Kathryn Ladner author page
3 puzzles by Kathryn Ladner
with Jeff Chen comments
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Look UP, A TREE! Nine of them, to be exact. Impressive theme density, especially considering that only two of them are short enough to spruce up—
Chop that pun down, buddy!
Don't worry, I won't make you sick a more with any more sycamore puns.
I enjoyed the kookiness of UP A TREE = trees running upward through columns, but I would have loved some sort of revealer to help explain that. There are some wonderful finds, notably SYCAM / ORE in AERO / MACYS, and including something like "chopping wood" would have given it raison d'etre. That's not a perfect revealer, but brainstorming would have been so much fun.
Nine themers, yikes! Every region of the puzzle has to work with at least two themers, and most subsections are saddled with three. Great work to thread in strong bonuses like OBELISK, ART DECO, CREW CUT. That triplet almost feels theme-related, with each of today's trees looking art deco-obelisk-esque … and most of them being cut?
Heavy focus on "-esque."
Although there's a ton of gluey sap dripping around the trees, I appreciated Kathryn's effort to spread it all around, so that no one region fossilized. I worried when my solve began with RAI and ENE, but thankfully PSAS ENT, NOI, TOR AERO, OBI separated themselves from each other. And Tolkien's tree-like ENT is more passable in today's theme, anyway.
Fun grid pattern, eye-catching theme density. With a stronger revealer explaining why the trees were pushing through black squares, it could have grown into a redwood.
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| B | E | A | G | L | E | S | E | M | B | A | R | G | O | |
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EIGHT / BIRDS … this had to be some 12 Monkeys or Seven Lions kind of thing I'm not cool enough to understand. The Goog to the rescue!
Sort of. Apparently it's a song by Conway the Machine? (Careful, that's definitely NSFW!)
Or maybe it's just (random number) + (random animal)?
Anyhoo, the BIRDS are PROBING, BEAGLES, FRATERNITY, MALARKEY, LAWRENCE, BALLOONIST, REGRETS, SCOWLED. We tried highlighting them all to help them stand out, but THE MUSE disapproved of the mess.
Impressive that each of the finds is in the exact center of their words. Having something off-kilter like the POPULAR KIDS would have been some MALARKEY. I also appreciated that Kathryn didn't miss many possibilities. (A cursory look turned up EMU, ERNE, CROW, TIT, NENE, which all seem to work, but no one should be featuring crosswordese ERNE or NENE. Probably TIT, too.)
Gridding around ten(!) themers is for the birds.
Sorry for that stale joke. I'm such a dodo.
Smart black square placements to separate those eight themers as much as possible. You rarely want stacked themers, and when you do need two atop each other like EMBARGO over FRATERNITY, that's the time to deploy as many black squares as you can. CIRRI might be a tough piece of vocab for some newbs, but that upper right corner is solid otherwise.
If only "middle birds" were a real phrase. It would be fun to brainstorm for a killer revealer for this one. It's neat to see so many exact middle placements, but without something to pull it all together, it doesn't completely take flight.
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Fourth debut in a row! The ominous sequence representing FATE, the group of four tones that is the hand of God, the strike of the Grim Reaper's scythe. Dum dum dum DUUUUM!
It's time to have a word with XWord Info's dumb symphony blogger.
I appreciated the visual presentation of G G G EFLAT, appearing as it would in a score, with G a few rows higher than EFLAT. Perfect that the Gs are short, and the EFLAT stretches out like it does when played!
Also interesting were the FATE and DEAF touches in the puzzle. I didn't remember that bit about the sequence representing FATE, but what other short musical sequence does that better?
It's a shame that this tribute comes so quickly after the last one, especially since E FLAT was incorporated into the same entry. Talk about leaving solvers DEFLATED. There's not much else you can hide EFLAT in, though, since BONNEVILLE FLATS doesn't disguise FLAT at all.
There are several execution problems with today's version, like RIGI a head-scratcher, C MINOR not placed symmetrically with LUDWIG, FATE and DEAF not matching positions either, and the odd mini-themed feel of ASGARD and LOKI. However, the visual of G G G EFLAT mimicking the musical score is so neat that I could maybe overlook the issues, especially given that it's a debut.
I doubt Will Shortz, looking back in hindsight, would make the same decisions to accept both puzzles. I can imagine his situation, though. You've already said yes to David's puzzle, and this one comes across your desk. You can't de-accept a puzzle … so maybe take this neat visual one, too, and spread them out?
At the time, it could have seemed like a passable idea. A shame that Will ran Kathryn's second, though, taking away from a debut constructor's impact.