Barry C. Silk author page

A strong triple-stack of 11-letter answers kicking off the puzzle, BLACK FRIDAY / TITANIUM ORE / WAITING AREA really fun. I'm a mechanical engineer by education, so I'm always amazed at how useful TITANIUM is. Such an incredible strength to weight ratio, and it's one of the foundations of modern orthopedics.

Stretching to fill in 15 long answers is no joke. It's especially hard to convert all those long slots into assets when you take up so much real estate with the central grid-spanner, BED AND BREAKFAST. I really like WINE STEWARD, and the MANASSAS / ANTIETAM pairing is fun, but I felt like the conversion rate today wasn't as high as I would like. GO BEFORE, TAKES LEAVE, SIGNS OVER are all fine answers, just not that colorful or interesting to me.

That's a risk themeless constructors run when trying to work with so many long entries. I generally find themelesses to be outstanding if there are at least 10 snazzy entries, so is it better to start with a ton of interlocked long slots and hope to convert most of them to assets, or start with fewer long slots and make sure every single one sings? That's the eternal question.

I'm on the fence about BTWO and R AND B types of entries these days. On one hand, they are hard to suss out and look interestingly weird in the grid. On the other, when do you ever see B TWO in real life? R AND B feels better to me (not sure why), but it was a little odd to get the full BED AND BREAKFASTS and the shortened R AND B.

ORT is harder to swallow, as one of the more notorious crosswordese words. Patrick Merrell recently started a blog using ORT in a cheeky way. Fun posts.

Overall, I like having mini-themes in themelesses, but it's often nice to have something not quite so transparent (I filled in CYBER MONDAY right after getting BLACK FRIDAY). I'd prefer to have to work a little to figure out both answers, and then earn my a-ha moment.

Barry gives us a dose of computer lingo today, with SPAM FILTER a colorful 1-Across. It was interesting to uncover EVERIFY, which looked kookily like EVER IF I, and CYBER WAR. I like when mini-themes crop up in a themeless, although I find it more elegant when those answers are in symmetrical spots. Still, having E VERIFY crossing SPAM FILTER is pretty fun.

I thought I had learned all the E-FILE, E-READER, E-TAIL kind of stuff, so I wanted to look up E-VERIFY. Interesting that almost half a million employers use it now. I kind of wish I hadn't looked it up, as it seems to be steeped in controversy around illegal immigration issues.

CYBER WAR … is that "a thing"? Google says it is, although it has an old-timey feel to me, akin to saying "cyberspace." Feels like there's a more colorful term emerging for CYBER WAR, but I'm not sure what it is. Ideas?

Speaking of mini-themes, I really liked the idea of placing two Greek states across the middle. After uncovering SPARTA, I pumped a fist and plunked in ATHENS. Dang it! Well, ITHACA seemed to work better ... no. By the time I got to the correct answer of ATTICA, I really, really wanted some historical tie between it and SPARTA. I found all sorts of information about the rivalry between Athens and SPARTA, but only that ATTICA encompassed the city of Athens. Sigh.

Barry gives us a good amount of colorful long material like SEEK ASYLUM, STARRY EYED, and even FOOD WEB, but it does come at a price. I think most of it is minor, like ISS(ue), the discontinued Olds CIERA, ACR(oss), Mel OTT who shows up in way too much compared to his level of actual fame because of his crossword-friendly name, and the religious inscription INRI. I'd be curious to know how many Christians would say it's a gimme.

Stacking 11-letter answers is a tough task — there are so many crossings that must work out, and too often that results in some ugly piece of glue. Barry gives us one of the best stacked 11s from recent memory, with RADIO GALAXY (I used to love astronomy), ABRACADABRA, and ICE CUBE TRAY, with such clean crossings. Some might think YAYS is a bit iffy, but I tend to let pluralized sounds slide when it's common to hear them in multiples. I can imagine a crowd letting out a bunch of YAYS, yeah?

Okay, some might question OCULARS (a fancy term for "eyepiece"), but OCULARS are a big product for Olympus, which invested in my previous company (Acucela Inc.) so it's fine by me.

