New York Times, Wednesday, April 30, 2014

I had quite a few PC & MAC candidates to choose from, so gridding was not as challenging as I had imagined. Still a bit tricky at spots. I hope foodies and food bloggers spread "pomegranate arils" & "acai bowl" quickly so ARIL will not be treated as crosswordese, and ACAI will not be just a a trendy berry that often stumps some on our blog.

Neat idea for a puzzle from C.C., who's becoming quite the force in the crosswords. Hard to imagine doing a language-based art form in a non-native tongue — extremely impressive how prolific she's become.

Ah, MAC VS PC, the old debate. I really like the crazy MACVSPC string and the overall concept, and the intersecting PC / MAC pairs are an interesting way of doing expressing it. Whenever I think of MAC VS PC though, I hearken back to those funny "I'm a Mac" Apple ads with sort of a split-screen approach. So expecting the puzzle to half be filled with MACs and half with PCs (deciding which you'd put in the "right" half would be an interesting statement in itself), I scratched my head at the crossing MAC/PCs. There is more overlap these days what with operating system emulators, but to me there still seems to be much more a chasm than an intersection.

That being said, C.C. does well here in many aspects of grid execution. Look at how elegant the PC themers are: all four are two-worders, all of them snappy, and all of them split the P/C, rather than incorporate the PC within a single word (like HEPCAT JIVE or IPCRESS FILE). She then selects short MAC themers which hide the word well, as in SMACKS.

It's hard enough to fill a grid with four "pinwheel" themers plus a central entry, but it's that much harder when you have four additional crossing answers to deal with. True, she had some flexibility in using different *MAC* words, but still, all the overlap makes things rough. She does well to deploy some cheater squares through the grid to facilitate smoother fill. There are a few issues like AS RED, but note how SUMAC overlaps POP CULTURE. Not a whole lot you can do with the ?SR?? pattern. The only other area that made me pause was the ARILS section — ENAMEL and LIP BALM are both nice entries, but I'm not sure they made ARILS worth its while. Botanists may disagree, of course.

ADDED NOTE: I had forgotten about "pomegranate arils" until C.C. mentioned them in her notes. Although the wikipedia article doesn't mention the word ARIL, POM (a large manufacturer of pomegranates) features it on its packaging. Perhaps I've been too hard on the poor ARIL.

Finally, I liked seeing iTunes in the grid and was hoping to find more MAC and PC related entries. It felt a little weird to have just one thing by itself. Perhaps if you squint really hard, REPRO is a description of all the copycat products PC makers have put out?

Now to await all the angry emails from Microsoft people...

I jest, of course. Microsoft does an amazing 1-for-1 match on XWord Info's year-end donation to Treehouse for Kids, and their ability to double our donation is both much appreciated and to be applauded.

Finally, a really nice little pair of entries: BRUCE right next to BATMAN, great stuff. Never easy to put adjacent related entries into a grid. Well worth the cross-referencing!