Kristian House author page

The last example of a "similar colloquial expressions" crossword was seven years ago? Say it ain't so! That can't be right! Fugeddabout ... no, fuhggedda … oh, forget about it.

Like its predecessor, today's puzzle featured four great phrases that I'd use in a themeless. I'm with Mike; my favorite is NO FRIGGIN' WAY, maybe because it reminds me of one of the best grid entries of all time.

This played much harder than a usual Tuesday because there are so many possible answers to each clue — in some ways, it's like doing a quote puzzle, since you're solving the theme answers mostly using the Down crossing answers. Hard isn't bad but having to push through an early-week puzzle tends to make me feel like a moron. (Never mind that it's true.)

I often carp about long Across bonuses muddying themes (Rich Norris at the LAT is staunchly in this camp, too). Will Shortz doesn't often care about this issue, choosing to give his solvers more credit for being able to discern theme/non-theme. It is true that EVEN BETTER and CHILI SAUCE are clearly not phrases that express disbelief.

I liken them to banner ads, though — they draw your attention away from what's important with their "hey, look at me, or EVEN BETTER, click on me!" Who wants ads in their daily experience, anyway?

Huh? You point out that XWord Info runs ads? [Angels don't see them! — JH]

Fuggeddabout it!

I'd have asked for a revision on the west section, with CRAG and APSE crossing RPI. We hardcore crossworlders know that Tyler Hinman — your 2021 ACPT champ! — went to RPI. We also know terms like CRAG and APSE because they're so useful to constructors that we're forced to learn them. I don't think it's fair to expect Joe Tyro to get those crossings correct, though.

I'm curious to see what the generation 3 puzzle will look like, seven more years down the road.

I've had the fortune to spend some time with Kristian at the ACPT several times, so it gave me a laugh to see some of his humor come out today. There's something so hilarious about a Saturday NYT crossword kicking off with DIM BULB and WISEACRE. Beautiful clue for AWAY TEAM, too — I could not imagine what kind of Rocky Mountains wouldn't be in Colorado. That's baseball's Colorado Rockies, on the road!

I flew through this puzzle, finishing in well under record time. Given my theory that difficulty and enjoyment are often inversely proportional, I should have given this one the POW!, right? I did enjoy it, especially with the fantastic wordplay in KRIS KRINGLE as a literal "stocking stuffer," and LADY FRIENDS cleverly using the modern word "boo," as in one's romantic partner.

So why did I enjoy yesterday's more? I couldn't place my finger on it, but it helped to list out some of today's entries:

HARRY STYLES

ANISTON

ELOISE

MASERATI

BEAVIS

MRS POTTS

These are all people that others will likely resonate strongly with — maybe someone who loved Eloise as a kid, someone who watched a lot of Beavis and Butthead, someone who's soothed by Angela Lansbury's singing voice. Me, not so much — but that's okay. It's not simply that these folks are all Caucasian. It's that I don't have a personal connection to any of them. People-heavy puzzles can be divisive, but as Erik Agard said recently, if this one isn't aimed at you, that's okay; hopefully, an upcoming one will be.

Fantastic clue to end this post: [Hardly a man without morals] as AESOP. No morals to this post, simply one dimbulb's opinions.

To be, or not to be … well, there is no question. The famous quote has been played upon over and over and over, not to mention time and time again outside the NYT. There have also been a number of double-letter homophone themes, the most recent only last week.

However, there's usually room for interesting combinations of already-done themes, and Kristian produced a different spin: TO (letter homophone) = 2x that letter, i.e. TO A SKYLARK = AA SKYLARK. I'm tired of plays on TO BE OR NOT TO BE these days, but that phrase made for a perfect end to this theme. How apt is it that a doubled homophone letter theme has a double-double grand finale!

I did wonder about TO A SKYLARK. That is a famous poem (or so my more eddicated friends tell me), but it didn't provide the same kind of click as the others. Perhaps because TO A began the phrase, making it harder to figure out? With so many ___ TO A ___ phrases out there, I'd have much preferred one that made the a-ha sharper.

Interesting that today marks the second instance of SERE this week. It's much more passable in a late-week puzzle since most Thursday solvers will at least have seen the word, but it's still undesirable, to say the least.

I don't mind ALAI, since Jai ALAI is incredibly popular in some countries (and cities). It does point to how subjective this all is, though.

I enjoyed PLUGS AWAY so much as a bonus that I might even have accepted SERE as a price for it. However, this is a case where you can have your cake and eat it, too — I bet a cheater square in that upper right corner would have made that possible. A different long bonus than PLUGS AWAY might have been just as good, too, and made for friendlier letter patterns to work around.