Loved USS NAUTILUS too, as it evoked images of Captain Nemo's ship, the Nautilus. Barry does pretty well with all his long slots, even PLEISTOCENE an interesting word, and PARAPHRASES getting a great clue in [Shortens a sentence, say]. I tried to stretch out PARDON in so many ways — dang it!

Interesting clue for MIL, a common measurement in mechanical engineering equal to a thousandth of an inch. A MICRON is a millionth of a meter. Too much engineering-speak? Not for me, but I can understand how some might grouse, especially when you toss in JOULE.

When a puzzle doesn't have a huge number of long assets (I count maybe 10-11 here), it's important to me to keep the gluey bits down. Otherwise, they tend to overwhelm the assets during my solve. -THON is a suffix, ENS and AUTH are abbreviations, LAC a bit of French, JAS is an abbreviation for … James? There's nothing egregious here, but overall, it's enough to make me notice. I wouldn't mind as much if there were, say, 15 great entries, which would stomp down those pesky gluey bits.

Great clue in [it may be written in stone], a quite literal interpretation for RUNE. I also appreciated the modern clue for TESLA, [They charge a lot for their cars]. It's not quite there yet, as TESLA charging stations are nowhere close to ubiquitous, but I really liked the idea behind that clue.

Interesting layout. As I solved, I thought there weren't very many long slots, but it turns out there are quite a few — just more spread out than I'm used to. I really liked the colorful KNEE BENDS and SPLIT ENDS types of entries. Nice to see a few more in STALE JOKE, FRONT PAGE, and COLOR WHEEL. Spacing the great stuff around the grid has the beneficial effect of not having all your best material only concentrated in the four corners.

QUADRUPLE PLAY is going to be pretty ho-hum to the solvers who complain that crosswords feature way too much baseball. I personally like rules — more accurately, trying to figure out loopholes around them — so I had fun trying to understand this one. Seems like a fourth out can be declared in many different ways, all of which depend on extremely unlikely circumstances.

I'll admit, I still don't really get how any of them actually work.

Given that some of the long slots were filled with neutralish answers (SCENARIO and SPOILAGE), there were fewer feature entries than I like to see in a themeless. So it's a shame two of them fell slightly short for me: SQUEAK TOY is a legitimate term, but SQUEAKY TOY sounds so much better to my ear (and it gets almost twice as many Google hits). COFFEE RUSH is a concept I understand as coffee is an important part of my day, but it doesn't sound quite right. CAFFEINE RUSH? COFFEE BUZZ? COFFEE HIGH? Hmm, not sure — none of them sounds dead-on perfect.

Some tough entries/clues in the puzzle:

• FiOS apparently is a Verizon service, apparently standing for "Fiber Optic Service."
• How is TWIT a [Goose]? I believe it's in the "silly goose" sense.
• OYEZ! is a term I learned from crosswords. I didn't know it could be spelled OYES, which made it very hard to guess correctly, especially considering ...
• DELOS. Dang it, I got fooled by knowledge that Barry likes to work in J Q X Zs. I filled in DELOZ with such confidence. Sigh.

Barry is known for his desire to work in high Scrabble value letters, and he does so in spades today. At least one each of the four bigs (J Q X Z), and the six Js is amazing. Typically these Scrabbly letters aren't easy to work cleanly into a grid, so it's really impressive that I only hitched a few times during my solve.

I especially appreciated how much care Barry took with his shorter fill, only SYS, ENES and SKEDS blips on my radar. Yes, RAYE and IVES are a bit on the older side, but they are definitely famous people. Where I winced slightly was hitting some of the mid-length stuff:

E-VOTE: is this a thing? "e-voting" seems to be legit. E-VOTE … for my money's worth, the jury's still out.

UNREELS: okay, this appears to be fine. It just seemed odd to me.

BOATEL: again, this term (a "boat hotel") is just not in my wheelhouse.

PUNNER or a PUNSTER? Merriam Webster defines PUNNER as "a ramming tool." Huh.

