New York Times, Saturday, April 25, 2015

Ah, SKRILLEX. I can't say I'm the biggest fan of his music, but his name is too fun to ignore, and he's a pretty "important" pop musician. Definitely grid-worthy, IMO. Still, I was glad to get LIGETI in there to class up the musical selection a bit.

If I could take back one decision I made during construction of this puzz, I would opt not to cram REDDIT into the NW. It was a mistake to fetishize "freshness" at the expense of smoothness there — particularly since the answer has been scooped twice since I submitted this grid!

I'm quite proud of the NE. It's silky-smooth, with three fun down answers plus FOR NOW, FOODIE, SAME-SEX, and STRATEGO. That's basically what I'm striving for in every corner. Results may vary.

One aspect I find interesting about this puzzle is the unique vibe of each corner. The NW is a classic high word-count first corner, with a bold 1-A and a cool stack. The NE is all about smooth. The SE is the funky corner, with E-TILES and RSTLNE stacked. And the SW is the tricky vocabulary corner, with SCAPULAR and the challenging-to-parse OH YES I DO crossing LIGETI and AD UNIT. Hopefully that provides variety, and gives something for everyone.

Hope everyone has a great Friday night and Saturday. Enjoy!

Jeff and I often catch up over dinner by comparing notes about the daily crossword (note to self: is this why people keep refusing our dinner party invitations?). More often than not, we settle out at roughly the same difficulty level, but a few clues can quickly tip the scales in one person's favor. Baseball, engineering, sci-fi, comedy, jazz ... Denny out, Chen in. Fashion, hip-hop, movies, politics, or French, and I'm all over it.

No surprise that this puzzle resonated more in my brain folds than in Jeff's, what with SKRILLEX, CHOCOLAT, PENA, and LOEWE. And if you're going to include a baseball player, PETE ROSE is one of the few names I recognize. While not easy-peasy, this was a pleasingly smooth grid for me. My only stumble was in the SW corner, with the unfamiliar LIGETI stacked on top of ADUNIT (a hillbilly's answer to "Whodunit?").

Jeff, Jim, and I have had several conversations about differences in crossword opinion, most recently after I confessed my ignorance of comedians of the black-and-white movie era. After reading my post, Jim sent me an email professing a very gentle Canadian outrage that I had lumped together the Marx Brothers with the Three Stooges. He went on to write:

"This kind of cultural disconnect is what makes crossword commentary so interesting to me. It uncovers the hidden assumptions we don't know we have about what is aesthetically pleasing or not, and what is surely common knowledge or not. It also puts crossword editors into an impossible situation. You can't please everyone (so I've heard) but I wonder how possible it is to delight a significant percentage of your crossword audience."

It's those moments of delight that keep me coming back to crosswords, and I believe that Jeff and Jim would say the same thing. Two moments of delight from this puzzle:

• I loved learning LUTRINE. My goal is to use it in an email at work by the end of the month.
• A very special nod to VONNEGUT, a proud Hoosier. This is only his third appearance in the Shortz era. Happy to see his name, sad that he is gone. One of the greats.