Given how well-trodden these two theme types have been, I'd have liked something even more to elevate the solve — perhaps always having the two letters in the middle of the phrase or presenting them in alphabetical order? — but I did appreciate the consistency of always playing on a TO phrase (not using TOO, say).

I'm a chemistry buff, and I knew with 100% confidence — no purity assay required! — that [Atoms that have the same number of neutrons] couldn't be ISOTOPES, which have the same number of protons. Yet, I still wrote in ISOTOPES. What else could ISOTO_ES be, after all?

D'oh!

So I was already hesitant when I filled in PURGATIO_. What else could that be? Fool me twice, shame on me! Could it be ... PURGATIOL? PURGATIOS?

This fool should have recognized the similarity to "purgatory," where I'm clearly headed after this shameful post. So much for my NERD CRED.

Thankfully, there was enough great DUCT TAPE (which I've used to construct load-bearing walls in my daughter's dollhouses), CORNHOLE (surprisingly fun!), ROAD BIKE with a great clue about not being for trails.

And that clue for BRACKET! People who don't follow sports might not get it — think about March Madness brackets, where people have to pick from 64 different seeded teams. "Collection of seeds" is deviously innocent wordplay.

A 72-word (the max allowable for a themeless) needs to squeeze every last drop of potential out of every long slot, so entries like EXTERNAL and GYMNASIA felt like something got left on the table.

I enjoyed the solve overall, especially after coming to terms with the word ISOTONES. With a non-audacious grid design, though, it's tough to overlook some weirdness.

We're at the movies today! Get it? MOVE Es? As in, move that long E sound into the theater? You know, like when you sneak in a full dinner of a rack of BBQ ribs, corn on the cob, and an entire sheet cake so you can have enough to last you the three movies you stay for when you're only supposed to go to the one?

Don't judge me.

Oh! ALL THE RIGHT MOVIES = all the moved Es are to the right!

Well, that doesn't quite work either, but it's close enough.

It's all too easy to add an E sound to something to create kookiness, so I appreciated Kristian's effort to tighten things up, restricting to 1.) only well-known movie titles and 2.) always adding the E sound to the right, i.e., at the end of the title.

Ah, drat. IRONY MAN and GOODY FELLAS ruins that consistency. Fuggedaboudit.

Through my solve, it felt like I was pushing through a bog of short answers. Nothing terrible, but nothing that interesting either. These shorties are generally ignorable, stuff that solvers get through to reach the truly interesting stuff — the themers and the long bonuses — but when you have this much of it, it tends to be more noticeable.

It's also noticeable when you draw too much from one specific well of crossword glue. In this case, there were so many tough names — WOPAT NEKO OMARR KIRI TOD GAMERA/YGOR READE ZAK etc. — it started to feel like a trivia contest.

Part of the excessive-short-entries problem was that Kristian went up to 142 words, past the max of 140. The themers also take up a huge amount of real estate, so there are only little cul de sacs left over.

It's a tough call. JOHN WIKI was the only themer that caught my attention because it's the only interesting spelling transformation (and unfortunately one of the themers in a puzzle I recently helped a friend put together, sigh). However, taking it and IRONY MAN out would have opened up the grid, allowing for more bonuses, fewer short words, and some cleanup in aisle OSCAN RESTE.

Back in 2012, there was another DUCK DUCK GOOSE puzzle, and I remembering being very surprised to hear from many people who didn't know the game. Curious! Today, we get DUCK DUCK GOOSE as a revealer, making everything a little clearer. Still, I wonder how many people will be looking it up, wondering why the heck it's so much better to be a duck than a goose. (No idea!)

I had some idea of what was going on after uncovering TEAL and EIDER, as I've seen those in crosswords enough times clued as types of duck. Curious to see what kind of GOOSE Kristian could possibly use, I smiled a little to see the crosswordy NENE (very common letters with alternating vowel consonant pattern). Amusing nod to crossword insiders.

I really enjoyed Kristian's choice of themers, all of them strong. TRIBUTE ALBUMS is really fun, as is SWORN ENEMIES. And the APARTHEID ERA is not exactly the jolliest of topics, but what a nice find in a phrase that hides EIDER.

GUSSIED UP, NO-GOODNIK, and BRAT PACK are great bonuses, too. (Who you calling old-timey, Kristian?!)

Very good gridwork in general — EDUCE is kind of a funny word, TUM can't be without RUM and TUGGER, and PONES feels odd in the plural, but that's all that keeps it from being a perfectly smooth puzzle.

Well, there's ABORC, which looks so bizarre. I still can't decide if I love "A, B, OR C?" or detest it. Don't people usually offer two or four choices, not three?

