New York Times, Saturday, June 4, 2016

BYRON: Fun as always to work with Brad. He's so meticulous in his craft, but always in an easygoing manner. I love the things you learn when you construct, and the story behind 15A (CESAR ROMERO) may be one of my all-time favorites. MARTI pops up in crosswords often enough that I was quite surprised I hadn't run into that fascinating bit of trivia before.

BRAD: This puzzle began its life as a solo submission of mine with UPSET VICTIM / NATURE DEITY / FRAGILE EGOS in the upper left. The 1A had a misdirecting sports-related clue, but Will felt that the entry was not quite in-the-language enough to green-light. My subsequent revision hinged on at least one abbreviation he had decided to relegate permanently to the "no" list. The whole thing sat for a while, and on a whim, I sent the stack from the opposite corner across the country to see if Byron liked it (FINESSE SHOT / TROMBONISTS / the Ayn Rand title "WE THE LIVING.") Byron replaced the literary reference with WATER-LOVING to spare everyone involved ERI at 60D, and we were off.

I don't consider wordplay clues my strength, but I think I chipped in 31D and 53D to try to keep pace with Byron's brilliant 25A and others like 13D. It's also nice to scan the puzzle and see validation of our combined relish for pumping life into common entries with trivia-based clues. (In case you were wondering, a puzzle with that old NW did find favor at another venue.)

So much fun to see these guys work together. I really enjoyed their secret initialisms puzzle, each of them contributing a BW phrase.

Great to get such exciting entries as TECHNO MUSIC, THE BURBS, FINESSE SHOT, BOHEMIANS. TROMBONISTS might have been my favorite one, especially with the misdirecting [Ones using slides] clue, since I was a trombonist for a long time. I'm still waiting for someone to incorporate SAD TROMBONE, a juicy answer in my personal word list, into a grid …

I always learn something from a Wilber puzzle, and the same goes for a Walden. Not surprising that the effect more than doubled today, some sort of synergistic effect from the two of them teaming up. That piece of CESAR ROMERO trivia was really interesting. BARBICEL was tougher to grok, but the crossings were fair (perhaps I'll use it in discussions with my toddler, who's becoming obsessed with birds). And the ancient Egyptians have always fascinated me, so I enjoyed picking up that the SCARAB was used as some pharaohs' seal of office.

Perhaps a little too much learning in one sitting for my taste, though. I follow the NBA pretty carefully, but Dan ISSEL is outside of my knowledge base. OLEAN plays poorly to the black hole that is my deficiency in geography. RAMON Novarro similarly falls into my lacking knowledge of older actors. They're all fair(ish), but it felt like a lot in total.

This is one time where I understand some people telling me they like entries akin to ADIT. I'm sure Brad and Byron struggled against including one of the worst old-timey crossword glue entries, but it did help me break open the right half of the puzzle. Still, ADIT is hard to swallow.

Great clues:

• What kind of series could possibly start and end with S? MTWTF, bookended by Sunday and Saturday.
• It took me forever to figure out why [Common Allen wrench?] would mean ANGST. Makes much more sense when you think about that capitalized A, and Woody Allen.

A challenging puzzle with a bit too much crossword glue for my taste. Still, quite a few fun entries, and I did learn a lot.