New York Times, Thursday, January 21, 2016

This puzzle was directly inspired by the Andrew Ries Fireball puzzle "Straight and Narrow." Even though the puzzle was very well-executed as conceived, the meta aspect left me and other solvers a bit cold. IMO, Amy Reynaldo sums up the puzzle perfectly in her concluding paragraph: "I got this meta quickly, but it was extremely tough overall: just five solvers got the correct answer, a number so low that, for what I believe is a first for Fireball, editor Peter Gordon gave out a hint and an extra 24 hours after the contest had closed." For reference, I've seen Peter Gordon record upwards of a few hundred correct responses depending on the difficulty of the meta; so, Fireball's solving base is by no means small.

This means that at least 95% of Fireball solvers--which include many of the top-ranked crossword solvers among their ranks--may not have understood or even located the theme! This fact dismayed me--and not just because I was one of the Fightin' ">95%." To me, it signaled lost potential, which, as a constructor, frustrated me to no end. Frustration led to curiosity, and curiosity led to SIDE/BARS.

The biggest constructing difficulty for this one definitely had to be fixing parallel theme entries in the outermost columns. Many "bars," when placed next each other, didn't produce nice crossings. For the most part, I targeted "bar" pairs that had alternated consonant/vowel patterns; and, for the few spots that didn't yield favorable bigrams (e.g. NC at the start of a word or TM at the end of a word), that was where black squares and a few key three-letter entries came in handy.

As for cluing, my first impression is that Will/Joel eased up on the difficulty to help solvers better glean the theme...? At any rate, though the final edit has a few deceptive clues, there are no explicit pun ("?") clues. As sad as I am to see [Iconic line of computers?] for TOOL[BAR] get removed, solve-ability and the thematic "aha" are more important.

Anyway, I hope this was a fun, crunchy, Thursday outing! Get it? Crunchy...NOUGAT...oh, never mind. =)

I liked Dave's take on SIDE BARS — we've seen a lot of "side" or "around" type puzzles, but I like the feat of stacking "bars" in sets of two., i.e. SNACK (bar) next to POWER (bar), TOOL (bar) next to MARS (bar).

Joe Krozel mentioned to me that stacking two answers is much easier than people might think, and David does have extra flexibility in being able to switch themers around, i.e. TOOL, MARS, DIVE, OPEN, CLAM, TIKI, SAND, TACO could all be interchanged. Still, Dave executes with impressive smoothness around all those pairs. I especially like TRIMOTOR and FIRE OPALS extending out from the NE pair. I wasn't as taken with VENIAL in the west, kind of an odd word, but all the crossings are fair.

As one of the younger constructors on the block, I've liked Dave's voice, giving us fresh-sounding entries like ALT-TAB (if you don't use this shortcut to switch between applications, I highly recommend it) and AW NUTS. Not as much today as with his other puzzles, but given the challenges in this construction, I like that Dave went for (and achieved) a smooth and clean fill.

Thursdays can be made trickier by 1.) a twisty, innovative idea, 2.) deviously clever clues, or 3.) just plain stumper-hard clues (listed in my preferred order). I've seen enough of these "side" puzzles that it didn't feel very innovative, but some clues sure were clever:

• Pitcher's delivery had to be WIND-UP or something ... except if a pitcher is defined as "one who pitches a SPIEL."
• What the heck could C - V - B - N - M possibly mean? Turns out it's letter sequence above the SPACE (bar).
• Round figure led me toward ESTIMATE or GUESSTIME or FUDGE FACTOR (we engineers like our fudge factors). But it just meant a round shape, i.e. a SPHERE.

The theme was a bit repetitive once I cottoned to it, but a bunch of clues like these really kept my attention.