New York Times, Saturday, July 4, 2015

This puzzle was constructed just over a year ago, inspired by the interesting intersection of BABA GHANOUJ and JEDI MIND TRICK at the J. I believe I wanted to do something similar with a Q, X, or Z in the 56A square, but that clearly didn't work out. In all honesty, I don't know what I was thinking, going with the black square pattern that you see here. Yes, it was practically built around the BABA GHANOUJ / GLOW IN THE DARK / JEDI MIND TRICK seed entries, but whoa, I still can't get over how weird it looks.

As with many of my puzzle successes, I can't believe how lucky I got with some of the fill. Sure, let's just try KLONDIKE BAR at 56A and hope something nice comes out of it (LOFGREN / AM I RIGHT). Let's spend hours monkeying around with the top-left and stumble upon the lovely SPELLING BEE and TYSON GAY, both never before seen in a NYT puzzle. Oh look, IDIOT right next to SMART at 25 & 26D. A Scrabble average of 1.98 without anything terribly forced! It's almost as if I know what I'm doing!

One more thing: My apologies to all the solvers that combed this grid looking for an Independence Day mini-theme, and were left disappointed … I must appear so unpatriotic. Truth is, I was quite surprised to see that Will had slotted this for today, though I'm stoked for its appearance on a nice, memorable date! If you are looking for something July Fourthy, however, perhaps today's offering on my website may interest you :)

Happy solving, everyone!

Nice offering from one of the 20-something constructors. I sometimes do Sam's puzzles on his indie site, and I must confess the vibe is sometimes way too young for me. I miss a lot of references as to what the kids say these days, I know virtually none of the current pop trivia, and his puzzles definitely race past the line of good taste (totally fine for an indie puzzle!). Today, Sam targets a broader audience with some great long entries like GLOW IN THE DARK, SPELLING BEE, RECORD CROWD.

I like the unusual arrangement, starting out with a shifted triple-stack pattern in the upper left. This allows him to run GLOW IN THE DARK as well as JEDI MIND TRICK (some references never get old to fanboys throughout the ages!) through the puzzle. Beautiful results; snappy entries without much glue.

I did wonder about AM I RIGHT though. Don't people mostly say/write AMIRITE? And BARF … do people really use that these days? It certainly used to be in vogue back in the 1990s, but has it made a resurgence?

And HOLLA? These types of little oddities highlight the differences in my and Sam's experiences and backgrounds. They all probably sound spot-on to people in his college class, but they gave me some head-scratching.

With a 70-word puzzle, I'd expect to see the gluey entries kept to less than five, and Sam does well there. NIRO always feels like a partial to me (DE NIRO is fine, of course), and MISDID strikes me as not really in usage. Perhaps it's appropriate for a particular sport or game or something? Along with the A COP partial, Sam keeps his liability count reasonably low.

A couple of clues snookered me, so I'll explain them:

• [Ring-toss item?] is HAT, when you toss your hat into the ring
• [They come down to the wire] = brilliant! BIRDS fly down to a telephone wire.
• I filled in [Skipping words?] with TRA LA and groaned. Thankfully, it was I PASS. Fun wordplay.