New York Times, Saturday, January 14, 2017

My partner introduced me to the term WEEKENDER when I mistakenly called his bag a satchel. My error and/or his sartorial expertise led to the puzzle you see before you. Well, that and RETROCHIC, a word that has fascinated me ever since Muffy from the kid's show "Arthur" told her friend her shoes were "fabulously retro-chic." My pre-adolescent mind was already collecting 1-acrosses, I suppose.

My early grid architectures had been a bit haphazard, so I decided to go for a tried-and-true style, one used extensively by my teacher, David Quarfoot. It fell into place quickly and wasn't as constrained in the NW and SE as I had anticipated. No wonder David had such luck with them. The other two corners, unfortunately, feel thin by comparison, but so be it. The clue for SEX was enough to leave me smiling.

What a fantastic NW corner! It's hard to intersect triple-stacks together like that. Sure, one triple-stack is easy to do, but when you run another one right through it, there's almost always some compromise necessary. Maybe you have to settle for a meh long entry; maybe you have to glue it all together with a couple of ugly short answers.

But I count six nice answers, and nary a dab of crossword glue. RETRO-CHIC and RAW MEAT make such a great 1-A / 1-D combination. (Was Lady Gaga's RAW MEAT dress RETRO-CHIC?) TIE SCORE isn't as zippy to me, but it's still good. And some might wince at AROAR as one of those A+(something) entries, but it's a perfectly fine word I see all the time in books. All in all, this is one of the best examples of intersecting triple-stacks that I can remember.

The lower right isn't quite as good, showing some of the signs of stress I mentioned above. SLINGER feels partialish, as does OPEN SINCE. RARE FIND makes me cock my head a bit, as does WEEKENDER. The latter does show up a lot in newspapers, so it's possible that it's just not in my bailiwick. The overall effect ... this corner doesn't strike me nearly as powerfully as the upper left. Nothing STANK, except the weird one-L ENROL, but not nearly as much stood out, either.

With this type of grid, it can be tough to work in much of anything else. So I like Andrew's efforts to integrate HARE-BRAINED, GRASS STAINS, and even the shorter IM EASY, NO CARB, THE POPE, BIOGAS, and ICE AXES. All good stuff.

All of this, with very little crossword glue — ENROL being the only sticking point I saw. That's nice execution.

If only the bottom right corner had been as spectacular as the upper left. Especially given the level of construction difficulty of intersecting triple-stacks, that would have made the puzzle an easy POW!