New York Times, Friday, October 18, 2013

I constructed this puzzle in April 2012. I had recently solved Tim Croce's puzzle from March 9 and remember thinking the grid looked awesome and would be a fun construction challenge! So I decided to rotate the grid pattern, move a few blocks around, and try to fill a similar grid myself.

My seed entries were STILL DRE and ZEN GARDEN, two phrases I'd never seen in a New York Times crossword before. When I noticed that a third seed entry, JASON MRAZ, fit at 25-Down, I started to get excited about how this puzzle was shaping up! The rest of the fill came relatively fast, since the number of options for such an open grid pattern is limited. My favorite corner is the lower right, because it has a lot of Scrabbly letters and unusual entries; my least favorite is the lower left, since it has several tough proper nouns. Nevertheless, I was very happy about how this puzzle turned out and hope it makes for an enjoyable solve!

David Steinberg, who turns 17 next month, has turned out an eye-popping construction here — and I accepted the puzzle over a year ago, when he was still 15! My favorite entries in it are STILL DRE, CONEHEADS, TWIN BILL, JET PLANE, YES DEAR, LABOR PARTY, ZEN GARDEN, SCARFACE, SNOW TIRES, GET REAL, JASON MRAZ, BISCAYNE, and JAM TART. That's a lot of great stuff. I could have done without EDE (where I've been, BTW) and TESSAS...but overall, this is pretty fancy constructing.

Fun solve from the puzzle prodigy. A 62-word themeless puzzle poses a significant construction challenge, and David has given us a nice solve today. The areas which I thought would be the roughest, the NW and SE corners, turned out to be relatively smooth, especially given their wide-open nature. I would guess not many people like to see EDE in their crossword, but then again, there's a pretty big Dutch presence in America, right? Aside from this outlier, the NW corner came out great...with one interesting entry to debate: STILL DRE.

I had a nice exchange with David over e-mail regarding STILL DRE, as it left me scratching my head after I finished. For him, it was a nice enough entry to help seed his puzzle. At first that entry gave me a feeling of incompletion, like I had uncovered the answer, but wasn't really sure if it was the answer or not. But after hearing his rationale and looking up / listening to the song, I understood better that part of it is a generational divide issue (I'm 29 in hexadecimal, or 32 in base 13, whichever you prefer). Different strokes for different folks.

The SW to NE diagonal really illustrates the searching, questing nature of themeless construction. There's some great stuff in the middle of it, the SNOW TIRES / JET PLANE / TWIN BILL area especially. Note though, how constrained that area is once you lock in just a few entries. The result in the NE is pretty good, notwithstanding ORIENTE, but the SW has so many propers that will be unfamiliar to some. The DEODATO / PASA / STEARNES crossings were awfully difficult for me, and I doubt I'll be the only one. I did enjoy looking up DEODATO and reading more about his work around "2001" as well as STEARNES's amazing career in the Negro league, but I would have preferred to not have to look those up on the very same day.

Finally, kudos to David for doing something that most of America would take for granted but we constructors too often brush aside: spelling AMOEBAE with the "O". The brilliant Matt Gaffney started a crossword blog recently, mentioning that his most dreaded piece of fill was AMEBA. I'm guilty of this, having used it before, having seen it used so many times in so many crosswords that it felt like no big deal. But his post reminded me that before I started doing crosswords, I had never spelled it AMEBA and would have found it very odd to see it that way. Good reminder for us as constructors to be vigilant and keep our word usage standards high.

Fun Friday challenge, quite a workout.