Not sure that people will identify TEAL as a type of duck (my first thought is always to the color), but there's something fun about having three crosswordy hidden elements making up this theme.

A couple of strong feature entries seeding this puzzle, GAZILLION, STINKEYE, BIG WHOOP, and JUMPS SHIP giving each corner some sizzle. I particularly liked the STINKEYE / SUPERFLY crossing — something about that sounds so pleasing.

Kristian uses a traditional layout, with a triple-stack of long answers in each corner. Without many other long answers, you have to really make each and every answer in all four stacks sing. I thought Kristian did quite well in the lower right, with USPOSTAGE giving me fits as I tried to parse it as (something)+STAGE. I'm still not sure if US POSTAGE sounds right — POSTAGE RATE hits my ear better — but I love the way the space threw me off. It's a shame that TEEN ANGST just appeared a few weeks ago, as seeing it again so soon took away from its impact. But it's still a very nice answer.

I wasn't quite as hot on the other corners. The upper right, for example, felt like it left some potential on the table, with COLONELS more a neutral answer, and EGOSURFS has been in crosswords quite a few times now, making it feel less-than-fresh to me.

And in the upper left, UP TO GRADE … doesn't UP TO CODE sound better? Or MADE THE GRADE? UP TO GRADE felt like a wonky combination of the two.

Most any themeless will require a bit of crossword glue, given how much white space there inevitably is. For me, REE and INA are pretty easy to take, not seeming very intrusive to the solving flow. And I don't mind diving deeper into the well of esoterica with some ERGOT (a grain disease) and OUIDA (not the most recognizable author) and SEAU (I vaguely know Junior Seau from days when I had the time and inclination to watch football), but as a whole, there's quite a bit of glue holding this one together. Toss in a POPPET valve (as a mechanical engineer, I know that one, but I bet it'll be rough for many) and ex-MLB commissioner Bud SELIG, and it seems like a lot.

But still, some really strong entries anchoring this one.

Great clue to kick off 1-Down: a RARE (or noble) GAS is one sitting at the very right of the Periodic Table, thus giving [Noble at the end of a table?]. Got me thinking about King Arthur and the Round Table.

Sometimes themelesses featuring 15-letter answers can suffer, what with a lack of any other zest besides those long answers. Not so today! Kristian chooses some great grid-spanning entries in GO FOR THE JUGULAR and THE GIRL NEXT DOOR, and adds in a good amount of other strong fill, headlined by a beautiful triple in ROGER THAT/AROMARAMA/REFUSENIK.

That upper corner is so pretty. That sparkly triplet of answers is so tough to pull off, what with GO FOR THE JUGULAR already constraining it. But Kristian doesn't stop there, working in some seven-letter answers. RARE GAS is a great entry, and OREGANO adds some spice (terrible pun intended). All of that for a minor AMI and a not-quite-as-minor SOHN makes it a standout corner.

At 72 words — the max allowed for a themeless — I expect both a ton of snazzy fill and nearly zero gluey bits. I bent that last expectation a bit to allow for the difficulty of working in a pair of 15-letter answers — but not by much. So to get some CESTA / TITI / TENK (10-K) action in one region alone was a bit disappointing. Those first two are real words, but a bit on the esoteric / very-friendly-for-crosswords letter patterns. Along with some of the usual suspects — RIA, the outdated UAR, and the aforementioned SOHN, it felt like too much for me for a 72-worder.

Then again, Kristian does do more with his grid than most 72-worders. I did like the interlock of colorful answers, EGG MCMUFFIN intersecting the 15-letter answers, plus BOOM BOX running straight through it. So upon second glance, having a bit more gluey short material than what I'd like to see out of a 72-worder is all right.

Some really strong entries featured today, MUFFIN TOP bringing me back to my days of obsessively watching "Seinfeld." And that upper-right corner is an absolute beauty, anchored by EVOLUTION running through both MUTATE and DARWIN, along with a BATARANG and a SPYGLASS tucked in. Not to mention, what a great clue for KING TUT — [Royal who toured the U.S. in the late 1970s] said nothing about the royal being alive!

A while back, I wrote a Saturday Stumper for Stan Newman, and he mentioned that one or two short entries were iffy in that they were "un-Stumperable." I didn't quite get what he meant, but today's puzzle made it click into place. In order to make a puzzle tough, it's important to have multiple ways of cluing an entry. Bits like AGHA, AMAH, and OGEE fall into that bucket. To regular solvers, [Eastern nurse] or [Asian au pair] is a dead giveaway for AMAH. And cluing it in some arcane manner would just be unfair. So I can understand how Stan would see it as critical to avoid these usual suspects in a puzzle meant to be extra-challenging.

