David Woolf author page

DOT DOT DOT makes me laugh! Reminds me of that "Seinfeld" episode where they use "yadda yadda yadda" for comedy gold. I'm having a hard time not wiggling my eyebrows right now as I say DOT DOT DOT.

Solid theme, using DOT DOT DOT to explain the presence of three famous people who go by triple initials. I was curious to see if there were any more, but I couldn't turn any up in my exhaustive (read: seconds-long) search. How fortuitous that these three work with crossword symmetry!

With just 38 squares of thematic material, David stretched to add all sorts of bonuses in his grid — no RESTRAINt, given JEWELER, BOBBIES, SO SORRY, UNICORN, SHOW BIZ, NEONOIR, JAY LENO. Such great use of mid-length slots!

However, the prices were too high for my taste. ODESA alone would make me reboot, especially on an early-week puzzle that has a ton of gridding flexibility. Toss in CEST, ENE, SNO, and the Jeff-crosses-his-fingers-and-hopes-for-the-best ANYA/TYE crossing … ultimately, I think that was a fair cross, as nothing else looks quite as "right" (I debated whether TIE / ANIA could be correct) but hoo boy.

I also found JAZZ HOP and BOSH curious. I like learning a new thing in my puzzle, and I'm a big JAZZ fan, so JAZZ HOP was fun. (Think JAZZ meets hip-HOP.) I know Chris BOSH from the former Big Three of the Miami Heat championships, but BOSH as a scoffing declaration?

Bosh, I say!

Okay, that's kind of fun. I'll try it out and see what people say.

All in all, I worry that the short fill detracted from the theme set and all the good bonus fill. I enjoyed the concept; such a tight theme set an apt revealer. But I would have preferred a more traditional layout. Breaking up the sides with two sets of black square "fingers," instead of how David had it (with just one set per side), might have helped a lot. Could have elevated this into POW! consideration.

I like to play the "guess the theme" game on Mondays. With just SUNNI ISLAM, I was pretty sure there would be more *I I* phrases. Bingo! SETI INSTITUTE and SKI INSTRUCTOR are both fun entries matching that pattern.

ANTI-IMMIGRATION, not so much, considering my parents were immigrants.

Even though I got the theme, I wasn't able to guess the revealer. EYE CONTACT = perfect! Playful, "eye" sounding like "I," with two Is contacting each other at the end of one word and the beginning of the next.

Theme was executed pretty consistently — for example, there were never two Is within a single word, as in HAWAII. And I couldn't think of another theme possibility like this, making it a tight set. Great work there.

(Minor nit, ANTI-IMMIGRATION is the only one with a hyphen, so it's not perfectly consistent.)

I enjoyed it enough that I considered it for the POW! But ETUI nearly kills that by itself, for a Monday puzzle at least. Add in LEM (lunar … something ... module? excursion?), UTIL, COOER, and it's too much. I don't mind COOER as much as LEM — even though it's a gluey answer, it's figure-out-able. Not so much with LEM or ETUI.

Note how ETUI was pretty much forced by SETI INSTITUTE / ANTI IMMIGRATION. That E??I pattern is generally to be avoided, as there are very few good options.

Usually, I think four themers + revealer is about right these days, but I'd have been happier without ANTI IMMIGRATION. It would have given the grid a ton more room to breathe; more opportunities to both smoothify things and work in more juicy bonus fill like ICY ROADS and NO WISER.

That northwest corner is sooooooo impressive. Almost no one tries an 8x4 themeless region, because it's too tough to get both colorful and smooth. Who would be crazy enough to run a 7x4 region through an 8x4 — along with a long entry as good as STRESS EATS? Check out how much great material David packed in: BIG SPOON, LOGROLLS, BOLO TIE, GAG REEL, STRESS EATS, and even OIL RIG. Yowza! Well worth the price of the unsightly I REST partial. Nice bonus to have POOP deck and ORLOP (that's a thing, apparently) deck right next to each other, too.

