Ashton Anderson author page

I haven't seen such a fresh trio of marquee central answers in ages. All of them are NYT debuts, and only one was already in our XWI Word List. REAL ORIGINAL, dripping with sarcasm, is ironically really original. Although I didn't recognize CUDDLE PUDDLE, it's easily understandable. Plus, squee-worthy animals!

Great material in the lower left and upper right corners, too. Themelesses are all about making the most of your precious long slots, and CHEM LAB / CUT LOOSE / ADMIT ONE are all excellent. Not only are they the kind of colorful multi-word phrases that editors prize, but they're ripe for clever cluing. This chem dork loves the misdirect away from solutions and solutes.

Not quite as much zing in the opening corner, unfortunately. I appreciate the effort to make BRANDISH sing, but the image of people waving guns in the air is not so appealing given current events. The oldie MR SANDMAN makes its second appearance in less than a month, too — although that does make SEE DOUBLE apt.

Attempting to forestall the questions I'm bound to get:

• DIRNDL is exactly as clued, a folk dress.
• RES is … a residential telephone number?
• Tube letters are always SPF. Except when they're ADA. As in, ADA Lovelace's cathode ray tube, of course.

(American Dental Association on a toothpaste tube.)

A lot of fun packed into this Friday-ish grid, mixed with some kick-it-up-a-notch Saturday-level clues. It's ironic that disgusting NONPAREIL candies mean "without parallel." I'm going to have some words with our French friends about that …

Such sass! BIG SURPRISE dripping with sarcasm. GOD, I HOPE NOT. SHUT YOUR PIEHOLE! And I'm curious how our French friends down the street would react if I said EXSQUEEZE ME? Apt that the opening corner contains AGGRO.

Excellent grid, Ashton did a superb job of exsqueezing the most out of his long slots, that SLY DOG. Kicking off with a HOT START to MIND GAME to WORKING IT to BONA FIDE, virtually every one of his 8+ letter slots contains an asset.

GROWING UP isn't that exciting, but I liked the effort to elevate it with that insightful Virginia Woolf quote. "Losing some illusions … perhaps to acquire others." That is one high-level MIND GAME there.

68-word constructions are so tough to make both colorful and clean. Big ups for gridsmanship — POW!-worthy work.

The tone reminded me too much of my day-to-day life, though. "Dad, I know how to use the fancy cup!" she yelled, just before SPILLing milk down my socks. Six going on seventeen ...

So much of a Friday themeless's satisfaction is personal connection. I don't envy Will Shortz, having to sift through dozens of these per week, trying to guess what tenor and feel will go over best with what percentage of his audience.

Colloquial phrases are among my favorite themeless marquee entries. IM ON A ROLL and NO WORRIES, with LETS DANCE playing in the background? Sawyer (congrats on your debut!) and Ashton are indeed on a roll!

When I first hear the term LINEARA, I could not wrap my head around that sequence of letters. I knew it had to be right, especially since all those vowels would be useful to constructors, but it's tough to decipher the space (LINEAR A) if this language isn't something you've already deciphered.

The grid layout ... it's tough to make mid-length material sing, and stuff like ENTER IN, EMOTION, TOWAWAY didn't provoke much dancing. There was also so much short material (4-6 letters) concentrated in the middle that I bogged down while trudging along the center diagonal.

Overall, though, I enjoyed this themeless, especially what with SCHNOZ, EASY AS PIE, WHOLE HOG, and the awesomely bizarre PRESSSEND as highlights. So many ESSes blurring together!

So much goodness packed into this themeless! Big corners like the upper right and lower left, with their stacks intersecting stacks, are notoriously hard to fill with snazzy material and a minimum of crossword glue. That upper right sizzles, all six long entries oh so good.

Well, the hated TOM BRADY being the exception. Grumble grumble says this Seahawks fan.

With every single short answer perfectly fine, that's stellar work.

Speaking of stellar, I even liked SKY ATLAS. Not only is it a neat term that this astronomy nerd liked learning, but it's easy to get from the crossings, as both words are recognizable as astronomy-related terms.

The lower left was also entertaining, but it didn't quite catch my attention like the upper right. BUST A GUT and UPTOWN GIRL are both fine answers, but both have a bit of an old-timey feel to them. I suppose the latter is a classic, immediately recognizable even to this pop music idiot.

The crossing of APO and THE ROOTS ... APO (Army post office) is going to be three random letters to some solvers, and THE ROOTS could easily be THE RIOTS. No bueno. It left me with a 50-50 guess, and thankfully, I guessed right. A case could be made that THE ROOTS is a big enough name that I ought to have known it. But I think while JIMMY FALLON and the TONIGHT SHOW are must-know names for educated solvers (even QUESTLOVE), I don't think THE ROOTS passes that bar.

