New York Times, Monday, January 5, 2015

Happy New Year, everyone! The fact that this simple theme featured animals made me worry that it would go straight into the editor's trash can. But, when I didn't see most of the theme phrases in the XWord Info archives, I thought it might make an entertaining Monday.

The fill was another story. The layout of the middle required DRACULA and AZTECAN, and so it locked in either crosswordese or partials. Personally, I like one or two gettable partials in early-week puzzles. They don't look so elegant in the finished grid, but they are pleasant enough when solving, even helpful (to me). But, having three intersect is pretty ugly, and these days, I would probably try to start from scratch with the grid layout.

Nice start to the week, five colorful phrases ending with a type of bird. I appreciated the consistency, each of the phrases containing exactly two separate words, none of them hyphenated. An elegant touch.

REGIFT could be one of those eye-rolling add-an-RE-to-the-beginning-of-anything, i.e. REOIL or REPEN or REBURP. This one is not just acceptable, but desirable in my eyes, because it's a lively entry that's entered the lexicon in a big way, perhaps first popularized by Seinfeld. Silly goose Americans.

This is a very difficult grid arrangement, what with a 13-letter themer smack dab in the middle. I often do everything I can to switch out the middle themer for a 7-letter one. That's often impossible, but once in a while you'll luck into something useable, which makes grid-building so much easier.

John deploys a lot of his black squares to separate themers, but there is only so much you can do with a 10/10/13/10/10 arrangement. The middle suffers, what with I REST / A TEE / USE IT all in one region. Too many partials for my taste, period, and way too many in a tiny area. It's so tough in the middle columns of the puzzle — you can either choose to separate LEGAL EAGLE and OLD BUZZARD, or OLD BUZZARD and SPRING CHICKEN, but you can't really do both. I might have leaned more toward the latter, due to the constraints the Z puts on that rocky I REST / A TEE / USE IT region.

I do like the NE and SW, nice and clean even though those parallel downs cause many constraints. John does really well to quasi-separate them from the rest of the puzzle through smart black square placement, and also does it in a way which doesn't make the puzzle flow suffer. Doing all this with a QUATRAIN and a PANDEMIC along with an extra Z worked smoothly in deserves a SHOUT OUT. Kudos!