On that note of difficulty, I would have loved something harder for ONE IN FOUR. Those numbers felt arbitrary to me, and the clue was so easy that it felt like cheating to fill in the answer. Perhaps something more crunchy, more satisfying to suss out, like [Chance of heterozygous parents imparting a recessive gene]? Or [Chance of rolling a 5 or 6 in craps]? The latter is too arbitrary, but figuring it out entertained me.

Finally, a note on DOCTOR WHO. Although I've dedicated way too many brain cells to Star Wars and Star Trek esoterica, I've never seen DOCTOR WHO. I still find it a perfectly fine entry though, as it's popular (albeit niche) in sci-fi. "Time lord" would be too much as an entry for me, but that term makes for a perfectly good clue. Nice to learn more vocab I can use in metaphors to baffle my wife (who once thought "Live long and prosper" was a quote from Benjamin Franklin).

GONZO JOURNALISM is one of the most colorful phrases I've seen in a while. I wasn't totally sure what it meant, but it came back quickly enough with a quick refresher on Hunter S. Thompson. We've seen this phrase in NYT themeless puzzles before, but it's great to see it featured in a themed.

Not having read (or seen) FEAR AND LOATHING / IN LAS VEGAS, it was tough for me to squee over the theme. But I did admire Kristian's gridwork. A 10/15/15/15/10 set of themers is tough to work with. It often results in compromises in the west and east section, where plenty of down answers must interact with two themers. Check out the east — SINO is only a minor ding, and he managed to work in the beautiful CUDDLE UP. Excellent deployment of black squares.

Additionally, Kristian wisely used the least-constrained part of the puzzle to work in some Scrabbliness, an X and a Z. Since that SE corner only has the end of LOATHING fixed into place, there's all sorts of freedom. Sure, ETES is a minor gluey bit, but to work in RIB CUT, HE/SHE, and X GAMES along with that X and Z is solid.

I did hitch slightly on NAV, which seems like a curious abbreviation for NAVAL (or NAVY?). But I personally like NAV, as it's commonplace in finance. A mutual fund's NET ASSET VALUE is an important indicator of (insert sound of readers falling asleep).

Finally, a great clue for US STEEL, throwing back to a heyday where US Steel built the "Unisphere" for the NY World's Fair. It's a company that has always fascinated me, because 1.) its ticker symbol on the New York Stock Exchange is the awesome "X" and 2.) it reminds me of Asimov's "U.S. Robotics," a company in his books that produced humanoid robots. And an actual company (which makes modems) took up that name! Life imitating art imitating life.

Neat how a single entry/clue pair can make a puzzle for me. Today, that was CLIP CLOP and its Monty Python reference. That movie brings back such great memories for me and always makes me laugh, even though I've seen it approximately a googol times. Bravo, Kristian! Neat when a constructor's right on my wavelength.

I thought today's puzzle would make for a good discussion of what is a "good" and "bad" piece of fill. I believe that very little of this is purely objective, so I'm always interested to hear other opinions. Here are all the entries I thought might come up in discussion:

• TSE
• RCA
• YEST
• OESTE
• A NET
• MRS C
• OWER
• PRIERS
• OTBS
• NES
• E LEE
• DEM
• SKAT
• ENER

Personally, I'd strike RCA, MRS C, and DEM off that list. I can understand the argument that RCA was broken up by GE decade ago, but it still played an important role in the history of technology. MRS C is a big part of my being raised by TV shows I wasn't supposed to be watching, so "Happy Days," the Fonz, MRS C and MR C will always have a place in my heart. And DEM is such a common abbreviation that it doesn't bother me at all.

At the other end of the spectrum, I think it's hard to argue a case for YEST and ENER (awkward abbreviations), OWER and PRIERS (rarely used noun-formed -ER words), E LEE and A NET (partials), or OESTE (a somewhat esoteric foreign word). I can see a case for SUR or SUD, as those words show up in relatively common place names, though.

The others are interesting, falling into my personal no-man's land. I've never seen an actual OTB, but my tolerance for gambling ends at losing five bucks. I've never played SKAT, but I don't doubt that it's a favorite game for many crossword solvers, especially older ones. And non-video game fans will scoff at NES, but if I only had a nickel for every hour I played "Super Mario Bros"...

Quite a lot of jazzy entries in this puzzle, highlighted by CLIP CLOP, ON ONE KNEE, and the really nice triple of TURDUCKEN, BLUE STATE, and SPYMASTER. Beautiful corner. Personally, I thought there were a tad too many liabilities in the puzzle, but 1.) that's personal opinion, 2.) I still found it to be an enjoyable solving experience, and 5.) thinking about the Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch made me chuckle.