New York Times, Friday, July 1, 2016
| Total | Debut | Latest | Collabs |
|---|---|---|---|
| 24 | 11/16/2009 | 6/23/2017 | 6 |
| Sun | Mon | Tue | Wed | Thu | Fri | Sat |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0 | 1 | 2 | 0 | 0 | 10 | 11 |
| Scrabble | Rebus | Circle | Pangram |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1.60 | 0 | 0 | 0 |
This puzzle:
Rows: 15, Columns: 15 Words: 70, Blocks: 30 Missing: {V} Spans: 1 This is puzzle # 19 for Mr. Mulhern. NYT links: Across Lite PDFI made this puzzle about two years ago. It's actually a rewrite; initially, I had a couple answers (FLASH ART, AN ITEM) that Will and Joel rightly nixed, all of which led to the version you see today. As a big fantasy sports fan, I was happy to include the grid-spanning FANTASY BASEBALL, as well as some other fun fill.
Hope this puzzle is a pleasant lead-in to a wonderful long weekend!
Two nice answers, FANTASY BASEBALL and SQUARE BRACKET down the midlines of the puzzle. I'm huge into fantasy basketball, and I can see the appeal of FANTASY BASEBALL (if only I liked baseball!). Something so compelling about analyzing oodles of stats, cutting the data in hundreds of ways a la Billy Beane in "Moneyball."
Sometimes when a themeless features a few really long answers, we don't get much else. Really nice that James configured his grid to allow for 12 eight-letter-long slots. My favorite was TEXAS BBQ, not just because I love me some BBQ, but that terminal Q is so bizarre-looking. It's also so smoothly interlocked into SQUARE BRACKET.
I would have liked more of these longish slots to be converted into stellar material, though. I enjoyed EPIDURAL with its funny [… labor management?] clue, and ER DOCTOR, TAILGATE, FLASHERS with brilliant usage of the word "hazards" (slang for hazard lights) in [Driver's hazards]. ANAPOLIS felt a little off, like ANNAPOLIS had been misspelled, and it felt like there was a lot of geography what with NAGASAKI and CANBERRA. I did like learning a little about each city, though.
Grids with great grid flow like today's often present construction challenges. It's so tough to work from two different directions and get everything to mesh together. Generally I thought James did quite well, for example getting the ER DOCTOR/TAILGATE region to mesh with LESTAT/LAKOTA/STARES, without needing crossword glue. The one place I hitched was in the center, with STUPA. The middle is no doubt the toughest region to fill, given how many words flow into it, and STUPA is really the only word which stood out to me. (Just one data point, but my dad's a practicing Buddhist, and he didn't know what a STUPA was.)
I would have loved a little more cleverosity in the SQUARE BRACKET clue — [Backslash neighbor] made it a little too easy to look down at my keyboard and fill in the blank right away. How about [It's often to the left of a backslash], misdirecting to URLs?
Overall, a couple of really nice long entries and a lot of care taken to make the grid pretty smooth.
1 T | 2 A | 3 T | 4 T | 5 L | 6 E | 7 F | 8 L | 9 A | 10 S | 11 H | 12 E | 13 R | 14 S |
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15 O | N | E | M | A | N | 16 A | I | R | W | O | M | A | N |
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17 T | A | X | C | U | T | 18 N | A | G | A | S | A | K | I |
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19 E | P | A | 20 D | E | 21 S | T | R | O | Y | 22 J | E | T |
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23 B | O | S | 24 S | 25 R | I | A | L | S | 26 L | O | I | S |
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27 A | L | B | U | 28 M | 29 C | S | I | 30 M | O | R | N | |||
31 G | I | B | L | E | 32 T | 33 Y | A | 34 Z | O | O | ||||
35 S | Q | U | A | R | 36 E | B | R | A | C | K | 37 E | 38 T | ||
39 S | T | U | P | A | 40 C | H | O | R | A | 41 L |
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42 F | 43 I | E | S | 44 I | S | 45 O | 46 A | U | D | I | O |
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47 R | I | M | A | 48 A | D | E | P | 49 T | 50 T | O | L | L |
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51 E | G | O | 52 D | O | U | B | T | I | 53 T | 54 C | G | I |
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55 C | A | N | 56 B | E | R | R | A | 57 L | E | 58 S | T | A | T |
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59 O | R | I | E | N | T | A | L | 60 L | A | K | O | T | A |
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61 N | O | T | A | T | A | L | L | 62 S | T | A | R | E | S |
Answer summary: 3 unique to this puzzle, 2 unique to Shortz Era but used previously.
Found bugs or have suggestions?