That said, I'd usually take questionable mid-length stuff that I don't see that often over questionable short stuff I see day in, day out. At least it's fun to try to decide if something like BOATEL or PUNNER is legit.

Beautiful entries featuring those Scrabbly letters, JAZZ QUARTET accounting for a J, a Q, and two Zs alone. Barry is smart with his placement of these tough letters, usually dropping them in right at the beginning or ending of a word. Makes his job much easier.

Finally, a great clue: [Not pass the bar?]. I thought about the corner bar first, then the legal bar, and it took me forever to land on a sand bar (thus RUNning AGROUND). A majority of this puzzle's cluing was simply ultra-hard, and it would have been great to get a few more fantastically creative clues like this. I like a solving challenge, but I love me a clever clue.

When a themeless puzzle goes up to the maximum 72 words, I'm pretty strict with my criteria: no more than five-ish liability entries, and the (assets minus liabilities) should be greater than 10. I've found that if I hit too many gluey answers, that detracts from my experience, and if I don't get enough sizzling answers to outweigh the gluey ones, that also detracts.

Luckily, a 72-word grid usually has plenty of room for good stuff. BEER O CLOCK is a great answer, and the POCKET WATCH / LIONS SHARE / BUGGY WHIP triple is colorful. Because "Hans and Franz" were a big part of my middle-school sense of humor, DANA CARVEY is a standout for me, but I wonder if he'll resonate at all with the millennials doing this puzzle. It's been a while since he's had a hit.

Does his SNL and "Wayne's World" body of work make him a classic? I think we'll have to wait a while to see if the test of time gives him favorable results.

Some liabilities are clear-cut, i.e. things like partials, uncommon abbreviations, etc. that Will points out to avoid in his submission criteria. And prefixes/suffixes like ACRO and IEST are not likely to give many pleasure. How about ARILS? Seems reasonably passable to me, since that word is on POM wonderful packages, but I can see how some would prefer avoiding it. WAAC and ELEC would likely draw some discussion; N TESTS and SCORNER as well.

But BRIC to me feels perfectly fine … since the BRIC acronym for the major emerging market countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China) is commonplace in financial lingo. Still, I'd tend to avoid it if possible, as I can understand that very few solvers would figure out [Acronym for the four major emerging market countries].

One helpful point about solving a Barry Silk puzzle is that he usually tries to work in a few Scrabbly letters — JQXZ. I was struggling around the middle until I remembered this point. A square which starts both an across and a down answer is ripe for one of these rare letters, so that helped me plunk in QUARTS for [Ice cream purchases].

This is my type of mini-theme, the GOOGLEPLEX headquarters a play on the number GOOGOLPLEX. I love the quote from a nine-year old, GOOGOLPLEX being "one, followed by writing zeroes until you get tired."

Many strong entries in the grid, and I liked how dispersed they were. Most themeless grids concentrate the bulk of their oomph in the four corners, but Barry spreads out the goodness today. It was really fun to drop in GOOGLEPLEX and then saunter my way to MAKE TRACKS before picking my way through ALGEBRA EXAM. Nice to get a constant, steady stream of colorful answers, rather than the concentrated stacked bursts I'm used to.

At the ACPT this year, BEQ and I were talking about borderline themeless entries, and he made a good analogy of tennis judges peering at the line, sticking their thumb slightly one way or another, and finally making a pronouncement. To me, ALL OR NONE and NEAREST EXIT feel like they're straddling that line. ALL OR NOTHING and EMERGENCY EXIT roll off my tongue, while ALL OR NONE sort of fumbles out. NEAREST EXIT is a phrase I hear before during every pre-flight announcement, but it doesn't feel like it quite sings on its own. Personal taste.

Loved the clue for CURATORS, an elegant one-word description in [Exhibitionists?]. And being the nerd engineer, I struggled to figure out what type of technical component [Some cable splitters] referred to. ROOMIES split a cable bill — clever!

Overall, the spreading out of the feature entries made my solve feel like there was so much goodness incorporated than usual. Upon closer inspection, the number of assets and liabilities is roughly on par with other NYT themelesses, so it's interesting to me that this dispersion effect enhanced my impression of the puzzle. I'm curious to experiment with this more on my own.

