of each answer — nice, from a consistency standpoint. I did notice that LEARN LEAR was the only one where the first word was a verb, so that did stand out a bit.

Nice start to the week.

– puzzle by Andrea Carla Michaels and Michael Blake

★ As I've said before, I'm a sucker for a neat visual puzzle, and Bruce and Pete deliver today. I didn't recognize the odd diagonal at first, but when I uncovered BENJAMIN, I got a big smile, recognizing the black squares were in the shape of a kite. Very cool! What a neat idea, to use an unusual type of symmetry in order to create a beautiful image.

It's very rare to have a puzzle with diagonal symmetry. At first glance it might be hard to recognize, but draw an imaginary line from the SW to NE corner, and you'll see that the puzzle is symmetrical along that line. Check out our unusual symmetry page — only three other puzzles in the Shortz era display this diagonal symmetry. And for my money, this one stands out even further because of the clever use of black squares.

One more comment about the visual element, and I'll go onto something else, I promise. Aside from the kite, did you notice the two Tetris pieces floating in the grid? At first I thought they were a little unsightly because they have extra black squares (cheaters), but after I finished, I noticed that they looked a lot like lightning. Might just be me, but I stood up and clapped.

Because of the unusual symmetry, the theme answers had to be broken up, BENJAMIN / FRANKLIN, DISCOVERING / ELECTRICITY, and the brilliant GO FLY / A KITE to tie it all together. The necessary cross-referencing did put me off a little, but I suppose it couldn't be helped. Perhaps cutting down some of it, i.e. if 16A had just been [With 23-down, puzzle subject]? Also, DISCOVERY OF felt much more natural to my ear than DISCOVERING, but that might be six of one, half a dozen of another.

And then there's the fill. Love, love, love seeing DR DOOM in there, one of the greatest supervillains of all time, along with JA RULE, OLD TIMER, GEISHA crossing SENSEI, and the BRAINY IBM PC. Sure, there's an OLEO of the MARNE and YSER rivers, SSE, ETAT, A TEST stuff, but I personally will take that trade-off any day. I appreciate super-clean puzzles, but when I get so much snazz, I don't mind the price of admission at all. I know some people will disagree, sticking to their guns about puzzles needing to be ultra-smooth and clean of dreck, but I like this trade-off a lot. Maybe it would be possible to make this puzzle both super-clean AND totally smooth, but I doubt it given all the constraints.

Bravo! Even more fun than the time I dissected an instant camera, stupidly ignoring the WARNING: GIANT SHOCK POTENTIAL DO NOT OPEN label. I tell you what, that capacitor was much bigger than I anticipated. Thanks for nothing, BENJAMIN FRANKLIN.

– puzzle by Bruce Haight and Peter A. Collins

Fantastic revealer today, one that made me Wish I Thought of That (WITT). I HAVE NO CLUE is such a nice in-the-language phrase which 1.) describes a quiet shrug and 2.) gives a perfect reason for leaving the themers unclued. I think this puzzle could have been done simply as all the themers unclued, i.e. "phrases which are equivalent to someone being left speechless," but the revealer is spot on and adds a great level of cleverness.

Evan's part of a new generation of constructors, bringing us into the digital age with freshies like GCHAT. It's rare that constructors can turn a five-letter entry into something cool, but this totally qualifies in my book. I don't personally use The Gchat (like The Google) because I find it hard to concentrate on anything when IMs are popping up. There's also the little reason that it scares me. I don't like my computer talking to me, thank you very much.

I had a little hitch during my solve in that I and ME were repeated in a 2/2/1 pattern, making it feel a bit uneven. Nitpicky, but I was left wondering if there weren't other appropriate phrases that didn't use either, or if it would have been better to leave out one of the I phrases (so it was a 1/2/1 pattern), or if all of the themers used I instead of ME.

HELL IF I KNOW sure is great though, reminding me of the old nugget, "What do you get when you cross a pachyderm and a rhinoceros?"*

Plenty of juicy fill, the JET SET, POKEMON (I may or may not have a stuffed Psyduck), STONE AGE, GET EVEN, even HEY YOU stuff really nice, adding a lot to my solve. It's offset by a modicum of partials and OTO/OTOS and ERI TU and MUS, but overall, the fill enhanced my solving experience. Good trade-off.

*Elephino.

Don't worry, I'm not quitting my day job.

– puzzle by Evan Birnholz

Rebus with a revealer; SOAPBOX describing the four different brands of SOAP crammed into individual BOXes. In today's age of ever evolving crosswords, straight rebuses without a revealer have sort of run their course. I like that Dani has given us a reason why he's made these four rebus squares; it adds a nice touch to the puzzle.

I found it a lot of fun sussing out where the rebus squares were. Once I uncovered the central answer, it was a bit of a puzzle hunt to go seek them out (and boy, do I like puzzle hunts!). For me, the hardest one by far was TONE, because I had never heard of that brand. The others gave me a nice a-ha moment, but TONE was a bit of a head-scratcher. (And no, I wasn't scratching my head because I don't use enough soap, thank you.) It was too bad, because being a mechanical engineer at heart, I loved the PISTON ENGINE entry. I was amused to hear that it was one of Dani's least favorite themers. Funny how widely tastes differ, eh?

In general, if there are only a few rebus squares, I really appreciate when they get placed into the longest answers of the puzzle, in snazzier entries. ZEST inside SEIZES THE DAY and BRONZE STAR, that's great. Really nice moment of discovery. DIAL in DIALECT... not as much. Although I did admire the craziness of LAVA in BRATISLAVA and BAKLAVA. That was pretty cool.

With essentially nine theme answers, the fill is bound to suffer a little, and we see signs of it in the awkward I HAD A (for whatever reason, several close constructor friends and I detest the five-letter partial — go figure), A NUT, WNW, WPA, ROKS sort of stuff. It certainly wasn't that bad, and definitely worth the trade-off for me.

Some solvers will not even notice though. A very nice reader, Lois Padawer, wrote in a few weeks ago with a comment after I pooh-poohed A MOLE in a grid: "I just learned about 'Whac-a-mole' a couple of weeks ago, as it was the name of an episode of The Good Wife (the name of the episode appears when you click "Info" on Tivo). TV is not usually one of my favorite categories, but you never know where pleasure will come from in a puzzle."

So yes, partials are generally inelegant, but they can serve their purposes. And it's always good to get a dose of humility, perhaps a good reminder that I don't know everything; that I always have more to learn today than I did yesterday. And that's okay.

