New York Times, Friday, August 7, 2020

This is my tenth NY Times puzzle, a milestone I never imagined when I started making puzzles. It's the first themeless puzzle I submitted, though I'd been trying (and failing) for a year to make one I felt good about. There are certain Friday/Saturday constructor names we see time and again, cranking out one silky smooth and lively grid after another. I don't know how they do it, but I appreciate their talents so much more now.

Cluing a themeless turns out to be harder than I thought too. My clue for 1-Across was [Drink that's hard on the stomach?] … heading the wrong direction right out of the gate! The editing team always improves my puzzles, but this time they had to work harder than usual with changes to well over half the clues. Thanks to Will and his team for making it a better puzzle!

Hope you found it to be an enjoyable escape from the craziness of these times.

I'm always on the lookout for devilish wordplay, and it usually comes in the form of "take a common phrase and repurpose it creatively." I got a delightful twist on that today, with the simple [Sent]. My first reaction was to roll my eyes. That could be anything! Delivered, mailed, postmarked, … oh! "Sent" as in the "elated" sense = ON CLOUD NINE! Such a devious trick, the sudden flip from annoyance to delight so memorable.

I also appreciated how Tom tweaked my perception of "add-a-preposition" phrases being generally neutral to dull. SCOOCH OVER is so much fun, as is DOGGED IT. Even SKATE BY has its merits. And don't get me started on SPIT IT OUT, which I often have to force myself to say to my three-year-old. (Both literally and metaphorically, sadly. Who drinks water out of a muddy kiddie pool? My son, apparently.)

Although most every entry was fair, several crossings felt treacherous. My wife, Jill, uses HARISSA often, and I'm a big fanboy of Zeno of ELEA. Don't get me started on Arthurian legends, so UTHER Pendragon gets a squee!!! from me, and I love Hitchcock's work, so Tippi HEDREN is great. I like KIR cocktails, and I've done enough crosswords to know that KOLN is something German.

Jim Horne navigated successfully through all three of those pitfalls! Yet he failed … at the Z of TMZ / ZAGNUT. He did grow up in Canadia, where the immortal ZAGNUT never thrived, and TMZ is the Jeff-Chen-level-of-lowbrow that mystifies decent people.

I politely nodded, sympathizing at Jim's plight (while posting to T-M-Zed about it).

As much as I adore "Ocean's 11" and phrases like BODY SHOT, ROLE PLAY, CRONUTS, I had to say THAT'S A SHAME about the booby-trapped crossings. I'd sympathize with solvers who finished with a wrong square or two.