New York Times, Thursday, October 17, 2013

I accepted this puzzle in 2009, but held it for so long because I'd run similar themes in 2004, 2002, and 1997. Three of the four theme entries here are new, though, and I think they're all pretty nice. Curiously, there's more substandard/crosswordy fill here than I usually allow now — K-STAR, OMB, ORT, ANSA, RES, TRY TO, and others. On the whole, crossword construction has improved a lot over the past four years.

"Add-a-letter(s)" type theme today, with APPENDAGE parsed as APPEND AGE as the revealer. Nice choice of revealer, although for the longest time I couldn't figure out why APPEND A GE wasn't quite working. (headslap) Also very nice was the inclusion of strong 7's: JEAN ARP, MACBETH, WHOS WHO, MY STARS. That all added to the quality of my solving experience.

The success of these types of themes hinges on the sparkliness of the base phrases plus the wackiness/hilarity of the resulting phrases. E STREET BANDAGE and CLASSIFIED ADAGE brought a smile to my face, but SCOTLAND YARDAGE and NEW YORK POSTAGE felt (to me) a bit too much like real things...only not quite. I would have loved to see more ridiculous clues for the latter two, something like "How caber tosses are measured?" and "Stamp showing a Brooklynite shouting 'Dem Bums!'"? Humor is so subjective (as my poor girlfriend/wife/barbarian well knows).

What I found most interesting about this puzzle was its layout. Note the 15-14-9-14-15 pattern. This makes construction very difficult, because the central 9 necessitates a block of three black squares on either side. Toss in the fact that the 14's must contain a single black square on one end or another, and that means that those single black squares must connect to the black squares at the ends of row 8 (in order to prevent a two-letter word in between). Tricky! The layout here certainly works, but the blockiness of the giant black L's feels a touch inelegant.

You might ask, why not swap the 15s and 14s to avoid that issue? Aha! Because 14-letter entries cannot go into rows 3 and 13 without forming an ugly block of three squares — the same issue as with the first layout. And if the 14s are placed in rows 4 and 12, that smooshes the theme answers together, making for a dense and difficult construction. That's the reason constructors often go out of their way to pick 11s and 15s, trying to avoid 12s, 13s and 14s if at all possible (especially when five theme answers are required).

Finally, an observation about the way the top section splits. Notice how BMW/NAMATH/LSAT break up in lengths of 3/6/4? This is less common than some permutation of 4/5/4 or 3/5/5, because those six-letter words add a level of difficult. Gary has done a nice job in the north section, with just ISIDRO being a slight outlier. The south section demonstrates how tough a set of sixes can be though, with a stack of REAIMS, EN FIN, TOILE, and BEENE all crossing MILNER (who may be more familiar to some, but not to me).

A tough challenge! Interesting to hear Will's comments about fill; I'm curious to see how different Gary would have made this puzzle today. We are blessed to be living in an age where crosswords are rapidly improving with each passing year.