Ahem. Note the word "perhaps."

– puzzle by Daniel Raymon

As you're reading this, I will be having a drink with Matt, one of the most fun people to hang out with at the ACPT. He and I share a lot of interests including xws, bridge (yes, the old person card game), and programming, among other hobbies. Reading his Notes made me laugh and also go back to his older puzzles to see if I hadn't missed an Easter Egg (a surprise bonus inside a puzzle, not overtly called out, that only astute solvers will pick up) he cleverly slipped by.

Before getting to the puzzle, another story about Matt. He wrote me about one puzzle to see if I understood it, and I was honestly baffled. I stared at it for the longest time before finally admitting defeat. Check it out and see if you agree with Matt or Will on the clue for 36A. Now that I understand it, I side with Matt. The fact that I couldn't figure it out on my own probably means Will was right, though.

Ah, the puzzle, a extremely tough workout for me, especially the northern hemisphere. Matt works in some great marquee fill, my favorites being GARAGE DOOR, HAZMAT SUIT, and the incredibly difficult to spell SCHADENFREUDE (note: I spelled this wrong even after I double-checked it; thanks David Barnhouse!). What is the latter, you ask? It's that feeling you get of guiltily giggling behind your hands when a bird poops on the head of your enemy (not that I've ever done that — neither the giggling nor the pooping). Ah, those wacky Germans.

The north was so difficult for me, starting with SCHADENFREUDE appropriately enough (no giggling, please). I didn't know what MENE was, so I jammed MANE in, misspelling it SCHADENFRAUDE. Rats! And then the cluing in the NE corner was so opaque that it took a good guess on DEATH to break things open. I might have preferred at least one easier clue up there — [Furnishing in many tearoom] is a really nice clue for TATAMI, but surrounded by so many other vague clues, that area played like a hard Saturday more than a Friday for me. If you had trouble too, take solace that tomorrow's puzzle came much easier to me; perhaps the same will be true for you.

I didn't really get what THE NANNY / LOST / ALL MY CHILDREN meant, or why it was funny as a statement, so I was really glad to read Matt's Note. On previous puzzles, I've tended to agree with Will more than Matt (in the interests of catering to a larger number of solvers), but on this one, I think I like Matt's subtle tongue-in-cheekery better. Sorry Will!

– puzzle by Matt Ginsberg

Sometimes I'm not on David's wavelength because he's roughly 130 years younger than I am, but I sped through this puzzle. A bunch of very nice entries, SEXY SADIE not surprisingly being my favorite, closely followed by GOOGLE BOT — in the same stack!

I was at Stanford a few years before Sergey Brin and Larry Page (of Google; slightly more famous than me). One of my favorite stories about GOOGLE BOTs (warning: this may be apocryphal) is that a marketing person told one of the high muckety-mucks that they needed to spin how much better Google's search engine was than the competition. The reply: if Google's algorithm wasn't the best out there, they didn't deserve to win. That's a philosophy that deserves a huge amount of respect. You go, GOOGLEBOTs!

A lot of good stuff today, along with a couple of AOLERS and STEARIC kind of answers, which makes me want to point out a thoughtful post David put up regarding what makes a puzzle stand the test of time (it's toward the bottom of the post). The key observation is:

"But when I encounter a theme I've never seen before, a trick that was brand new at the time, or a particularly impressive theme entry interlock, I slow down and admire the puzzle and the constructor for trying something a little different. If the fill has an entry or two I don't like, then so be it. The puzzle is still highly memorable and successful, in my opinion, for holding interest more than thirty years later."

I appreciate how he stands up for a philosophy that sometimes gets unfairly derided in the blogosphere. Wise beyond his years. Honestly, I'm not completely sure where I fall in the spectrum, but I think having two pretty iffy answers is well worth the price of having so many great ones.

I'll finish off by pointing out two beautiful clues, exactly the kinds that tickle me as they should on a Saturday. [Popular line of footwear?] for JUST DO IT and [It's flown in] for AIR SPACE. The former is a great piece of wordplay, "line" referring to an advertising line, not a line of clothing. And the latter is my favorite, misdirecting the solver to think about what types of objects get flown in (as in shipped in). I love that it doesn't give itself away with a question mark!

– puzzle by David Steinberg

Beautiful puzzle today, one that straddles the line between very different two camps of solvers, the old guard who likes the good old traditions, and the new generation of rule-breakers and experimentalists. BEQ gives us a twist on a standard theme, adding a Z sound to the first word of each phrase, transforming it from a one-syllable to a two-syllable word. Talk about perfect consistency. And the results are strong: eight theme answers which almost all made me laugh or at least smile.

Beautiful layout, a great example of how to make your themers stand out without explicitly calling them out by asterisk or other means. Not only are all his themers longer than any piece of fill, but BEQ puts the shortest ones (CHOOSY TOY and ROSY HOUSE) in-line with others (DAISY TRADER and BOISE WONDER, respectively) to make them stand out. Since he has some eight-letter fill (I love EUROMART / MONEY MEN!), it could easily be confusing to a solver whether those eights are thematic or not, especially since LARYNXES carries the question mark on its clue, making it seem like it could be thematic. The fact that those shortest themers are in-line with other longer ones really help.

Great selection of base phrases, DAY TRADER and CHEW TOY are absolutely fantastic, and HEY SAILOR is of course my favorite (no surprise). And note how he selected a huge variety of transformations (AY to AISY, EW to OOSY, etc.)? Not one of them is identical — how cool is that to have eight, all different?

There were a couple of minor dings here and there — not many like to see OSO or DERR in a grid — but it's so smoothly filled, so professionally done that these entries are hardly noticeable. I wouldn't expect anything less from the master.

The audience for the NYT is so amazingly diverse, ranging from people calling for the Maleska days all the way to avant-garde indie movement eschewing any itty-bitty piece of subpar fill. Go too far toward either side and you risk rankling millions of NYT solvers. BEQ does an amazing job to give us a middle ground which I think will make both ends of the spectrum happy.

– puzzle by Brendan Emmett Quigley

There are two camps when it comes to revealers (an entry which overtly explains the theme): some love them because they make everything crystal clear, some hate them because they leave nothing to the solver to figure out. I think a case can be made either way, but today I really like the fact that Kelly leaves out a revealer. The theme is simple enough to figure out (HAMMER, LEVEL, FILE, NAIL are all items in a TOOLBOX) that is was nice to sit back after I finished and have a little a-ha moment. Nicely done.

