Total | Debut | Latest | Collabs |
---|---|---|---|
65 | 10/22/2009 | 6/16/2019 | 6 |
Sun | Mon | Tue | Wed | Thu | Fri | Sat | Variety |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
16 | 9 | 11 | 9 | 10 | 3 | 2 | 5 |
Scrabble | Rebus | Circle | Pangram |
---|---|---|---|
1.64 | 3 | 5 | 1 |
Even after finishing, it took me a while to figure out why CRASH SITES described the theme answers. And then I felt old. I of course know AMAZON since it's huge, and YAHOO started out of Stanford just a few years after I graduated, but POLITICO, VULTURE, and GAWKER were only vaguely familiar to me. Made it awfully tough to grok the theme! They all seem to be relatively popular websites … perhaps for very different demographics than me.
It's been fun to see Joel's experimentation with low word-count puzzles. He's made some really nice 74-word Monday puzzles, and even excelled at a Monday 72-worder, which is extremely tough to execute on with color and smoothness. Today's goes way into the depths — a 66-word themed puzzle is virtually unheard of!
My first impression was that there were a ton of black squares eating away at the grid, choking off the puzzle flow. Additionally, having experimented a lot with giant black pyramids like the ones on the sides of the puzzle, I've found that these formations make the filling process much, much easier, so the fact that this is a 66-worder doesn't impress me as much as if it had been done without those pyramids.
And smoothness … it's unusual to see much of any crossword glue in a Joel puzzle, so running into REMAP, TGI, SAXE, IS AN, IT A and the curious ZOOL(ogy?) and POGOED (is this really in usage?) felt far out of Joel's norm. I did like how the grid allowed such goodness as the MR ROPER / WAY ABOVE / AUNTIE EM stack, but overall, I don't know that those positives outweighed the smoothness issues. After a certain level of crossword glue gets smeared across the page, my enjoyment level falls off pretty fast.
So, a theme that probably plays better to younger or hipper solvers, with interesting experimentation in low word-count that didn't totally hit the mark for me. Still, there's something to be said for trying new things to push the boundaries.
1 S | 2 T | 3 I | 4 F | 5 L | 6 E | 7 M | 8 R | 9 R | 10 O | 11 P | 12 E | 13 R |
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14 P | O | G | O | E | D | 15 W | A | Y | A | B | O | V | E |
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16 L | O | U | N | G | E | 17 A | U | N | T | I | E | E | M |
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18 A | M | A | Z | O | N | 19 V | I | N | E | 20 E | T | N | A |
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21 Y | E | N | 22 I | T | A | 23 I | S | P |
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24 Y | A | 25 H | 26 O | 27 O | P | O | L | 28 I | 29 T | 30 I | C | O | ||
31 S | O | P | H | 32 N | O | B | U | T | S | |||||
33 V | A | Y | 34 A | 35 A | I | R | S | |||||||
36 H | E | R | O | I | 37 N | 38 Z | O | O | 39 L | |||||
40 V | U | L | T | U | R | E | 41 G | A | W | K | E | 42 R | ||
43 D | O | S | 44 T | G | I | 45 C | H | 46 E |
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47 I | L | K | 48 S | 49 C | R | A | S | 50 H | 51 S | 52 I | T | E | S |
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53 S | A | I | L | 54 B | O | A | T | 55 E | A | S | E | U | P |
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56 C | R | E | A | M | P | I | E | 57 E | X | A | R | M | Y |
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58 S | E | R | B | I | A | N | 59 D | E | N | N | Y | S |
Answer summary: 8 unique to this puzzle.
Found bugs or have suggestions?