Along with the toughie PERCALE, that corner didn't make as good an impression as the opposite one. Still, it's pretty darn strong--GOO GOO GA GA made this dad laugh--if you can overlook the big flaw.

I was leaning toward giving this one the POW!, what with all the fantastic SPINAL TAP, SUPERDOME, ANTIPOPE type answers to accompany the aforementioned. But there was another hiccup for me, the clue for OGLE: [Look at on the beach, say]. Ick. Ick. Again, ick. Why clue it that way when there are so many less creepy ways to do it?

Overall, 95% of the puzzle had me nodding and smiling. Too bad about that remaining 5%.

AUTOTUNE! If you haven't already seen "The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt," it's well worth watching if only for the autotuned opening song. I thought the show had its ups and its downs, but even the bad episodes were made palatable by that awesome theme.

Interesting layout today, featuring only 10 answers of 8+ letters. Most of those were pretty strong — DRAG SHOW, ONLINE AD, and HULA SKIRT some of my favorites — but I wasn't sure if GET WEIRD felt natural enough. Is GET BAD or GET CONFUSED or GET WILD equally acceptable ... or just weird? Not sure.

So that places a lot of pressure on the seven-letter answers to generate color and snazz. Of the whopping 18 (!) seven-letter entries, some are quite good. DAS BOOT gets a great clue, describing a amusingly-named drinking vessel. PACHISI teaches us a bit about the etymology of the name. CANKLES is a funny word, although I don't know how well this will go over with certain solvers. (The term is a portmanteau of "calf-ankles". Do yourself a favor and don't look up pics.)

Normally, I love the onomatopoeia of KERPLOP … but as Ashton mentioned a while back, he likes to search for fill where adjacent or crossing answers relate, giving mini-themes. I'm not such a huge fan of KERPLOP crossing TOILET in my morning crossword. Ahem.

STAY DRY and TALK BIG also hit me the same way as GET WEIRD. TALK A BIG GAME, for sure. TALK BIG? Dunno. STAY DRY … okay, it's legit, as in a mom saying ["Keep out of the rain!"]. Perhaps more of a neutral entry for me.

So with a decent (but not outstanding) number of grid assets, I'd expect the shorter stuff to be pretty darn clean. James and Ashton do pretty well in this regard. TKTS is a bit awkward and KERB is pretty out there, but neither is puzzle-killingly terrible. And while some people will hate CAGER, there seems to be dictionary support for it.

Overall, some strong vocab, as well as some that didn't quite hit for me.

A lot of nice entries today packed into a 72 word grid. I especially liked what was going on in the NW quadrant, given the LIQUOR UP / TEQUILA crossing as well as ONE ON ONE and BUTTOCKS squeezed into a UNITARD. Love the intentional connections; a nice touch of which we don't see enough. Such nice packing density of colorful entries, especially given how large that L-shaped quadrant is. It's daunting to work with a triple-stack of any kind, and when one turns the corner into other long entries, things can get rough.

Often I'm not a fan of grids leaning on 7-letter entries, but I liked a lot of what I saw today. That SW corner especially exemplifies what I personally like out of 7s: SWEE PEA with a neat trivia clue (all these years I thought he was a she), the colloquial HIT ME UP and OF A SORT. Excellent triplet, even featuring AP TEST running through them.

72-word grids sometimes have a danger of feeling restricted, and I noted that today. Usually I'm fine with a set of cheater squares, and even prefer them since they often make smoother fill possible. Today, the squares after HAIL and before ALTS felt restrictive to me, nearly dividing the puzzle into halves. I can see how difficult it would have been to get those giant NW and SE corners filled though — 8x3 chunk intersecting a 7x4 is something I stay away from because of the difficulty involved in getting colorful and clean fill. Always the trade-offs.

Curious, the decision to connect MORE / OR LESS and BAD / EMS. I personally don't like seeing cross-referenced partials, seeming like a desperate save to make something like OR LESS acceptable. As much as I liked the NW quadrant, I didn't care for OR LESS, maybe even liking it less for the cross-reference. And BAD / EMS … whoo. Nearly made the puzzle impossible for me. Saturday puzzles should be hard, so maybe this is fine. It was a very unsatisfying moment for me though, when I finally did enter those BAD / EMS squares after struggling over them for so long. Not an a-ha moment at all.