Consistency breeds elegance in crosswords, i.e. four themers which work exactly the same is awfully nice. I did appreciate that all four themers today hide their respective item, making it somewhat opaque as to what was going on (DOORNAIL wouldn't hide the meaning of NAIL at all, for example). Well done there. I did find it a little bothersome that FINGERNAIL was the only single word out of the four, and that ON THE LEVEL (such a nice phrase!) was the only themer with three words. It would have been nice to have more consistency there.

The pinwheel arrangement of themers doesn't often allow for much long fill, and today is no exception. It's difficult to work in eights or nines due to grid layout, especially when there's a central theme answer. Still, Kelly manages to work in TOP THIS! and ALL DONE! and STIFFS and OLD AGE, all really nice entries.

The fill is an interesting mix, from the 21st century GOOGLE to the oldies ELENI and ILIE Nastase and XENA the Warrior Princess. It skews a bit toward an older solving crowd, but that will make much of the NYT's solving audience happy. It's a tough job to satisfy every segment of the NYT solving population, so this one does a nice job for the old guard who take pride in knowing automatically what AMICI and AMAT and OBIS are. I personally tend to prefer puzzles that feel a little more modern, but a case could easily be made that puzzle ought to feel "classic," and that "modern" puzzles contain too much stuff that has no staying power. Two sides to every coin.

TEN KS is an interesting little entry. I only ever see them as 10-Ks (both as a race and as a SEC annual filing) so I'm not a fan of seeing it written out. But I know some constructors who like the craziness of how TENKS looks in a grid. I winced a little to see TEN KS and TEN in the same grid, but sometimes these things happen.

All in all, a fun Monday. I like that it made me work a little to figure out the theme.

– puzzle by Kelly Clark

I like a puzzle that reminds me spring is around the corner (fingers crossed). A real treat to see crocuses starting to emerge as I go for long runs, so a puzzle themed on IN BUD was very welcome. Four phrases are (sort of) IN BUD, i.e. they have the letters BU and D at their ends.

BUMS AROUND is a great answer; snazzy stuff. And I smiled at BUTTONWOOD — it's a nice enough entry in itself, but it made me think how incredible this theme would be if there were four entries which satisfied the BU*D pattern AND were actually things that were currently in bud? Anyway, too much to hope for, methinks.

interesting layout today, one which sort of segments the grid into nine subsections. I don't mind the NW and the SE, but generally I think it's best to avoid sectioning off the NE and SW so severely. To me, it takes away from the overall flow of a crossword, choking down to a single entry which must be figured out (ON A BET or UPTICK) to move through that necking point.

I also found the placement of revealer a bit inelegant, as it's in a random-ish spot of the grid. I would have preferred IN BUD to be where UMPED is, for example. This is simply a personal preference — having a revealer with no symmetrical entry is perfectly fine but feels so much cleaner if it's in a margin or at the final across entry.

Not a lot of long fill today, but COOKBOOK carried a nice clue to it, and PARDON ME could only have been made better by referring to the old Grey Poupon ad. (I can't tell you how many times my brother and I have giggled over that old commercial.) And BEAN BAG is a great entry in the grid.

The short fill... usually short fill is like a chief of staff: the best you can hope for is you don't notice anything. If the chief has done his/her job well (see: Doug Stamper on House of Cards), everything runs like a machine, no knocks or pings. Today, I would have liked to see the west section smoothed out (ILIA and ANIL); same for the north (AGIN). Sometimes a constructor puts in "weird" entries on purpose (Tracy Gray's PLAGE for example) which I find perfectly fine — one of those here or there is acceptable, even desirable. And while both ILIA and ANIL are generally things one sees outside of crosswords, when seen together, they stick out (in my opinion).

Anyway, nice themers today, I really liked BULL-NOSED too (I have many pairs of BULL-NOSED pliers; they're extremely useful) and BURMA ROAD was a fun one to look up.

Spring has sprung! (as I sit in a coffee shop looking at the cold rain)

– puzzle by Mel Rosen

Genius, simply pure genius. What else can I say about my "JEFF vs. DAN" contest... or should I say, my "JEFF vs. DAN" con? (rubbing hands deviously together)

For those of you not familiar with JEFF vs. DAN, I speed-solve my own puzzles against five-time American Crossword Puzzle Tournament champion Dan Feyer. It's now been years of sandbagging, pretending like Dan's been beating me by a long shot, whining about how I'll never catch him, even though I know all the answers in advance. And it finally paid off! For I have pulled off the heist of the century.

Danny Ocean? A mental midget compared to myself when it comes to pure devious plotting. (Vizzini? Moron.) See what I have achieved: I finished today's puzzle in -0:43 (yes, that's negative forty-three seconds), clearly besting Dan for the first time ever, using my trade-secret combination of dual-handed solving, Asimovian psychohistory, and warp-induction time travel. Call the Guinness Book people, folks!

And the coup de grace: by beating Dan on this most important of days, I won the ACPT 2013 title from him, based on the contract clearly implied by the JEFF vs. DAN contest. So sayeth my esteemed barrister.

Game.

Set.

Snatched your trophy.

I WIN, FEYER, BWA HA HA!

P.S. My actual time, having studied all the answers before clearing the puzzle and solving it on computer as fast as possible: 1:59.

– puzzle by Jeff Chen

Heavily constrained construction today, with a very neat revealer: COLOR BY NUMBER. Alex, a young constructor still in school, had contacted me about this puzzle a few months ago, and I thought it had a lot of potential. Glad to see that he made it through Will's gauntlet.

I liked very much how structured the themers were, i.e. the number and the color were always a matching length. It would have been much easier without that constraint (for example, being able to put ONE next to BLUE), so I'm glad Alex took it upon himself to shoot for the stars.

One question I asked him as we went back and forth on this: why those numbers, and why those colors? Specificity makes for elegance in crosswords, so it would have been really nice to have some pattern built in, i.e. TWO FOUR SIX EIGHT or ONE TWO THREE FOUR. I had suggested to Alex maybe trying it as a Sunday-size puzzle, perhaps with all the numbers one through ten, or with some rationale like one through seven coupled with the ROY G BIV colors. I don't know if that would have been possible though.

Note the central themer, which effectively divides the puzzle in half, left to right. Alex further ups the ante by using pairs of longish themers, forcing a extremely difficult construction, with effectively four tough-to-fill chunks of grid. Just looking at the white space in the NW and SE corners makes me shudder. I had suggested using cheater squares to smooth out an earlier version of his puzzle; glad to see a few in there. Much better than in the previous version!

