New York Times, Wednesday, January 11, 2017

I'm sure a few people out there will look at my D-N-As winding down the grid and say "Hey, that's a single helix, not a DOUBLE/HELIX!". To them, I'd like to respond with a quote from The Dude in "The Big Lebowski".

"Yeah, well, you know, that's just, like, your opinion, man."

My defense is that the two sides of the squares containing the Ds, Ns, and As form the double helix. Convinced? Yeah, I didn't think so.

Actually, a few years ago Joe Krozel and I tried to build a grid with intertwining D-N-As working their way down the grid, but soon gave up. If I recall correctly, the fill around that column got way too tortured.

A belated Happy New Year to one and all!

The DOUBLE / HELIX is so ripe for crossword brainstorming. One of Liz Gorski's a while back was particularly memorable, as was one of Joel Fagliano's. Today, Pete gives us something similar but goes with the letters D N A filling out the more-single-than-double-looking (sorry, Pete!) helix.

Nice find that WATSON / CRICK / DOUBLE / HELIX exhibit crossword symmetry!

I did find it inelegant to have to jump across the grid to connect the word pairs, and it was weird to get CRICK before WATSON. Using mirror symmetry would have helped this — both WATSON and DOUBLE could have been in the top half of the puzzle, with CRICK and HELIX at the bottom. (Back to the bottom where you belong, CRICK!)

Some nice bonuses in the grid, ARACHNID and ON THE GO my favorites. NOT A SOUL and FOOTSTEP = good stuff too. Much appreciated to get the extras, given that the puzzle felt a bit theme-thin.

Oh! As a macro econ junkie, I loved seeing REAL GDP in the grid. Except that it was REAL GNP! (Domestic vs. National, don't ask me what the difference is. My macro prof is now rolling in her grave.) That crossing with BRINDISI was a killer. Perhaps a case can be made that it's fair since the Appian Way is very famous, but that didn't stop me from grumbling.

It's so tough to work through that center of the puzzle, with so many D N A letters fixed into place. So the gluey results of INRI, SANI, ENDO, BANOS … not unexpected. And having a theme word fixed into place in each of the four corners, getting more ACOP, TASS, MDLI, ROIS, LIBBER, ERO … again, it's not unexpected, but it doesn't make for an elegant, smooth solve.

Finally, as a biochem junkie, I would have loved to see base pairings of A-T and G-C (adenine-thymine and guanine-cytosine), reflecting the actual building blocks of DNA. But I can only imagine thousands of solvers wondering why there were so many of these four letters in the grid. And other thousands in an outcry yelling BUT THAT AT-GC-GC-GC-AT-AT-GC SERIES IS NOT AN ACTUAL GENE SEQUENCE! Can't make everyone happy.