New York Times, Tuesday, June 17, 2014

As you can see from my original submission, Will did major surgery on the grid and greatly improved the fill.

Brad Wilber sent me this link explaining why the D is silent in Django Unchained.

Neat idea from C.C. today. We've seen many puzzles based around silent letters, but I really enjoyed how she added an extra layer on top of that by choosing SILENT movies, e.g. ones which start with a silent letter. Clever concept and really cool that she managed to find an iconic one, PSYCHO, which happened to match the revealer, SILENT, in length.

A six-letter revealer might seem trivial, but it's one of the harder things to integrate. Seems bizarre, doesn't it, that a teeny lil' ol' six-letter word would cause so much trouble? But typically, a revealer is most elegant at the very SW or SE of a puzzle. And when you stack another theme answer on top of it (KNIGHT AND DAY over SILENT in this case), look at that 6x3 chunk, constrained on both the bottom and the top. It can be quite a challenge, especially if the letters aren't friendly.

I like the NE quite a lot, a real feat of cleanliness given those constraints. The SW is surprisingly fun with AMBIEN and BOOTIE (BOL is sadly not clued to my favorite bball player of all time, the stick-thin Manute Bol, often seen heaving up three-point shots), but SPINET as a small piano is going to be a roughie toughie for many. Even as a former cellist and trombonist, I hadn't heard this term before. At least all the crossings are fair.

Speaking of fair crossings, that MEHTA / MEADE cross is going to be a hair-puller for some. I think both are more than fair game, especially for the NYT solving audience, but that's a challenging square right there. I love JOHN GOODMAN and "The Big Lebowski" reference. I abide, after all. But I wonder if a different choice of long down fill might have been better there. It is quite a pile-up of names, with GOODMAN, MEADE, MEHTA, and ALITO all in a small subregion.

And POWER PLANTS, that's a beautiful piece of fill. It does create some filling challenges in the NW though. I think I might prefer C.C.'s original fill up there, although both ATRI and AFORE are tough pills to swallow. Perhaps a cheater square at the A of SCHWA could have helped things? I tend to play fast and loose with cheater squares (extra black squares which don't affect the total word count).

Really nice to get a clue I haven't seen before for ALI. Nice piece of trivia. And SHARK clued as [Jet fighter?] was just brilliant. Good stuff, especially for an early-week puzzle.