Nice offering from Barry today, a good example of his "crossword voice." A lot of strong material — EARTHRISE, BIOWEAPON, BLOOMBERG, what a great triplet — along with a smattering of crossword glue, plus a nod to the Phillies. Quintessential Barry Silk.

I'm usually not a fan of themeless layouts featuring seven-letter words, as constructors often fill those slots with neutral entries rather than colorful ones. But look what Barry does today in the NE corner. The triplet of LA BAMBA, STEP MOM, and AIR TAXI is really strong, plus everything around it is solid. He does sacrifice a little in terms of grid flow in order to achieve this, as there are only two entries that can help the solver break into that corner. But when those two entries are super strong ones like CEREAL BOX and GAS TAX, I don't mind as much.

A note on "clue echoes." Repeated clues work really well for me when they refer to completely different things. For example, POOL ROOMS and AILERON both are clued with respect to banking, but that word has wildly disparate meanings in the two clues. For POOL ROOMS, it's talking about banking shots off of rails; for AILERON, it's referring to a plane banking to turn. That sort of creative connection is a huge plus in my book.

I personally don't like clue echoes as much when they're within the exact same wheelhouse. [Searchlight element] for example, clues both XENON and BEAM. Along with (the awesome!) BATSIGNAL also being clued in a similar fashion, this repetition gets a bit tedious for me. Personal taste.

There aren't any ugly entries, just minor offenders. It's a shame that the weakest entries — L RON, SOLS, EL AL (SHEB Wooley ... he seemed to reach decent fame during his time, so he seems okay) — are concentrated in one region. L RON might have been something like FRED or FRAN (TAIL becoming NAIF; most of that section changing) but it would have required PICT, the ancient Briton, in the place of PACT (see left). I have a peculiar distaste for partials, but I can see how others would deem L RON as "gettable" and PICT as "too esoteric." As always, subjectivity is such a big part of construction.

A lot of tough but clever clues in this one. For those of you still mystified by [Binder?], think not of a school binder, but a bind-er, as in "something that binds."

Finally, I wish crosswords could evolve faster with respect to new technology. I hadn't looked up the "Earthrise" picture until Barry mentioned it. Super glad he did, because I forgot how breathtaking it is. How cool would it be to have a visual clue, just the picture, similar to Jeopardy? No idea how to do this given the medieval state of the art in crossword programs, but a guy can wish. Seems like this is a huge opportunity for someone enterprising, given the rapid evolution of crosswords.

Like Ian Livengood yesterday, Barry Silk is another constructor I admire because of the diversity of his gridwork. As you can see on his constructor page, most of his puzzles are themeless. I enjoy scanning through all his thumbnails, in awe at how many grid patterns he's used. A mark of a real themeless professional, someone who can adjust a grid, even demolish it and start from scratch, to suit the specific needs of whatever seed entries he chooses.

Also like Ian, Barry is a sports fan, Philly sports in particular if I'm not mistaken. I've struggled with a few of his constructions in the past, like SIXERS GAME so it was nice to get answers from a variety of fields today. Some astronomy (COSMOS and CARL SAGAN), pop entertainment (PRETZEL LOOP and FOR YOUR LOVE), zippy phrases (GO TO YOUR ROOM and GO ALL OUT), and yes, even some sports (WILD CARD TEAM and HURLER). As a solver, I almost always enjoy variety in a themeless puzzle, so I thought this mix was well-selected.

Yet again like Ian, Barry's puzzles tend to be wide-open, with an easy flow. Notice how each subsection can be entered with multiple different words? In fact, there isn't a single space that can't be entered by at least three entries. That type of open feel really helps me as a solver, giving me multiple shots on goal to crack into any one region. For instance, that SE corner (and NW, similarly) is the most chunked off of any area, but if you can't figure out any of the answers within that corner, you have FOR YOUR LOVE, ODESSAN, and CARL SAGAN to help you break in. Well thought out. It makes construction more difficult to have such wide open flow, and this solver really appreciates the extra effort.

