New York Times, Saturday, April 6, 2019

SNUFFLEUPAGUS was the "seed" entry, originally in the top stack where it just wouldn't work, so down to the bottom stack it went, and happily so. It arose in a conversation with my brother over how to pronounce it, but just as much it's here as a nod to my kids, who grew up with Sesame Street (and my daughter was a Sesame Street intern one summer, working as their "muppet wrangler").

This puzzle is a major redo of a previous effort that had a ho-hum top stack with some resulting fairly sketchy fill - a near-miss with Will, with too many "dings." I opted to go with a three-part series of monologue bits from the same speaker in the top stack and to clue them contextually. They depend on each other to be sussed out, and I enjoyed the chance to test it with Will and company as a relatively fresh way to build a themeless puzzle, with three sequential conversational pieces to start the puzzle off.

But it all started with SNUFFY, Big Bird's imaginary friend who later appears as a very real woolly mammoth - to the chagrin (and delight) of the other characters. SNUFFY lives, and I'm glad he's (she's?) making his/her puzzle debut here.

Quick! How many of you out there can say the name of Big Bird's wooly friend? I thought so! And doubly quick, how many of you can spell it?

S N U F F … E? A? L?

Drat.

Glad that Ned was careful with his crossing answers. I hitched on the -AGUS ending, wondering if it could be -IGUS crossing FLIM. But that seemed flimsy.

Thank goodness I know IGA from crosswords — I hope others weren't baffled, as IGA seems to be regional. Ultimately, if you're doing the NYT Saturday crossword, chances are you've run into IGA in the crossword before.

One crazily-spelled entry in a crossword, I can handle. Two? On top of each other? Hatchi matchi!

I remembered that LIPPI is a painter, but the guy's first name? FRAFILIPPO? It's as if his parents evilly tented their fingers and roared out a maniacal laugh as they imagined the gnashing of future solvers' teeth. Parsing that string seemed like it should be ___ LIPPO LIPPI. But FRAFI didn't seem right.

(Turns out that he did go by LIPPO LIPPI. A big time-saver when your full titled name is FRA' FILIPPO LIPPI!)

Devious clue for one of the answers running across those two long entries, [Innocent, e.g.]. I had the starting P and ending E, and struggled to figure out a synonym for innocent. Ah! That's POPE Innocent. Such a relief to figure that out and finally nail down those middle two letters.

Another wickedly clever clue in LETS. Think of "reserve" as "re-serve"!

I enjoyed the pairing of NOT A BAD IDEA … BUT WILL IT WORK? I wasn't hot on the latter by itself, but there's something cool about two adjacent long entries, connected. The first time I saw something like that, I was blown away.

All in all, some great feature entries, but this type of grid doesn't allow for much juice outside of the big north and south stacks. For instance, NUTS ABOUT, TWIN PAC, ALATEEN … they're fine, but I wasn't nuts about them.