Pretty nice work in the opposite corner too, considering the constraints. Seeing things like ETOILES (deep foreign vocab) and ONE TO TEN (felt kind of arbitrary) is more what I'd expect from a giant L-shaped region like this, but to get FIRE SALE and RATS NEST, with only ESOS as a price to pay is a good result.

Snazzy lower left. BMX BIKE has that lovely BMXB start, and TEAR GAS / BAR CAR make for excellent additions to that corner. The one oddity was IN GAME. Tough to swallow — I couldn't force myself to believe that was "a thing" — but apparently it is. Huh.

HOT DOGGER anchored the final corner, and I particularly liked how it echoed the nature of some BMX BIKErs.

I had to really think about why yesterday's themeless struck me better than today's. As a constructor, I really admire the tremendous challenge David set for himself. But there were enough entries that made me hitch — GOOD REASON was another where I wondered "is this good or not?" — that the solving experience was more one of admiration for the construction feat rather than the pure joy of the solve. There were some feature entries today that I've seen several times already, like RATS NEST and ORATORIO, as opposed to debuts like yesterday's HACKATHON.

Still, there's something to be said for very nice piece of ambitious construction work. Kudos!

What a neat idea! The TWO-STATE SOLUTION refers to the ongoing Israel-Palestine conflict, but also to the fact that every four-letter word in this puzzle is formed by two state abbreviations, i.e. MISC = MI (Michigan) + SC (South Carolina), ORCA = Oregon + California, etc. Not an easy task at all to come up with 18 (!) words, using 36 postal codes without repeating any.

Simply forming that many words without repetition is tough enough, but to do it without resorting to a bunch of ugly answers is impressive. MISC isn't great, and ILKS feels odd in the plural, but the other 16 are all fine entries. Nice that David didn't resort to the ARME or CACO sort of stuff.

And to stack all those four-letter words so well! I did hitch on a couple of inelegant entries, a SERIO / AFARM here, a SCI there, so I had a feeling something odd was going on — David has strong enough grid skills that he wouldn't usually let those through. But when I realized the constraint he was working with, I was impressed with the results. The lower left corner is especially nice, stacking WACO / ALLA / FLAK without needing crossword glue, but also giving us the nice CLAVE and even intersecting STEVE / ALLEN. OAKED might seem on the marginal side, but it is regularly used in the distilling business.

Also admirable to work in SHILLELAGH. What a neat word, and so hard to spell correctly. I let out a giggle when I filled in THREE WAY for [Relationship with two other lovers, both of whom consent]. A little embarrassing to realize it was TRIAMORY. I enjoyed learning that term.

Not easy to work with this tough constraint, so I don't mind the aforementioned inelegant entries plus the dabs of SMS, MTN, TWI, etc. State postal codes have been used in many ways in crosswords throughout the years, but this will be memorable for me.

Such a cool graphic in the pdf. The red/green ellipses are simple, but they provide a cool traffic light image. Really neat when I realized all the GREEN phrases are going through the green lights, and all the RED phrases stop — except for the RUNNING A RED LIGHT revealer! I normally like perfect consistency in themes, but that exception was fantastic.

I missed how this puzzle worked at first. 11-Down, the Detroit Tiger whose #5 is retired ... I thought he was just HANK GREEN. It confused me that the second half of that entry — BERG — formed another word. It is pretty cool that every GREEN themer worked this way, but that was a big source of bafflement for me.

Sometimes the second half of this type of themer gets a [no clue] or a [-], which is a dead giveaway that something odd is going on. I often think that makes things too easy. But today, I would have appreciated it, since I missed the full extent of the theme at first.

It's a tough balance — you don't want to make the puzzle too easy, but you also want to make sure lots of solvers actually understand the theme when they finish. I'm curious how many "Who is Hank Green"? questions I'll get, or how many people will think [Symbol of Washington State] is simply EVERGREEN, rather than the full answer, EVERGREEN TREE. We've fixed up all the answers below, if you want to make sure you didn't miss anything.