What with the difficult constraints, I think Alex did a nice job in filling his grid. Aside from the handful of stuff I could overlook given the tough constraints, the one spot that jumps out is in the very tough NW corner, AVANTI crossing ANENT. I don't mind AVANTI at all, given that it's a real thing outside of crosswords, but ANENT falls in the ADIT camp to me — I used it once for Rich Norris (editor of the LAT) a while back and regretted it after sending it in; thankfully, Rich kicked it back to me saying ANENT was just too far off the crosswordese charts. Especially with its opaque clue, [Re], it was a tough section for me to solve.

I appreciate when constructors experiment, trying to achieve something not done before. If nothing else, it stretches the limits of possibility, potentially sparking new ideas to come.

– puzzle by Alex Vratsanos

An impressive number of grid-spanners in today's construction, the likes I haven't seen for quite a while. Not just a triple-stack going down the center, but two more in the down direction plus three more in across. Eight 15's in one themeless — that's pretty cool to see.

Typically with this many grid-spanning entries, some (or more than some) are just so-so, but Alan has picked some beauties. ANDROMEDA STRAIN didn't come easy due to its opaque clue, but wow, what a nice entry. And all three in the triple-stack are really nice. I didn't know THE NOONDAY DEVIL and when I tried to research it, only a few links came up. Perhaps I'm missing a cult classic? In any case, by my count, seven out of eight winners is a great slugging percentage.

As with most themeless puzzles highlighting lots of 15's, there will be a good number of shorter entries. I typically gloss over the four and five-letter stuff, but the threes sometimes stick in my craw, and with 24, they did seem to be ubiquitous. Not that any of them are terrible, but as a whole, I IN plus MDL and others made the puzzle feel slightly shaky at points. The clues for many of the shorties were awfully hard, so overall it made the entire puzzle a real challenge for me.

I really appreciated that Alan didn't stop just at the eight 15's, but integrated two very nice eights (BBC RADIO and THE SLOTS), plus IN THE WILD and PHASING IN. Because he was at 70 words, Alan could have split up one of those pairs to make a 72-word puzzle, but I like the added zing of the long fill.

Finally, with any triple stack, the crossing answers are bound to have some rocky places. Really only ROTOS was troubling for me — anytime you have to use "Old" or "outdated" in a clue it's a sign that maybe the entry isn't so good — but Alan does give us a pretty cool construction; three grid-spanners intersecting a triple-stack is no mean feat.

All in all, a puzzle that stretches for an ambitious goal, paying the price of a good handful of not-great filler material. I admire the strive to do something which pushes the boundaries. And a big congrats to Alan for hitting his 10th NYT puzzle, which qualifies him for our list of most published constructors.

– puzzle by Alan Olschwang

★ This puzzle was right up my alley. A pretty standard-ish layout with 70 words, but jam-packed with great entries, from the classic HOLMESIAN all the way to the fantastic up-to-date TWITTER JAIL. For those of you not on Twitter, users are limited in their number of tweets per hour and per day, and those that go over (thus annoying the crud out of their followers) get put in TWITTER JAIL. Neat term. And for those of you who think it's impossible to go over 100/tweets an hour, someone I know recently got put in TWITTER JAIL after the explosion around her book deal. Amusing that she had to ask a friend to post that she wanted to respond to each tweet but couldn't.

When I first started choosing Puzzle of the Week selections, I thought I would tend to select more Thursdays, because I like when constructors break the rules. But I've come to realize that I really appreciate Saturdays, especially the fact that the constructors and Will really up their ante when it comes to cleverness of clues. I really enjoyed the clue echo of [A line, e.g.], and [A lines, e.g.], neither of which had to do with the A-line dress.

Even the clues for some of the shorter ones: [How the description of most things usually end?] was very clever for EST, in the sense of clever, cleverer, and cleverEST. Nice to interpret the word "most" in an unexpected way.

Typically ULEE is not something I like to see in a grid, but when it's combined with BEEKEEPER ("Ulee's Gold" is a crossword classic due to the friendly nature of the ULEE pattern) I like the echo as well as the insider's nod to the crosswordy bit.

The only hitch I had was at the AUDIE / AARE crossing, but thankfully I've seen the AARE river enough in crosswords that it's nearly automatic (again, very crossword-friendly combination of letters). And from a construction standpoint, I love MUTANTS, but I wonder if a pair of cheater squares where the S is (and symmetrically the T of TAMARIN) would have allowed for a smoothing out of TBAR, RELET, and ARPEL all in the same little section. I love TAMARIN as an answer though, so the trade-off would have to be pretty good.

Saving my favorite for last, the answer and clue pair for KISSY FACE was great. "Smacked" had me thinking it was something offensive which would initiate a slap, and even when I got the KISS pat of the answer, it took me a while to see KISSY FACE. All in all, a really nice grid with some feature entries and more than a handful of wordplay clues. Beautiful stuff.

– puzzle by Ed Sessa

Today's author, Jeremy Newton, wrote one of my favorite puzzles in recent memory, one around Beethoven's Ode to Joy. This puzzles marks his tenth puzzle for the NYT, qualifying him for our "Most Prolific Authors" page.

Today's theme is explained by FOLLOWING THE / PRESCRIPTION, i.e. phrases containing the relatively rare RX pattern, hardly ever seen outside the MARX brothers and MARXISM. The phrase itself feels a little questionable, FILLING A PRESCRIPTION sounding better to my ear. I'm also not convinced that FOLLOWING THE PRESCRIPTION is that accurate of a revealer, as I would interpret that as "phrases that follow the RX letter sequence." Maybe I'm missing something?

ADDED NOTE: indeed, I totally missed a clever additional layer to the theme. I've highlighted the RXs in blue, so you can see their travel from SICK all the way to WELL down a diagonal path. Very cool! I'm really glad to have read Jeremy's note so I can appreciate the puzzle fully. Neat!

Jeremy sure picked some nice themers. I've been a huge X-Men fan for all my life (if you don't know what material Wolverine's skeleton is made of, I shall scoff at you), so seeing PROFESSOR XAVIER was pretty neat. SOLVE FOR X is also snappy, a beautiful phrase for us math dorks. Overall, X is such an infrequently used letter, it was neat to see so many instances of it strewn about the grid.

Not that records matter much (I think the solver's experience should be paramount above all else), but Jeremy gets up there in terms of number of X's. If you're interested, you might be interested to peruse all the record-setting letter counts for the Shortz era.

