New York Times, Friday, January 24, 2014

Prediction: In a couple hundred years, YA will replace YOU in the English language. And YOU will seem as archaic as THOU does today. Might as well get ahead of the curve on that one.

Oh, MILE HIGH CLUB was my seed entry, obviously. But there's a special place in hell for 12-letter seed words. Never again, I tell ya.

Not surprisingly, Ian's puzzle is the first Times crossword ever to have the entry MILE-HIGH CLUB. The term was probably a little too racy for my predecessors. But how to clue it? Ian's clue was "Group getting some air play?" I liked the misdirection of this, but the usage of the word "play" here felt too loose — and maybe too racy for the Times audience. Another clue I considered was "Group whose membership qualifications are up in the air?" — but that felt too easy. And "Set of screws on an airplane?" was just too rude. So I finally settled on what you see here.

There are lots of people probably confused as to why they saw this puzzle last week. I don't know the exact details, but apparently there was a mixup at the Times, because Will wanted to run Kevin Der's puzzle just before the MIT Mystery Hunt, because it was actually integrated into the Hunt. Pretty cool, huh? Great idea, but the execution was lacking.

Onward and upward. Another fine offering from Ian, clean as a whistle. I have to think this follows more of his experiment placing the shorter stuff first, then seeing what he can get out of the longer answers. In general, I love the fact that there's hardly any ugly stuff (pretty amazing to have just AWS, HEPS, SSN, and only HEPS is really cringeworthy).

But the other day I had an interesting exchange with another constructor who's opposed to this approach, because it doesn't allow for as many new entries. Since you fix some constraints by placing shorties into the grid first, you limit your ability to insert truly snazzy stuff. I like the colloquial HOW ARE YA a lot and love MILE HIGH CLUB (if only this had been in another venue and we could have seen one of Will's clues), but other than that, nothing spectacular. And an entry like TRADE BOOKS is about as interesting to me as bond funds are to my nephew. (It's pretty fun to chase my nephew around, yelling about credit risk and durations. Ah, good times.)

For just about any constructor I'd stand up and clap upon encountering this puzzle. A 70-word puzzle is harder than a 72, and a 68 is verging on "only possible to do cleanly and sparkly for those named Berry." But Ian Livengood... well, he's Ian Livengood. I was expecting more sparkly goodness out of a 68-worder. It's kind of unfair, but once you achieve name-brand status a la BEQ, DQ, Nothnagel, Walden, et al, the ante is upped. Still, fun puzzle today; a good workout.