My first impression was that it was too bad that the themers were asymmetrical, but I think it's perfectly fine now. It might be one of those rare cases where asymmetry is actually better, since it more accurately reflects the non-regular layout of some city's streets. It also gave David a ton of more freedom in selecting colorful (pun intended) theme answers.

I found it to be an extremely difficult solve, with somewhat choked off grid flow (perhaps appropriate for a traffic-jammed city?) and some rough patches necessitated by all the restrictions of the themers. Still, a couple of awkward EDATES and SLEAZO (not SLEAZE?) kind of things didn't stop me from enjoying this one. Memorable, for sure.

TOSSED SALAD describing the letters S A L A D mixed up within phrases. Some nice finds, particularly SALSA DANCING (I used to do that a lot back when I was single) and DOUGLAS ADAMS, the genius behind "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy."

I also liked PINA COLADAS, but it felt like the outlier, being the only one where the mixed-up S A L A D string didn't span across the two words of the phrase. Given that S A L A D are pretty friendly letters to anagram in various ways, it would have been nice for all of them to span across phrases.

Nice gridwork, especially considering David worked with six themers. Not an easy feat, and David went above and beyond to include some long bonus entries in LAZY SUNDAY and KEEP IT REAL, both strong, colorful answers.

Smooth grid, given how many places have to work with two or three themers. The toughest sections are in the NW and SE, having to build around three themers — really well done around the SATYR/CRAWL/WOO area. Similarly in the symmetrical spot, although OSAMA … historically important, but not the kind of downer I typically like to see in my crossword.

The only place I thought was not as strong as the rest was the east section, with OTT, NOV, ELL, EDO. All of them are super minor, and a case can be made for each of them as perfectly acceptable. Still, they collectively are the price of the awesome KEEP IT REAL, and I think it's a fine trade-off, even for a Monday puzzle. Every one of the crossings are fair, so even novices who don't know about OTT's crossword ubiquity can still achieve a successful finish.

Fun start to the week.

We haven't seen a "turning" puzzle in a few months now — much appreciation to Will for spreading them out. Today, David gives us a TURN OF EVE … or is that TURN OF EVENTS? Three other themers get turned somewhere within the EVENT letter sequence. I've highlighted them below.

I generally like themers to be the longest across entries in the grid, or otherwise stand out somehow. But today's gave a nice challenge of having to find those turning buggers. I was baffled when I read that there were supposed to be four — ACEV(ENTURA), PREVE(NTABLE), and TURNOFEVE(NTS) were obvious. Where was the final one? Took me forever to realize that the [Hearst monthly] is SEVEN(TEEN), not SEVEN.

That bugged me. For consistency's sake, I would have all four themers working exactly in the same way. They do all turn somewhere within their EVENT letter sequence, but SEVEN is the only one that looks so innocent in the grid. I would have preferred if every one of the themers was hidden so innocently, like in a previous turning puzzle I quite liked, but breaking SEVENTEEN into SEV(ENTEEN) or SEVENT(EEN) would also have appealed to me more.

Grids using short themers always come with an added difficulty level, requiring a lot of long entries. I really like NBA DRAFT, NEST EGGS, OPEN TABLE (as part of a themer!), even INUNDATE and DRAMATIZE. I wasn't sure about UNADVISED, as ILL-ADVISED was what came to mind, but the dictionary shows that UNADVISED is perfectly legit (as in a client UNADVISED by their lawyer). So overall, a nice job of working in colorful long material.

Short material was good too, just a small amount of things like … well, AMT. That's the way to keep a puzzle smooth. And linking WHO and HOW as questions that are anagrams of each other — right next to each other, too! That's a nice touch.

Normally I don't care for grids that segment puzzles into sections, but this design was so appropriate for the theme. Cool idea to have twelve "boxes" — just like a calendar! Great a-ha moment when I first uncovered (JAN)GLE and TRO(JAN)S, turning my initial grousing about the puzzle's (quasi-)segmentation into compliments.

