New York Times, Tuesday, August 9, 2016

Made this years ago when Brian Cimmet and Patrick Blindauer were nice enough to ask me to create something for Lollapuzzoola. Brainstormed ideas wanting to do something New York-centric (thus the NEW YORK NEW YORK running thru the middle and ELLIS Island and CHINATOWN running down) (And a little YOUBETCHA as a shout out to the Minnesotans out there!)

My original concept for this puzzle is quite different from what appears here. To be honest, I fought both Patrick and Will on this, but lost in the end. (Of course. they are probably right.) But I wanted to have double phrases (ZOOM ZOOM, HEAR YE HEAR YE, SING SING, etc.) separated by a black square but the FIRST word would be defined as is... and the second one would be "With such and such across (New concept)" So, for example, 71A: "To chant melodically" (SING) / 72A: "With 71A a prison in upstate NY" (SINGSING). This way, only the second half would have "With such and such ..." in the clue...so it would be two different ideas... a singular one and when doubled, a new concept.

But Patrick thought it would be better if they were defined as one concept in two different ways. In the end, I had to defer to his genius and instincts. (Will agreed and was willing to publish it in the NYT to generously cross promote the tournament this upcoming weekend, so I'm thrilled it's seeing the light of day, years later, in any form!)

Patrick and Will should share in the credit. (AUTHOR AUTHOR AUTHOR?) I urge everyone to go and have a blast at Lollapuzzoola, even though I can't make it this year. You can find me in San Francisco having a major bout of FOMO.

I love hanging out with crossworld people, so I'm sad that I haven't ever been able to make Lollapuzzoola. Fear of Missing Out (FOMO) indeed! What with the long trip out from the West Coast to NYC, and two little kids sapping my strength — er, delighting me — I'll miss this year too. Ah well.

Although I've seen a lot of word duplication puzzles before, this one had an interesting feel to it. I actually had the same internal debate Andrea did — I can see both sides of her struggle. On one hand, it's pretty cool to have one word defined as normal, and the other one cross-referenced. On the other hand, it's really fun to see doubled-word phrases … having two separate definitions! AUTHOR AUTHOR clued as both the Al Pacino film and the P.G. Wodehouse book is entertaining.

I also really liked how the last themer broke the pattern. As much as I like consistency, this is a potentially repetitive-feeling theme, so it's cool to get not just SING SING the prison, but SING SING SING, the classic big band tune. For solvers lulled into a false sense of complacency … ba-BAM!

I hadn't noticed all the NEW YORK NEW YORK-centered fill, so it was nice to get an explanation of why there was a good amount of crossword glue holding everything together: INRI, ERR ON, SKED, MUMBO (can only be clued one way), IT NO, etc. Makes more sense now that i see the trade-offs.

Finally, there are a few elements that make this puzzle more whimsical than what would usually be seen in the NYT — I just loved that [What generals keep up their sleevies?] for ARMIES. So playful.

Dang it, my FOMO is even worse now!