A bit of crunchy fill today in RSTU, ARIL, SPUME, etc. which made it a very tough solve for me. But one thing I'd like to point out is Jeremy's excellent usage of moderate-length fill. Check out the great colloquial 7's: MGM LION, GO BROKE, SWELL UP, ROM-COMS, and my favorite, THING IS... What fantastic use of usually boring 7's! And the 6's, even more difficult: HOT WAX, POOR ME, FESS UP!, FULL ON. GO COLD. I know some solvers much prefer a super-clean solve (no EPH, RES, ERN, etc.) without a great deal of snazz, but I appreciate the trade-off Jeremy gave us today. So much goodness in that mid-length fill.

Wish I had been more clever and picked up all the theme layers on my own! I blame the post-ACPT blues. Hurry up and get here already, ACPT 2015!

– puzzle by Jeremy Newton

Such a fun time meeting John at the ACPT a week ago! We toiled away at judging (read: goofed off in the back room) and attended two imbibement meetings hosted by Will (what happens in Brooklyn stays in Brooklyn). A math teacher by profession, John is a really nice guy.

To the puzzle! A vowel progression of the pattern G?M* (in search strings, the ? can stand for any letter while the * can stand for any number of letters), John goes one step further than most, including the Y for a sixth entry. Five entries are hard enough to integrate smoothly, and six is even harder.

A typical trade-off is that with six themers, it's difficult to incorporate much long fill. Often, you need to deploy your black squares to separate the themers, and working in even one set of long downs becomes difficult. But John blasts that notion apart, giving us the sparkle of SEDUCTIVE FANTASIES (math teacher or Walter Mitty, hmm?), DRESS CODE, and JIM PALMER. More good long fill than we usually see on a Monday — very impressive!

Regarding the short fill, Will and I have a difference of philosophy when it comes to Mondays. I totally get that he wants to make even the easiest puzzle something that the erudite NYT audience will appreciate. I would prefer to make the Monday puzzle something a beginner could tackle, thus encouraging audience growth. I think seeing IRAE, NILS, ADANO, A TEST in a grid would turn off a true beginner, thus losing a potential customer, as I tend to think of things more from the business side than anything. I appreciate that Will wants to keep his current audience happy, though. It's his prerogative, of course.

As for the theme, I like vowel progressions — I think they're fun. As my good friend Andrea Carla Michaels (ACME as we call her) says, they're almost lyrical, poetic. I would prefer for a little more tightness than what we have today, as GUM sticks out to me as the only full word chunk and GYMNASTICS is the only themer without two words. But what can you do — this particular G?M* sequence isn't particularly amenable to that.

Raising another glass to Walter — er, John!

P.S. I pity the fool.

– puzzle by John Lieb

Another puzzle from the crossword magician! I recently saw "Now You See Me," for which David was the lead magician. Talk about a childhood dream to hand out business cards entitled LEAD MAGICIAN to Woody Harrelson and Jesse Eisenberg. Live the dream, David, live the dream.

Nice revealer today, A FAREWELL TO ARMS being both a perfect 15 and a way to describe wacky answers which had ARM removed. Usually the fun in these types of themes for me is enjoying the kookiness of the resulting phrases, but today I found the quest to understand the base phrase amusing. BURGLAR AL clearly starts with BURGLAR ALARM, but GENT DISTRICT was a little harder (GARMENT DISTRICT). Same with SNAKE ARMCHER, which was incredibly hard to suss out.

I jest, of course. Some say I charm. Mostly me, unfortunately.

So although DEATH WED OVER was the only one that wed me over — er, won me over, I enjoyed the wordplay and quest to find the base phrases. I did have an incredibly hard time finishing the puzzle, given the tough TORV and BWI crossing one of the harder to figure out themers. BWI I only know as the airport code for Baltimore's airport, and it turns out BWI also stands for Book Wholesalers, Inc.; who knew the Bahamas was such a literate place? Learn something new every day.

(British West Indies)

So given the tough entries and the difficulties I had in sussing out the phrases, I had my first DNF (did not finish) on a Tuesday in years. It's good to get a dose of humility every once in a while. I did appreciate some long fill like MOTOROLA (I still proudly show off my Razr, sadly) and RATTED ON. The construction is extremely challenging, given that the 9/12/15/12/9 represents a whopping 57 theme squares. All those interconnected areas produce difficult constraints, resulting in a few unfortunate entries such as NORW, AGOGO, SSW and ITA as direct results of all those necessary crossings. Perhaps a slightly less ambitious construction would have resulted in a smoother end product.

Finally, I appreciate when I learn something new from the crossword. I had never really thought of BUFF as a color, so it was neat to finally uncover. And I was supposed to have read Dante's The Divine Comedy in college, but I had a much more divine comedic college experience and failed to read past the title page. So it was fun to read up on the role Beatrice Portinari played in Dante's life!

ADDED NOTE: check out this blog post about the magic trick David integrated into the puzzle. Cool!

– puzzle by David Kwong

Fun outing today from one of my favorite people in crossword-land. I appreciate that Sam tries for non-standard grid layouts, breaking the mold to deliver something different. It would never have occurred to me to break up MAKE LIKE A / BANANA / AND SPLIT. At first I thought it was odd to have a single themer spread across three grid entries, but after considering the one themer containing SPLIT is split, I grinned.

Neat theme, a bit easy for a Wednesday, as all theme answers were readily inferable once the trick became apparent. I like what Sam's done to make the puzzle harder: look at those big NW and SE corners. Typically rows 1, 2, 14, and 15 get split up into three entries a piece, because using only two entries a piece produces a much more difficult filling challenge. I wasn't a huge fan of some of the short stuff required to do it (ERG, ORU = Oral Roberts U, AST, IRR, and the awkward TYE), but it sure was nice to get some long fill in unusual places. NO HASSLE is such a fantastic opening to the puzzle! That's the kind of 1-across I aspire to.

Today's fill falls in the camp of "let some ugly stuff by in order to achieve some snazzy fill." Man oh man did I like the SW corner: I mean, MY GOSH, OLD NAG next to a SKI BUM with its awesome double-acting clue? Please sir, I want some more! I did hitch a few times though, especially at the randomISH XOX and ugly-looking SSGTS, in addition to the aforementioned short stuff.

