New York Times, Friday, January 3, 2014

BARRY: TWITTERVERSE was the seed here. I also thought EXPEDIA would make a good Scrabbly entry, despite it being a brand name. We went through a few drafts before settling on the published grid. The first attempt used TIMEOUTS in the NE corner, which had to be changed because we eventually incorporated TIMELAG into the SW. So Brad replaced TIMEOUTS with WIPEOUTS and made some other changes to the NE. There were a couple of other words I wanted to use in the puzzle that would have been debuts for the NYT, but they had to be removed for other reasons. I thought LIBRARIAN would be fitting for the puzzle given Brad's profession. He clued the Downs and I did the Acrosses.

BRAD: Barry sent me a sizable section with his two nice seeds, plus a nice shout-out to my day job! I was merely glad to be able to make my own 12-letter seed work with a fairly nice stack of 9s. If memory serves me, I think we both did some tweaking to the corners with the shorter stacks. Using WYCH ELM reminds me of the second or third puzzle I ever did with Doug Peterson, where he used a variant spelling and we got by with it. I didn't know either spelling existing before that time! And I don't know if we're the first clue-writers to reference Hitchcock for 2-Down, but it may be a fresh angle for many solvers. I may have used that clue in one of my online self-edited puzzles.

Before the Internet, I don't think constructors in different places (McLean, Va., and Houghton, N.Y., in this case) ever teamed up to construct a crossword together. Now co-constructions have become fairly common. We live in a wonderful age. My favorite entries here are PETIT-FOUR, ST. PETER, FOREVER STAMP, PAIN-FREE, BEANBAG, and TWITTERVERSE. There's lots of other good stuff, too.

Another fun solve from two of the themeless masters. This one played extremely hard for me, more like a Saturday, given the opaque cluing. A real brain-buster of a workout. I think it's more typical to see WYCH ELM and NICOLAI Ghiaurov on a Saturday, as they're both difficult pieces of trivia.

I really enjoy misdirectional or wordplay type cluing, so FOREVER STAMP was both my favorite entry and clue in the puzzle. It had me thinking about public utilities, then apartment rent caps, and the real answer took forever to make itself known. Great stuff.

Being on the TWITTERVERSE (follow me at @JeffChenWrites if you don't mind inappropriate/insane/inane observations) I loved the entry, but it would have been great to get a less direct clue. (Perhaps TWITTERVERSE isn't well-known amongst different generations to do that, though.) And it's a pretty cool feat to have EXPEDIA right next door, as well as an up-to-date clue for SEPIA involving Instagram. I liked the modern vibe.

Finally, I've been thinking more and more about Ian Livengood's comment regarding seeding a themeless with tiny words (three and four letter entries) that have easy letter patterns, and seeing what you can get for the long entries after that. I really enjoyed today's puzzle, but as a constructor, it's difficult to overlook entries like ERI, OFT, SYL, THA, NAE. Tyler Hinman, a former ACPT champ and excellent constructor, has said there's no such thing as an excellent themeless with a few ugly entries. I wouldn't quite go that far, but I think he has a point. Anyway, just one guy's musings. Enjoyable Friday.