New York Times, Monday, January 26, 2015

Do solvers know Hieronymus Bosch outside of crosswords? I certainly don't. I do, however, celebrate Brennan Boesch's entire collection. BOSCH is a notch below some A-listers like Monet, Renoir and Picasso, but the highbrow entry should appeal to the NYT demographic, I think.

Hope solvers like it!

Themers starting with sassy synonyms, all disguised using other meanings: SMART as in smart-mouthed, FLIP as in flippant, FORWARD as in "that incredibly good-looking Asian crossword blogger was a little too forward but man did I flip at his bold commentary!"

Or something like that.

It's been great following Ian's puzzles over the past years, seeing him constantly pushing his skills. It wasn't enough to be able to execute a five-themer puzzle as clean as a whistle. Next came five-themers with four long downs — still clean. Then six themers was the new challenge. And now six themers, plus four long downs? I love seeing that drive to push one's boundaries.

Ian does something really interesting today with his themers. Usually it's best to alternate them left right left right etc., but he stacks SMART COOKIE over PERT PLUS on the right side. Makes for a very hard overlap in the RUER area. With six themers, an alternating pattern often makes grid design very difficult — especially when an answer is as long as SMART COOKIE — because it creates many areas where you need to work around three themers at a time. This arrangement, while still very difficult to nail cleanly, reduces the number of said areas.

It's unusual to see a RUER in one of Ian's puzzles, given how exacting he is about his fill standards. But look at how much goodness that one entry enabled: SENIOR PROM in the NE (and PADDYWAGON in the SW). Well worth it.

Sorry to those of you struggling with that Starship captain crossing BOSCH, but I feel like it's fair, even for a Monday. I'd personally categorize BOSCH as one of the greats, and Jean-Luc Picard is clearly the best of all the Enterprise captains. (Don't even get me started on Captains Janeway or Archer, and Kirk supporters are fresh heathens.)

And congrats is in order for Ian, one of the four new members of CrosSynergy, a syndicate providing daily xws to the Washington Post. The others are Patti Varol, editor of the Crosswords Club, Brad Wilber, editor of the Chronicle of Higher Education, and Todd McClary.