Hard to say which philosophy is best, the ultraclean-but-sometimes-lifeless or the zany-with-some-uggos (I don't think there's a clear right or wrong). The XOX section is a perfect example: I hadn't heard of the AXION, and I really appreciated learning something about that particular particle. But was it worth the price of XOX, the partial A SOU, and the chance that solvers will put in OXION/OZOWA or the like? I probably wouldn't have made the same decision as Sam/Will, but that's what's great about a daily puzzle with such a variety of constructors: if you don't like this trade-off, come back tomorrow and you'll get something different.

Off to make myself a banana split, which I'm pretty sure Sam and his puzzle are implicitly giving me permission to do.

– puzzle by Samuel A. Donaldson

Just a few days ago, I suggested to a prospective constructor that Will doesn't often run puzzles with entries that look crazy. Shows what I know! ABRIDOOFAR is A BRIDGE TOO FAR + "Get lost!" (an instruction to lose GET) = ABRIDOOFAR. GET is treated differently in the other three themers, which I've highlighted. Tricky theme! PATEGURNER took me forever to uncover because of how weird it looks. Good a-ha moment when I realized how it fit with the theme (GET is literally entered in "Get back!" fashion, or TEG).

I always appreciate getting something I've never seen before, and the mechanics of this theme was pretty cool. I wish the phrases in parentheses ("Get back!", for example) had been tied to the clues or the answers somehow though, like if instead of PAGE TURNER, Victor had found a themer which had the *TEG* sequence which meant "Get back!" That's likely way too much to ask for, but it would have made a pretty cool idea the bomb dot com.

What a wild looking layout today, eh? Any time you have themers "bending," the fill becomes more difficult, and since two of the themers "bend" twice, it becomes even more difficult. Victor does go over the 78-word limit (80 slots today, although four get melded into others for a total of 76 entries), but he still manages to give us a couple of really nice pieces of long fill, CONGOLESE, JEZEBEL and WRIT LARGE being my favorite. What a neat phrase, that last one.

One issue I had was the segmented nature of the north and south regions. It's usually best if the puzzle has a more connected, flowing feel (more than just one way into a section), because if a solver gets stuck, he/she really gets stuck. That's what happened to me in the south today, unable to see AFORE what with the opaque cluing for the crossing answers. It also seemed to me that with such a closed-off section with little constraint, a better answer than AFORE could have been used. Who knows though, often times a constructor has a particular affinity for a particular word, and that's okay by me as long as it's intentional.

It sure is nice to get the Thursday workout. Will tends to switch things up so there are some easier ones (with more straightforward themes but difficult cluing) and there are some harder ones (mind-bending or rule-breaking themes). I'll almost always favor the latter, but I do appreciate the variety.

– puzzle by Victor Barocas

BEQ! If you haven't read his story on how he came up with a brain-bending ACPT puzzle 5 (typically the hardest one, designed to spread the field), you owe it to yourself to do so. It's hard enough to come up with something that's never been done before, but to do it under the vice-like pressure of a ridiculously short deadline? My hat is off to THE MAN.

The thing I like the most about the ACPT is getting a chance to hang out with everyone, but especially the other constructors. It's so fascinating to chat over a beer and hear what others have to say about construction philosophy, what's working for them and what isn't. It was really fun to chat with BEQ about his previous Sunday puzzle, which he kind of shrugged at and I thought was really good. He comes at construction from an interesting perspective, in that he's a professional puzzle-maker, making a living doing it. Anyway, super fun to share thoughts with one of the greats.

On to the puzzle. As with all his themelesses, he packs all sorts of goodness in. When I emailed him about this puzzle (see his Note above) I honestly wasn't sure which word he was talking about. Both of us being music sorts (me a faker these days), CRUMHORN was up there for me. Turns out he was talking about BETWEEN TWO FERNS, which I had just recently heard about.

I had a super-hard time figuring out that central down entry, so I went over to Funny or Die to check out the show. I do like current entries in my crosswords, but I personally don't care for them if they don't have staying power. It's simply a personal preference, but I like my crosswords to have a classic feel, like they're regal, in a way (I also like them to be Reagle, BTW). And man oh man did I laugh, watching the clip of Galifiankis "interviewing" President Obama. I can't believe I haven't watched this before, and fully approve. Congrats BEQ, for being the one to debut it.

There are a couple of clunker entries like ONERS and ULT and IN A PET (which probably is a real saying but feels so weird to me), but they're few and far in between. Overall, I loved seeing the gimme [Enemy of Cobra] as it brought back many memories of me and my brother watching hours of cartoons when we were supposed to be doing homework. And I'm sure some people won't care for BESSEMER, but being a mechanical engineer, I plopped it in with pride. Toss my favorite entry and clue pair, [One learning how to refine oils?] for ART MAJOR and you get an entertaining Friday puzzle.

– puzzle by Brendan Emmett Quigley

Good showing from Greg, only his second NYT puzzle. Some really nice debut entries plus a good number of tough clues made for a good hard Saturday workout. I loved seeing ZOO EXHIBITS along with its deceptive clue [One often behind bars], making me think about criminal repeat offenders. Gave me a nice smile when I finally uncovered it.

Greg brings us an unusual grid, in that the NW and SE are segmented off from the rest of the puzzle, only one entrance into those sections apiece. Typically I like to see more flow within a themeless grid — I was able to work my way into the SE fairly easily, but the difficulty of that NW section and its only entry, ZOO EXHIBIT, made it fell like a mini-puzzle I had to solve after the rest of the puzzle. Not ideal, but I'm sure many will have no problems getting into those closed-off sections.

But really, really nice job on those closed-off areas. A 6x6 region will by nature be tough to fill cleanly, as there's no short entries available to glue everything together. Greg had to work with a 6/6/6/6/5 crossing a 6/6/6/5/5 section, which is no small feat. And he comes out beautifully, nary a bad entry in either section. Some will point out YTD as not so hot, but being on two Finance Committees for local non-profits, I loved seeing it. The SE was even prettier, another Z worked smoothly in, along with SYDNEY and its good bit of trivia.

What, you thought Greenland was a continent? Ha ha ha! Only silly billys and uneducated boors and certain crossword analysts who sit on Finance Committees would think that. Ha ha ha!

Not a huge fan of certain entries like RENTABLE and ALTERANT which certainly are words, but feel like they just take up space in a themeless grid. But those parts of the grid (8x3 stack intersecting another 8x3 stack) makes it very difficult to fill both cleanly and with snazz. As with all themelesses, there are trade-off: the wide-open NE and SW corners make the beautiful NW and SE corners possible.

