New York Times, Saturday, August 27, 2016

My First NYT puzzle was in 1972. Puzzle constructors back in the 70's needed access to dictionaries, song books, atlases, encyclopedias, etc. Today, a few keystrokes to the Internet and Google eliminate library visits and getting off your butt to look up information. Back then, no PC access to crossword compilers or word lists. Back then, a ream of graph paper, a fistful of hard-lead pencils and rubber erasures by the truckload were a puzzle constructor's tools. I still have tear-, blood- and sweat-stained manuscript grids from those days. Lead-pencil smudges and erasure holes nearly obliterate the penciled-in grid words.

When Will Shortz introduced the themeless, low-word-count Friday and Saturday puzzles, I began assembling a word list of my own. Words I picked up in my newspaper, magazine and book reading. Words I figured would be fresh grid entries for themeless construction. Fresh vocabulary in evidence, I believe, in my puzzle today.

(Jeff: the first puzzle of Jim's that we have in our database is from 1974, but he is sure he made a puzzle for Will Weng that was published on 6/14/72 — we're trying to figure out the discrepancy.)

Constructors have such different styles, such varying leanings when it comes to the trade-off of clean vs. colorful. Patrick Berry is far to one end of the spectrum, always producing squeaky clean themeless grids with nary a dab of glue in sight. However, sometimes his puzzles can feel a bit workmanlike; not the snazziest of feature entries.

Today, Jim gives us one on the other end, with a ton of dazzling entries held together by a good amount of crossword glue. Just look at that beautiful triple of SINE QUA NON / CREAMSICLE / SEX PISTOLS! So snazzy, so evocative. Unfortunately, it requires the pluralized ESCS and PONES, along with IHS (which my darn computer keeps auto-correcting, but it's supposedly "Iesus Hominum Salvator") and SQ MI.

LET IT SNOW / OZONE HOLE / MARS ROVER are also great answers — and how cool is it that OZONE HOLE and MARS ROVER are both space(ish) related? (If only SPACE CADET had been in that region …) So much fun when themeless constructors manage to get related answers intersecting or adjacent to each other. But we get ATOR, so awkward either as a suffix or a partial (AT OR).

KARAOKE BAR / I BELIEVE SO / DRUMSTICKS so nice — REUNE is awkward though, and OIS is another weird little suffix. And BECLOUD … hmm. It does appear to be in the dictionary.

It's a style that relies too heavily on crossword glue for my taste, but I can see how some solvers would really dig it, the overwhelming amount of great material making the liberal use of crossword glue acceptable.

Finally, a beautiful clue in PIANO WIRE. It might get lost on non-musicians, but inside a piano there are 88 tiny hammers that strike the different tuned wires to produce notes. [Something hammers hit] seemed so innocent, and it produced a neat a-ha moment when I finally figured it out.