We've seen a lot of rebus puzzles now, one with the exact same rebus strings and another one still. But David's calendar-looking layout gives it a unique execution. Even though I knew what the rebus square would be in each box, I still had to work to uncover it. Nice balance of deviousness and solvability.

A puzzle like this which uses so many short themers is hard to build — due to word count maximums, if your themers aren't long, your fill has to be. David did well here, with DIETITIAN, RAW SCORE, BEER STEIN, CROSSBAR, etc.

Usually I prefer entries with rebus strings to be long — LIFEBLOOD, SOTOMAYOR, CARL JUNG — but I enjoyed BAN(JUL)'s NYT debut, as I traveled to the Gambia in 2009 with a non-profit org. I learned a ton traveling upcountry for two weeks. The Gambia is a little snake-like country that the British carved out of (French) Senegal, specifically to claim the Gambia River. Crazy colonialists.

I didn't enjoy I(MAR)ET as much. I find it so much more satisfying to uncover something even like (DEC)OCT than I(MAR)ET, wondering if the latter is a valid word. I happen to know it from crosswords, but I liked the WI(N OV)ER / CASA(NOV)AS discovery much better, for example. Personal taste.

ONEK is such an odd entry. The first time I encountered it, I was sure it had to be wrong. It does parse to ONE K, but 1.) it's rare to have a 1-K race, and 2.) it's even more rare to see a race written out as a Five K or a Ten K. Personal preference, but I much prefer entries that one sees in real life. To me, that one sticks out much more so than INTRA or ETATS or even IAL or BRRR.

Very neat effect today with the calendar-looking grid.

Neat middle "slantstack," with APRES MOI LE DELUGE appropriately flooding through it. RADIO SILENCE is a great entry, one of my favorites today. I also liked PUT A RING ON IT since it sounded so familiar. I overthought it, feeling like it was weird to call a woman/man an IT, but then I remembered the IT usually refers to a finger. Whew!

BOBA TEA is something I used to have all the time, but I had to look it up since I call it "bubble tea." LATTE ART was another slick modern entry, but since I just drink coffee with half and half like an old guy, it wasn't exactly in my wheelhouse. Still, I really enjoyed those two answers which gave the puzzle some hipness. Dare I say, DOPENESS?

I can already see the kids shaking their heads, swearing off the term DOPENESS now.

Speaking of modern, KARENO. One of David's previous puzzles brought us KUTI. Considering we saw a crazily-spelled SKRILLEX recently, I guessed KARENO might be KL RENO — like KD LANG or something. Although I grew up in the Bay Area and not Sacto, I can't ever remember hearing anyone call it SAC. I wonder if Utahans similarly pooh-pooh the idea of calling Salt Lake City SLC?

David pushes the boundaries today, giving us so much great stuff like the aforementioned plus DRUM LOOP, MOON BASE, and THE MOB. That's a ton of strong material jam-packed in.

On the flip side, this sort of high-density packing often requires various types of glue. I don't mind some minor ORO, MES, DESE, but the old-school ESNE and especially ESNES is not somewhere I'd personally go. And when I looked up FERULE, I got this: [An instrument, such as a cane, stick, or flat piece of wood, used in punishing children.] Uh … yikes.

All in all, a huge amount of snappy material but requiring a couple of dabs of industrial-strength glue to hold it together.

Homonym play, SOL SOLE SEOUL SOUL all getting their day in the sol (Spanish for "sun"). I think SOL CERVEZA is iffy — not many people say "I want me a Bud Beer," right? — but I do like a cerveza fria on a hot day.

With a straightforward theme, it's so important to add pizzazz through the puzzle's fill. I like what David did with his long entries, LIQUORED UP very colorful (and echoing SOL!). Some ICE CUBES to go with the refreshment (classy, I know), LIKE MIKE from the old commercials, and JUNE CARTER linked to REESE Witherspoon with an apropos cross-reference. Neat how those last two entries are right next to each other — I like that added touch.

And the mid-length fill is pretty good too. ARSENIC and Old Lace, a LOVE-IN IN HEELS, even some TRILLS and TUT-TUTS. All added to the quality and fun of my solve.

