New York Times, Friday, October 11, 2013

Well, the seed entry of this one was WHERES THE REMOTE — something that anyone with kids has uttered too many times to count. My goal was to have interlaced 15-letter entries, but I wanted to stick to 15-letter entries that hadn't been used in the NYT before. I almost achieved my goal — MEAT THERMOMETER has been used a couple of times. But the other five are debuts, as are the two ten-letter entries (ARMY STRONG and OXYGENATED). The down side of this kind of grid layout is there aren't the usual wide swaths of open space as there are on many other themeless puzzles.

I see fellow Ann Arborite Jason Flinn constructed the NYT puzzle a couple of days ago. If you haven't caught on yet, it's all part of our plan to elevate Ann Arbor to the cultural center of the universe. Worldwide domination will soon follow.

First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin.

A ton of nice debut stuff from Pete today. SETTLES THE SCORE, WHAT HAPPENS NEXT, and especially WHERES THE REMOTE with its brilliant clue. It's not often we see five debut 15's in a single puzzle; cool feat Peter's pulled off. I got a thrill typing those beauties in (what can I say, I'm easily amused).

Unusual arrangement, not only incorporating four 15's in the across direction, but interlocking them with two 15's in the vertical. Building a themeless grid in this style is daunting, because it creates so many subsections, each one with high constraints. Quite a challenge to find a set of six 15's which allows for reasonable fill. I really appreciated hearing Pete's comment about trying for six debut 15's, but settling for five in order to give the solver a better experience. I love hearing a constructor prioritize the solving experience rather than the construction feat.

While the arrangement of 15's is awfully nice, the surrounding fill suffers a tad. We get an assortment of partials (A STAR, USE AS), crossing awkward abbreviations (CTN/CWTS), French words crossing (ETAT/LYCEE), and a dash of crosswordese (ENOTE, REE, SERE), but I appreciate that Pete has carefully spread it out amongst the different categories so we don't get a ton of one type or another. Still, there was enough of the suboptimal stuff that I noticed it during the solve, and it made me think about the trade-offs Pete must have been weighing as he chose his 15's and filled the grid.

Quick observation about SERE, which has been a crossword staple for decades because it contains common letters. 149 instances in 12 years of the Maleska era (thanks David Steinberg for adding pre-Shortz puzzles to the master database, process still ongoing), 98 from 19 years of the Shortz era. I like this trend, as it discourages the idea that you need to know a totally different language in order to do crosswords. Perhaps with more of this kind of thoughtful progress, crosswords will one day be more popular than baseball.

A guy can dream, can't he?

Good workout today plus some very nice debut entries.