New York Times, Saturday, May 10, 2014

My seed for this puzzle was MCMANSION. When filling out the puzzle, I tried to use as many scrabbly words as I can, without introducing obscurities or crosswordese. I hope solvers find this puzzle entertaining and challenging.

When I submitted this puzzle back in early November 2012, I thought MCMANSION would be a great debut word in NYT. I was surprised when I solved Paula Gamache's December 14, 2012 puzzle and found MCMANSIONS there. I was even more surprised when Will Shortz accepted this puzzle two days later on December 16.

Another appropriately silky creation from Barry. This one eschews the typical separation of corners, instead meshing two sets of triple-stacks in the NE and SW corners. Very hard to do well, as the high constraints make it difficult to get both snappy answers and clean crossings in those locations.

That top stack is loaded with juicy answers; MCMANSION / CRAZY BONE / DONT PANIC. Ah, if only the latter had been clued to "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy." I had never read the book until two years ago and thunked myself on the forehead for being so remiss. And I had an initial hitch at CRAZY BONE, waffling on whether to love it or try to force in FUNNY BONE. But it Googles fine.

It's impressive then that Barry got a nice stack running down the right side. ON IN YEARS is a nice one, as is IONIAN SEA. NECTARINE is a bit more bland in my book, but a nice clue related to the color, not the fruit, gave it extra oomph.

Given how nice those six long answers are, it's no surprise that there's a bit of glue needed to hold them together. MCD seems like it should be "a thing" (short for McDonald's?) but as a random Roman numeral, it sticks in my craw a little. Just personal taste. And AZTEK is a fun combination of odd letters, but SHAK feels wonky to me. I suppose there needs to be a way to abbreviate Shakespeare (and maybe this is the uber-common way to do it?) but what an unsightly four letters stuck together. I like the SBA as they do some good work in facilitating loans to entrepreneurs, but I hardly ever like an ASE. So a mix of snazzy stuff with some glue required.

Contrast the SW corner. There's still really nice stuff in there, DREAMLAND being excellent, but there's nothing that jumped out to me as a marquee answer in that corner. It is really nice to have only a DSO and MIES holding it all together. So not quite as snazzy, but not a lot of junk either.

A really nice feature of this grid arrangement is that it allows the NW and SE corners to be more isolated than usual, and Barry does a bang-up job in both. Love the JINXES and PIZZA and ZIPPO Scrabbly letters, all done without making it all feel forced.

Figuring out Saturday puzzle clues is getting to be my favorite part of crosswords, and the clue for BONSAI didn't disappoint. It is a small job indeed — not a job that will take a small amount of time, but a small work of art. And seeing then MONKEY as a wacky 1960's dance, that adds a lot of spice. Finally, I really liked the Ruy LOPEZ clue. For years I've been fascinated by chess terminology, and there's something awesome about hearing this lingo. I didn't actually know the Ruy Lopez opening, but seeing this made me go look it up.

Now to think of what the Chen Crossword Maneuver should be...