PESO adds to the Spanish flair, which I liked, but it would have been nice to add to that further with better quality entries than ESOS and ESTA. Both are fine words in Spanish, but they are gluey bits seen often in crosswords because of their common letters.

Not wild about seeing NAZI in my crossword. It's a good save to clue it to the hilarious Seinfeld character, but I can imagine there are at least a few people who will be offended. Can't say I blame them.

It would have been nice to get perfect consistency, i.e. all the themers with the same lengths, but SEOUL SOUTH KOREA bungles that up. Still, a three-word phrase starting with SOLE or SOUL — maybe SOUL TRAIN AWARDS? — would have made half the themers with two words, half with three words.

Themeless puzzles featuring 15-letter entries sometimes suffer from a lack of pizzazz, because those long guys don't leave much room for other good fill. If most of your grid snazz comes from six grid-spanners, all six ought to be fantastic.

Luckily, David gives us six beautiful ones. SEALED WITH A KISS is a great way to lead it off. The clue for RUSSIAN ROULETTE doesn't seem quite accurate — it can go around the circle multiple times without anything happening, yeah? — but the entry itself is colorful. (Note: Jim pointed out that there is only one round ... the round in the chamber. D'oh!)

Added bonus to get MILE RUN, I ASSUME, SCEPTER. Way to work some extra assets right through the stacks.

So very tough to make a clean triple-stacks puzzle. David does quite well as triple-stacks go, but at this point in crossword evolution, the "as triple-stacks go" qualifier counts for very little. About five little gluey bits for most themeless puzzles is roughly where I as a solver start to sense inelegance.

IT CAME feels particularly inelegant to me, breaking the rule of no partials greater than five letters. I'd be fine with a six-letter partial if it allowed something never before seen to happen — not here though. I'd love to see if something like IT CLUB (kin to an AV club) could make things better. Shifting the black squares in the center might be effective, but that would cause all sorts of ripple effects.

(Note: David mentioned that his original clue was [Cry after finding a package], which seems better to me. A bit arbitrary, but at least I can see IT CAME as a non-partial now.)

Some nice clues:

• [F-, H- or I-, but not G-]. Cool to figure out that it related to chemistry: fluorine, hydrogen, and iodine can become ANIONs.
• [Get a lock on, e.g.] had me thinking about targeting, homing in on, etc. Great a-ha to realize it referred to leg locks, etc. in wrestling.
• [Web content] is something I'm always thinking about; trying to write about puzzle elements I think solvers will find interesting. SILK in a spider web = a good headslap moment.
• [Breaks down in class] made me think of poor students wailing over finals, but it's a misdirection. English teachers parse (break down) sentence structures.

Really appreciated how each of these clues didn't require a telltale question mark!

I always enjoy seeing something new. So to get three stacked pairs in a themeless was very cool — surprising that I can't remember something quite like this. It reminded me of Ashton Anderson's comments about trying for mini-themes within a themeless, using adjacent answers. TRUE CRIME and RAT POISON was especially pleasing to me, as both of them can stand alone as great phrases in themselves, and the link between them is strong.

IN ONE EAR AND / OUT THE OTHER was also nice, although half and half answers aren't as satisfying for me. With standalones, you can get one and then you still have the other one to uncover, whereas these half and halfs fall all at one time. Similarly, I SHOULD HAVE / KNOWN BETTER is colorful, but the reveal came all at once.

Speaking of I SHOULD HAVE KNOWN BETTER … BIG BREASTED? I appreciate Will's pushing the boundary of what the Gray Lady allows, but this to me stumbles outside of what makes the NYT crossword the NYT crossword. Readership and solvership is generally well-read, highly literate, and cultured to some extent (aside from me). Would we see BIG BREASTED featured inside the NYT Magazine or the Styles section? I'm okay seeing that entry featured in an independent crossword, especially but it's not my taste for the NYT. I very much appreciate David's comments and concerns about its usage. In my opinion though, it's tough to see it well-accepted with any clue.