Finally, in the "nice clue saves a glue entry" department: who knew EL AL had a King David Club? What an interesting piece of trivia. Now if only EL AL would get as big as UNITED or SOUTHWEST and make its common letters more crossworthy…

Another appropriately silky creation from Barry. This one eschews the typical separation of corners, instead meshing two sets of triple-stacks in the NE and SW corners. Very hard to do well, as the high constraints make it difficult to get both snappy answers and clean crossings in those locations.

That top stack is loaded with juicy answers; MCMANSION / CRAZY BONE / DONT PANIC. Ah, if only the latter had been clued to "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy." I had never read the book until two years ago and thunked myself on the forehead for being so remiss. And I had an initial hitch at CRAZY BONE, waffling on whether to love it or try to force in FUNNY BONE. But it Googles fine.

It's impressive then that Barry got a nice stack running down the right side. ON IN YEARS is a nice one, as is IONIAN SEA. NECTARINE is a bit more bland in my book, but a nice clue related to the color, not the fruit, gave it extra oomph.

Given how nice those six long answers are, it's no surprise that there's a bit of glue needed to hold them together. MCD seems like it should be "a thing" (short for McDonald's?) but as a random Roman numeral, it sticks in my craw a little. Just personal taste. And AZTEK is a fun combination of odd letters, but SHAK feels wonky to me. I suppose there needs to be a way to abbreviate Shakespeare (and maybe this is the uber-common way to do it?) but what an unsightly four letters stuck together. I like the SBA as they do some good work in facilitating loans to entrepreneurs, but I hardly ever like an ASE. So a mix of snazzy stuff with some glue required.

Contrast the SW corner. There's still really nice stuff in there, DREAMLAND being excellent, but there's nothing that jumped out to me as a marquee answer in that corner. It is really nice to have only a DSO and MIES holding it all together. So not quite as snazzy, but not a lot of junk either.

A really nice feature of this grid arrangement is that it allows the NW and SE corners to be more isolated than usual, and Barry does a bang-up job in both. Love the JINXES and PIZZA and ZIPPO Scrabbly letters, all done without making it all feel forced.

Figuring out Saturday puzzle clues is getting to be my favorite part of crosswords, and the clue for BONSAI didn't disappoint. It is a small job indeed — not a job that will take a small amount of time, but a small work of art. And seeing then MONKEY as a wacky 1960's dance, that adds a lot of spice. Finally, I really liked the Ruy LOPEZ clue. For years I've been fascinated by chess terminology, and there's something awesome about hearing this lingo. I didn't actually know the Ruy Lopez opening, but seeing this made me go look it up.

Now to think of what the Chen Crossword Maneuver should be...

Strong showing by themeless specialist Barry Silk. Today he utilizes a tough set of triple-stacked 11's, much more difficult to execute cleanly than triple stacked 8's or 9's (the more common choice in themelesses). Barry also does something unusual in that he breaks up his SW and NE stacks with a black square, resulting in double-stacked 9's instead of triple-stacks. I love it when a themeless constructor plays with grid shapes, so it was really fun for me to study this one.

And upon closer inspection, I really like how Barry has incorporated SIDEARM into the SW corner, and crosses the whole shebang with my favorite entry, SPHINX-LIKE. Now that's some good stuff. I might have preferred a harder clue for SIDEARM — what else could [Like some pitches] be besides OVERARM and UNDERARM? On the other hand, I appreciate seeing a constructor's preferences and tendencies in a grid, so it was neat to get an echo of Barry's proclivity toward baseball.

Although KTS feels like an inelegant abbreviation (chess players might likely disagree), I really liked the clue echo of [They often land next to queens] for two entries right next to each other. Very nice stuff, especially considering "queen" meant two completely different things.

