New York Times, Friday, July 3, 2015

I am very happy to be debuting my first themeless today! Being a themeless neophyte, I worked with just the single seed ALBUS DUMBLEDORE and let the subsequent fill take me wherever it wanted to go.

I spent a long time writing the clues for this puzzle, so I'm happy to see many of my favorites — THETA, DECK, BROMANCE, T-BALL, CIGS (though brilliantly edited to sync up with KIX), and CLEESE — make the cut. I was sad to see my more devious "Vessel of the 'Odyssey'?" for EPIC VERSE, "They call for a change of address" for PHDS, and "Subject of a noted 2007 outing" for ALBUS DUMBLEDORE get altered, but so it goes. I particularly liked the new clues for SEA ICE, RINGO, SLEEPS, and POTUS (which of course post-dates my submission!).

Since writing this puzzle, I've tried to be more careful about words that are almost always clued as part of a common phrase, e.g. POLI and RUSSE. I tried to save the former with the clue "Greek cities" and the latter with "French Russian," but no dice.

I hope that you enjoyed this first effort, and I'd be eager and grateful for any feedback.

ADDED NOTE: I completely agree with Jeff about SEX KITTEN. I would certainly not use that entry (or anything else of its ilk) in a puzzle today, and am sorry that I chose to a year or so ago when I made this puzzle.

Impressive debut themeless today. I was leery of those upper right and lower left corners, as a 4x8 space is so tough to fill with color and cleanliness. Brandon already had me with one of my favorite characters, ALBUS DUMBLEDORE, but intersecting him with HAD IT MADE / EL DORADO / AND ... SCENE! in that top right is even better. Very impressed how well he used so many of those long spaces, only paying the price of HALEN and TRAC.

Some die-hard Van Halen fans will disagree about HALEN, of course. But to me, it's inelegant in that it's partial-esque. How are you going to clue it, except for some variant of [Rockers Van ___]? Same goes with POLI, as Brandon already pointed out.

There's so much long material packed in, and I was impressed by how much of it works well. Even QUAKER GUN was really interesting to read up on. RUM RAISIN ice cream feels somewhat outdated to me, but entries like WHITECAPS and EPIC VERSE were enjoyable.

I bet some will love SEX KITTEN, but it really turned me off. That surprised me — even five years ago, I would have pumped a fist with an "awesome!" (Embarrassingly true.) But to the present-day me, this sort of term, while perhaps used in the mainstream 50 years ago to describe Brigitte Bardot, seems awfully derogatory now. I don't think it belongs in the New York Times. An indie puzzle, sure, a specialty puzzle for Maxim, absolutely. Could be that I have a daughter now — sure changes one's perspective.

It had such a strong enough effect on me that I was considering this puzzle for the POW! but seeing it dropped it right out of contention. Yes, it's fun to have cleverly cheeky references in the puzzle, but overt and potentially crass entries feel wildly out of place; beneath the NYT.

All that said, I enjoyed so much of this puzzle, including some impressive work in those very difficult 4x8 corners. And I'm sure some people will point to SEX KITTEN as their favorite entry.