That aside, I really liked the pairing of answers, and would have really like a fourth pair in the NE. Perhaps ACT NORMAL and SHRINKAGE could be linked via Seinfeld (the pool episode, as David mentioned above), but that's quite a shrink. Er, a stretch.

For those of you (us) who didn't understand how [Critical unit?] could be STAR, think of it as a ranking unit, i.e. four stars. And an awesome clue, nodding to one of my favorite STAR personalities, Andre the Giant. How appropriate that his name means "manly"!

I like not seeing a theme coming. Neat to reach the end of this one and smack my forehead, knowing that I could have figured out the themers, related to STICK positions: PARK, REVERSE, NEUTRAL, DRIVE, LOW — or PRNDL as it's commonly seen.

David does a great job of masking the themers. I really liked how they all have different-ish meanings from the car-related ones. THEME PARK is a solid entry in its own right and has nothing to do with a vehicle being in PARK. DOUBLE REVERSE and GENDER NEUTRAL don't achieve the disguise as well, but they both 1.) do the trick and 2.) serve as very colorful entries.

INTERNAL DRIVE certainly disguises DRIVE. I'm mixed on how much I like it as an entry, though. Yes, it's a real thing, but I doubt I'd pick it as a marquee entry. OPTICAL DRIVE feels a little more colorful. And the sci-fi nerd in me jumps up and down to use IMPULSE DRIVE. If I had been constructing this one I'd have had to force that dorkasaurus to realize that 1.) it's too similar a meaning to a car's DRIVE, and 2.) most humans won't know what this is.

Ambitious grid. Those three central entries cause all sorts of problems, 13 being the most inconvenient length. I do like getting such goodness as MALLCOP, LIMA PERU, and RACE DAY, but I'm not sure the parallel downs of LIMA PERU / ONE CARAT and DETECTOR / EYES ON ME were worth it. That sort of arrangement is almost always hard to fill cleanly (PLAT / OMARA and ARRAN / ORO), and the long entries are often not stellar. I'd prefer to have LIMA PERU and EYES ON ME broken up with black squares, and a focus on getting A+ entries where ONE CARAT and DETECTOR sit, along with cleaner fill.

Fun theme concept giving me a "hey, that's cool!" moment at the end.

Neat idea for a visual puzzle, a representation of a CHOCOLATE CHIP COOKIE. Nice use of cheater squares in the four corners to make a circle-ish shape out of the normal crossword square. And a fun time searching for those rebus squares, CHIPs dotted around the puzzle. Everyone has their favorite puzzle type, and visual puzzles tend to do it for me. Dare I say... CHIPs ahoy! (groan)

CHOCOLATE (CHIP) COOKIE being 16 letters necessitated expanding the grid past the normal 15x15 shape. I like how the circularity of the cookie is preserved by going up to 16x16, although there is something nice about cookies fresh out of the oven being a bit imperfect, even ovoidal. Going to a 16x16 grid does mean that the revealer has to be at the bottom of the puzzle, with a matching entry at the top. Nice find in (CHIP)PENDALES DANCERS, a snappy phrase in itself.

Visual puzzles are tricky. I find that the ones tickling me most have a visual very closely resembling what it's supposed to be. I had a hitch with this one in that those 1x3 rectangular black bars around the perimeter disrupted the cookie image for me. I doodled around to see if it would be possible to make a cookie image (left) without long "chips" on the perimeter. I'm not sure how hard it would be to fill — probably doable but also somewhat to extremely hard to fill cleanly — so it's hard to say if something like this would fly or not. Those long answers all around the perimeter would make filling very tough, and would likely necessitate fewer CHIPs. David hits the nail on the head — as always, trade-offs.

It might have been nice to get more CHIPs dispersed throughout the puzzle (I'm that guy who "accidentally" spills three times as many chocolate chips into cookie dough), but it's a good balance between theme density and smoothness. The fill was solid, with a good combination of CHIP as a single word as well as part of a longer word. And for those of you solving electronically, take a peek at the grid below — I was surprised at how much clearing out those corners made a difference in terms of cookie-ness. Enjoyable solve.