– puzzle by Greg Johnson

★ Beautiful puzzle today, everything I personally like to see in a Sunday-size grid: nice theme answers, strong, clean fill, and a visual element. Plus, an inspirational message! Often, I get a little worn-out by a 21x21 crossword puzzle, but this one kept me delighted from start to end. Doesn't hurt that I just saw Ian at the ACPT and had a drink with him, really enjoying chatting about crossword construction as always. Nothing better than talking shop with fellow constructors.

Except if Will is paying, of course.

One aspect I thought Ian did very well was in capturing elements of many different types of puzzles. Quote puzzles by themselves tend to be on the dull side (unless the quote is spectacularly funny or insightful), but not only does Ian restrict the quote part to three entries, he ties it in with the puzzle's visual. I had to work to uncover the quote, and it was totally worth it.

It's also neat when a constructor's personality and interests shine through. Ian is a sports guy, so seeing beautiful long entries like NFC SOUTH, CHICAGO BULLS, and my hometown THE NINERS was a pleasure. Some may accuse him of making the long fill too sports-oriented, but it's not like he's used TOLEDO MUDHENS or the TACOMA RAINIERS. Come on, it's THE NINERS, people! Grumble grumble, stupid play calling / decision making at the end of last year's NFC championship game, grumble grumble.

It did take me a little while to figure out the AHA MOMENT running around the light bulb, because I skipped the notepad (those just tend to seem superfluous) and tried to read it from the lower left corner going clockwise. It's the natural thing to do, right? Getting an OMAHA TNE wasn't quite doing it for me though, so I begrudgingly went back and read the notepad. Fine, I'll follow directions!

As with all of Ian's stuff, the fill is so smooth. He's the one who got me on a kick against partials, especially five-letter ones. It's amazing how much good stuff he packed in while avoiding ugly stuff, just some short NNE, CIR, ADE, SOC, ULT, OLEO kind of filler, barely noticable (I had to go back and search it out). I totally agree with his use of cheater squares in the middle row of the puzzle (before SEAL and after IDOS), which I'm sure made those sections smoother. That section above SEAL (where FEDORAS is) I'm sure would have been crunchier if not for that cheater square.

Can't say enough good stuff about this puzzle!

– puzzle by Ian Livengood

Fun start to the week, DIRTY WORDS starting three snappy phrases. FILTHY RICH, GREASY SPOONS, STAINED GLASS — great selection of themers! In-the-language, pleasing to the ear, all phrases I wouldn't hesitate to use. Love 'em all.

I also appreciated Tom's effort to incorporate long fill into the grid. Usually with four themers, I would expect at least one pair of long downs, but Tom's gone the extra mile to incorporate not just SHEEP DOG and USHERS IN, but WILL DO! and ARGYLE, making good use of his sixes. And seeing the up-to-date THE CLOUD, a nice touch, particularly relevant since xwordinfo has moved to the cloud! Hopefully nothing breaks, but let me know if it does.

I was slightly confused during my solve, as I had thought THE CLOUD and SPLIT PEA were part of the theme. That's a risk of using long across fill; solvers like myself will spend minutes trying to figure out what the heck is so dirty about SPLIT (don't ask, you don't want to know what I thought up). Yes, those two answers are shorter than the 10's, but they look awfully theme-y. I would much rather have two sets of long downs than a set of long downs plus a set of long acrosses — it's sometimes difficult to pull off, but that arrangement works better for my personal tastes.

Overall, it's a pretty nice grid. Lots of nice fill including YERTLE, but there are a few entries like AS NEW, ERN, OLEO, DER, EINE which combine to be not ideal. The NE corner looked pretty isolated, so I would have liked it redone to get rid of OLEO, but again, that's a personal preference. Out of curiosity, I investigated that corner to see if it would be easy or hard to redo, and it turns out the letter combinations (11D and 12D ending in O and U) make it not a cakewalk. It took me a while to figure out that IT'LL DO works much better than WILL DO, which seems like it will always have one trade-off or another. So not super easy to redo, as it turns out. Given how nice WILL DO! is, having OLEO feels like a reasonable price to pay.

Always the trade-offs in crosswords. I'm sure there's a way to get rid of ERN and AS NEW in that section, but it would likely be at the price of the nice ARGYLE and GENDER. So much work goes into gridding up a single crossword!

Excellent to have met Tom at the ACPT, and it's neat to see his work in print!

– puzzle by Tom Pepper

★ Tuesday is a hard slot to fill. It's supposed to be a relatively easy puzzle, so no tricky themes will fly. This makes it awfully difficult to create something interesting enough to satisfy both experienced solvers as well as be okay for relative newbies. Often, that means you get a product that is straddling the line, sort of making both sides happy, but not really addressing either party's need. Tough challenge!

So I really like today's offering. The theme is not complicated, in fact, it feels slightly thin to me given the revealer takes up two of the four long entries. But it does its job, giving two nice examples of sports terminology related to not giving up until the end. It would have been really nice to have a football-related one in there to cover the major sports (fine, Howard Barkin and the Canadian contingent, maybe a hockey one too!).

FYI, a BUZZER BEATER is when a basketball team wins a game at the last second (just beating the game-ending buzzer). A WALK-OFF HOMER is when a guy (or woman) homers in the bottom of the ninth inning (or in the bottom of an extra inning) to end the game. And as Jim pointed out to me, it's awfully nice that a WALK-OFF HOMER always happens in front of a home crowd.

(shaking my fist at stupid Kirk Gibson for beating my A's)

Where I think this puzzle shines is in the fill. Yes, there are some rough patches (I see you, ENISLE/GRE/SSR corner), but David does such a nice job of filling out the grid with long stuff (SHISHKEBAB and RICHARD III), along with Scrabbly goodness (ZAFTIG, FLOOZY, JOGGER), and new words I enjoyed picking up (XYLEM, RABAT, MANOLO; nice that they're from such different areas of knowledge). It took me longer than usual to finish this puzzle, but I enjoyed that extra duration, savoring all the fun entries like SCRUFF and its clue, HAREM and the fact that "Scheherazade" looks so crazy in the clue.

This puzzle won't do much for the non-sports fans in the audience, of course. I wonder if there would be a way to do this theme such that the themers are from different areas? Like themes related to cat-and-mouse detective stories? Or presidential elections (DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN)?

Anyway, fun to toss around ideas. I appreciated that David did something kind of different with a Tuesday, making it a very fun outing for me.