Fun anchor phrases, ANTS ON A LOG such a snappy entry. It's too bad it's not more well-known that it required such a definitional entry. And I think I liked STREET MEAT a lot. I think. I would put a picture of it up, but all the images Bing showed me were of a different (NSFW) ilk. Ahem.

★ I love days like this. Sometimes I have to dig a little to uncover the assets of a crossword — almost every puzzle has something to admire in it — but sometimes there's goodness everywhere I look. It's a true joy to write about a puzzle when I enjoyed it as much as today's.

I'll go back to my personal system of analytics to take measure of this puzzle. First, the ASSETS:

• CHA CHING
• AI WEI WEI
• BEANTOWN
• SIR KAY
• SIXTH MAN
• THE CLOUD
• ON A HUNCH
• WATERSKI
• KOWTOW
• IN A WORD
• NO SWEAT
• DONE AND DONE
• I CAN RELATE
• TRUST NO ONE
• TAKE THE FALL
• IWO JIMA
• AM RADIO
• NEW AGEY

An astonishing 18. More typically, I usually count about 12 in an average NYT themeless. Now, let's evaluate the LIABILITIES:

• OISE
• WSW
• HIERO
• ENS

Judgment of what's an ASSET and what's a LIABILITY is completely subjective of course (some might argue that RESTATE isn't great, but I hear about companies restating earnings all the time).

So how does the puzzle hold up? We have fewer than five LIABILITIES, and ASSETS minus LIABILITIES = 14 (much higher than my threshold of 10), so this puzzle easily crosses my thresholds. Not surprising, considering how much fun I had solving this bad boy.

Not to say that it's perfect — very few puzzles are. For me, the biggest issue was the slash in the middle of the puzzle tending to create a two mini-puzzle solving experience. It wasn't a serious problem, but it did hinder the puzzle's solving flow for me. I've used a similar effect before, because it makes puzzle construction easier. One of the biggest challenges in themeless creation is working with interlocking areas, where one change ripples through the puzzle. If you can section off your puzzle into separate pieces, it makes construction much easier.

Well done; such a pleasurable solving experience for me today.

Good Saturday workout, with a huge number of fresh, up-to-date entries. It's really neat to see a themeless puzzle obviously put together by constructors of Gen Y, hopefully bringing in more younger solvers into the NYT fold.

Some wonderful long entries, PRIMAL URGE and MAKE BANK my favorite. Colorful phrases that jump off the page are hard to beat. LEGALIZE IT also does a nice job touching on the national debate around marijuana, which is legal here in Washington State. FYI, it's odd to be running around Greenlake (a beautiful 2.8 mi loop in the heart of Seattle) and get a big whiff of pot smoke. Sometimes from another runner!

The older generation of solvers might not be as into this puzzle as others, as it could argued that it doesn't have a "classic" feel. One aspect of that is the test of time, which I'm not sure LEGALIZE IT or SHE SAID YES (the song) will pass (congrats, James!). Another is that there's so much material geared toward "feeling fresh" that it might overwhelm. I like new entries as much as anyone, but seeing LEGALIZE IT, REEFER, and SEX SYMBOL all together felt like a tad too much testosterone flowing through the grid. Could just be me, also reading too much into some of the clues.

Heck though, even if you agree with me, a great thing about a daily puzzle with a large number of constructors is the huge variety. It's a reasonable bet that there will be a more female-oriented puzzle in the near future, if that's your taste. FYI, Amy Reynaldo started a great dialogue about male/female constructors well worth reading.

Take a look at that fantastic SE corner (count me as a huge fan of ANATOLIA and the Seven Wonder of the Ancient World). That area is a beautiful piece of work, what with PATTY CAKE, LUCKY ME, MAKE BANK integrated all without a single blemish. I'd hope all themeless puzzles aspire to that level of quality. It's rare to see such snazziness without at least one ugly entry.

As far as the overall construction, the long entries are beautiful. All twelve of them are good to great, and LUCKY ME is such a beautiful choice for a seven-letter entry. It all does come at a price though, with the handful of NES, FER, ABAB, ETERNE, AYLA to hold everything together. While that seems like such a small number of entries, there's so much competition in themelesses these days that I did notice them as I solved.

Finally, a beautiful clue for the difficult LEE. At first glance it would seem simple to clue, yes? But it's been used so many times, finding something interesting and not overused is tough. Trivia-related clues can be hit or miss, but I really enjoyed learning something I didn't know about General Lee.

ADDED NOTE: James's girlfriend... SHE SAID YES! Okay, forgot what I said about the staying power of that entry. Congrats, James!