One hitch I had on this puzzle was the handful of short "glue" entries like AMAH, AREAR, CIRC, RTE, ATNO. It's not a huge quantity, but because it's difficult to come up with mind-blowing clues for these shorties, they're often the first things I enter into the grid, thus giving me an impression that there are more than there really are. I can see Stan Newman's viewpoint in his Saturday Stumpers, not allowing certain short answers he considers "not Stumperable." I might put AMAH in that list, in that it's almost a gimme once you do enough crosswords. There aren't that many ways to clue "Eastern nurse."

Finally, my favorite Saturday-hard wordplay clue has to be the one for ALTERNATE. In itself, ALTERNATE is a pretty average answer, but [Every second] is brilliant. For some people, it might be too cute for its own good, but I loved how it messed with my mind. It wasn't "every second" as in "every second counts," but as in "every other one." Really neat how it forced me to think about a common phrase in a completely different way.

Another fun solve from two of the themeless masters. This one played extremely hard for me, more like a Saturday, given the opaque cluing. A real brain-buster of a workout. I think it's more typical to see WYCH ELM and NICOLAI Ghiaurov on a Saturday, as they're both difficult pieces of trivia.

I really enjoy misdirectional or wordplay type cluing, so FOREVER STAMP was both my favorite entry and clue in the puzzle. It had me thinking about public utilities, then apartment rent caps, and the real answer took forever to make itself known. Great stuff.

Being on the TWITTERVERSE (follow me at @JeffChenWrites if you don't mind inappropriate/insane/inane observations) I loved the entry, but it would have been great to get a less direct clue. (Perhaps TWITTERVERSE isn't well-known amongst different generations to do that, though.) And it's a pretty cool feat to have EXPEDIA right next door, as well as an up-to-date clue for SEPIA involving Instagram. I liked the modern vibe.

Finally, I've been thinking more and more about Ian Livengood's comment regarding seeding a themeless with tiny words (three and four letter entries) that have easy letter patterns, and seeing what you can get for the long entries after that. I really enjoyed today's puzzle, but as a constructor, it's difficult to overlook entries like ERI, OFT, SYL, THA, NAE. Tyler Hinman, a former ACPT champ and excellent constructor, has said there's no such thing as an excellent themeless with a few ugly entries. I wouldn't quite go that far, but I think he has a point. Anyway, just one guy's musings. Enjoyable Friday.

Barry Silk is one of the most published themeless constructors in the Shortz era, and there's a reason for that: he consistently delivers challenging puzzles containing a mixture of fun answers and good trivia from a wide range of areas. His name always brings a combination of excitement and nerves tingling through my fingers, as I know I'm going to get a tough but fair solve.

Some great stuff in today's puzzle, headlined by a clue/answer pair I found immensely challenging but providing one of the best aha moments I've had in a while: PHONE BOOTH clued by "DC transformation location". What a perfect example of a misdirectional clue! It took me forever to change my mindset (thinking about DC politics) even after ??????OOTH was in place, and I beamed when I realized the clue referred to DC Comics and Superman's preferred choice of changing room. Perfect late-week clue, in my mind. I also really liked the clue for HOCKEY MOM and CLEAT. Great stuff.

I had an interesting conversation with Frank Longo, who helps Will with fact-checking and general proofing. Although there is no hard and fast rule about duplicating a word from an answer inside another clue, the BATTERY BOX and "Penalty box..." clue at 47D made me pause. Apparently Frank and Will had a discussion about that, but ultimately decided anything but "penalty box" was too oblique to use in cluing (unfair to non-hockey fans). And since "box" is a short word, the dupe was passable. I think they made a good decision, especially since as a non-hockey fan, I was mystified by SIN BIN.

Each of the four corners contains a triple-stack of 10's, with good results. Each corner has its pluses and its minuses, for example, the SW has the beautiful PHONE BOOTH and SOLAR ARRAY but with OLEN and ERICAS in the way. The NE corner is relatively clean, save FORA, but ARRIVE LATE feels like a less elegant form of FASHIONABLY LATE, and I wasn't totally sure what a BATTERY BOX was. Each corner is very reasonable though. All over, we see example upon example of the quintessential constructor's dilemma: what trade-offs are worth it in order to work in great entries?

Nice Saturday challenge with some fantastic entries and clues.