– puzzle by David Woolf

A very nicely constructed grid today. I remember a few years ago when Alex first contacted me, one of my big points of feedback was to be more careful about the quality of his grid fill. He had some interesting ideas, but too often there were too many unappealing entries which as a whole left a bad taste. It's fantastic to see how far he's come, especially considering today's grid is no easy construction.

The theme today is a little difficult to get, considering the long revealer clue. ATOMIC / NUMBER, which is the number of protons an element contains, is used to clue in four entries: CARBON COPY is at 6 down, and carbon's atomic number is 6. NEON LIGHTS is at 10 down, and NEON's atomic number is 10. Get it?

Alex ran this theme by me a few months ago, and I liked the overall construction — not an easy task to get four long themers at specific numbers — but I asked him, why those four elements? Just because they were ones possible to make four snappy phrases out of? And although it was kind of neat that the ATOMIC NUMBER matched up with the four entries, even after taking years of chemistry in both high school and college, I couldn't recall the atomic number of copper to save my life. So the idea didn't appeal to me all that much.

That said, I do appreciate the experimentation. Other constructors have used the across/down numbers within entries before, including one I found particularly ingenious, but Alex takes it a step further and uses those numbers for a different purpose. The concept didn't quite tickle me, but I'm sure some chemistry lovers will dig it.

I really liked the care Alex took in filling the grid today. He could have sat back and tried something simpler given that he already had quite a few long entries, but look at all the nice sevens: YOU LOSE, INHALER, TEST LAB, HOLED UP. Rich Norris at the LAT gave me very useful feedback a few years ago, that he prizes multiple-word phrases within themeless puzzles (as well as for long fill in themed puzzled), and I've taken that to heart. Certain one-worders like NIBLETS are really nice too, but in general, those two-word phrases have so much more potential than single words. Of course there are exceptions (I like SPINNER much better than ONE WOOD since most people call the club a driver), but it's a nice rule of thumb.

As with any difficult construction, there will be compromises here and there, but Alex does a nice job keeping these to a minimum. Ideally the lesser stuff would be spread out so it's not as noticeable, so it's too bad that MSN, PPS, DHS, all go straight across the bottom. I found it well worth, though, it in order to get those nice big chunks in the SW and NE corners.

– puzzle by Alex Vratsanos

(warning, nerd alert) Ah, a math puzzle! Even better, a geometry puzzle! It's a shame that this didn't run on Pi Day (3/14), but a person can only dream. Jean uses the famous formula for area of a circle, pi*r^2 (or "PI R SQUARED"), and for circumference, 2*pi*r, where r is the circle's radius. It took me a while to figure out what was going on with 2 PI R because I always think of it as PI D (d = diameter), but sure enough, 2 PI R is totally legit.

And to top it off, Jean's incorporated FULL / CIRCLE into the grid, a nice revealer hinting at the two formulas. I like that it doesn't hit you over the head like some revealers do; rather, it hints at what's going on, leaving the rest up to the solver's imagination. I would have liked to seen FULL / CIRCLE not split up, or at least placed in closer proximity, since I don't like jumping all over the grid for cross-referenced clues. Placing those answers both in the SE corner would have achieved that, plus would have given the added bonus of not having the revealer appear until the solver is near the end of the puzzle. But that might have been quite difficult to achieve, given the grid layout.

Rebus squares can be tricky, and typically I like to see them kept to four letters squished in or less. SQUARED obviously can be much better represented by a superscript "2" in print, but plenty of solvers will prefer to write in SQUARED since SQUARED AWAY looks so much more correct than ² AWAY. I did like the variety of it all, in that experienced solvers aren't used to having a mix of rebus squares, regular ones, and numbers. Neat mix.

Because the theme is squeezed into compacted areas, the rest of the grid is fairly wide open. Jean does a nice job of incorporating other long fill, such as BIKINI TOP (my favorite, of course), BANISTER with its neat misdirectional clue (flight of stairs, not airplane flight), and TAX EVADER with a great clue, "duties" meaning "levies," not "responsibilities." Great to get a healthy dose of wordplay. There are some compromises like OR IN, ORO, WE SAY, but I sure liked getting all the great long stuff. Not a bad trade-off.

Finally, for those of you wondering, FOURH is good old 4-H. It's strange to me since I never see 4-H written FOUR-H, but it's almost kooky-looking enough for me to I like it.

– puzzle by Jean O'Conor

What a nice up-to-date central crossing to seed a themeless: CAPTAIN PHILLIPS crossed by SOMALI PIRATES. Great movie, fantastic cast, unbelievable story. Neat to see it commemorated by being featured in the NYT crossword. I didn't originally notice Tom Hanks in the clue to 48-across, but after looking at the finished grid, it made me smile.

Unlike the movie, which although fantastically executed, made me utterly seasick (that's never happened before). I'm super, super glad this crossword wasn't printed using jarring camera techniques. (Don't you get any ideas, constructors.)

David takes it one step further, using four more grid-spanners, all of which are pretty decent. SOURCES OF INCOME isn't a snazzy answer in itself, even for this business-loving MBA, but its clue was fantastic. I kept on thinking about HOUSE PAINTING, DOOR TO DOOR SALES, but I was pleasantly misled. Nice a-ha moment when it came together. Now that's how you jazz up an otherwise ordinary grid entry.

Typically with such a heavily constrained grid, compromises will be present, and there's a reasonable assortment of A ROW, MTNS, UNI, ALL OR, NNE, ASCAP crossing the double-stacks. Normal, expected stuff, didn't really bother me too much. However, I did have a very hard time with TRILBY crossing INGE, ending with an error (TRELBY / ENGE).

Perhaps it's on me to know (or be able to infer) TRILBY, which I actually did enjoy looking up, but I have a feeling I won't be the only one with a mistake in that square. Even TRALBY / ANGE seemed plausible. Another crossing, KLEBAN / ABBIE, might be tough for some, but I'd argue that ABBIE Hoffman is important enough that a majority of NYT readers ought to know him.

Not that I think all squares should be gettable by every solver — I'm sure there are plenty of people for whom TREBLY is a gimme — AARGH IT'S TRILBY! Ahem. But I might have considered adding a cheater square to change INGE to ING, which could be clued as the Dutch bank or the –ING ending. Something gettable by a larger chunk of solvers, anyway.

Finally, my favorite clue/entry pair. Maybe it's a residual Harry Potter effect, but it was so much fun for me to see BLIMEY! in the grid. A fun, quaint exclamation not unlike GOR! That's a good crossword at work, making solvers smile.

– puzzle by David J. Kahn