★ So many layers on this clever puzzle. I have a feeling many people will be at the point I was at, irritated at the "inaccuracy" of seeing E equal mc, not mc², so I'm going to break it down even more than in David's comments. I must have thought about this for a full day, wondering how the NYT could possibly allow such scientific and mathematical error. Heresy! Why not at least make the other side of the rebus MCC to represent the C squared? It finally dawned on me that mc² is read as "mc squared" — the letters MC are "squared" into a single rebus cell. It adds another level to the already cunning idea of E equaling MC in a two-way rebus. EINSTEIN-level genius with wordplay.

Very neat how David incorporated the special squares within some of the theme answers. Yet another nice touch. What would have made it Puzzle of the Year quality for me was some rationale built in to explain why there were six special squares. Not absolutely necessary, but man oh man that would have been the icing on the icing already on the cake. If the number six were somehow integral to the theory of general relativity...

I love it when a puzzle makes me think more about what could be done. How cool would it be to have some sort of physical representation of the bizarre effects that occur when one approaches the speed of light? Hmm...

One small nit I'll pick is that I found it slightly odd that half the special squares worked one way, and half were flipped. On one hand it made it more challenging to uncover them, but it felt to me like having them all work identically would have been more elegant. Personal preference.

A final note, on vocabulary. As much as I like current slang or fun terms, entries like PLUTARCH never go out of style, in my eyes. A timeless entry, appropriate for the educated tone of the New York Times, and especially appropriate for a puzzle with this EINSTEIN-ian theme. I doubt I'll ever gripe about seeing PLUTARCH, whereas I can't say the same thing about the latest "celebrity" who may be fun for small niches of people to see, but who may not have long-term staying power.

★ Tuesday is a hard slot to fill. It's supposed to be a relatively easy puzzle, so no tricky themes will fly. This makes it awfully difficult to create something interesting enough to satisfy both experienced solvers as well as be okay for relative newbies. Often, that means you get a product that is straddling the line, sort of making both sides happy, but not really addressing either party's need. Tough challenge!

So I really like today's offering. The theme is not complicated, in fact, it feels slightly thin to me given the revealer takes up two of the four long entries. But it does its job, giving two nice examples of sports terminology related to not giving up until the end. It would have been really nice to have a football-related one in there to cover the major sports (fine, Howard Barkin and the Canadian contingent, maybe a hockey one too!).

FYI, a BUZZER BEATER is when a basketball team wins a game at the last second (just beating the game-ending buzzer). A WALK-OFF HOMER is when a guy (or woman) homers in the bottom of the ninth inning (or in the bottom of an extra inning) to end the game. And as Jim pointed out to me, it's awfully nice that a WALK-OFF HOMER always happens in front of a home crowd.

(shaking my fist at stupid Kirk Gibson for beating my A's)

Where I think this puzzle shines is in the fill. Yes, there are some rough patches (I see you, ENISLE/GRE/SSR corner), but David does such a nice job of filling out the grid with long stuff (SHISHKEBAB and RICHARD III), along with Scrabbly goodness (ZAFTIG, FLOOZY, JOGGER), and new words I enjoyed picking up (XYLEM, RABAT, MANOLO; nice that they're from such different areas of knowledge). It took me longer than usual to finish this puzzle, but I enjoyed that extra duration, savoring all the fun entries like SCRUFF and its clue, HAREM and the fact that "Scheherazade" looks so crazy in the clue.

This puzzle won't do much for the non-sports fans in the audience, of course. I wonder if there would be a way to do this theme such that the themers are from different areas? Like themes related to cat-and-mouse detective stories? Or presidential elections (DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN)?

Anyway, fun to toss around ideas. I appreciated that David did something kind of different with a Tuesday, making it a very fun outing for me.

Debut! Some great entries today; I love to see snappy phrases like CASH BARS and SEA OTTERS, and it's nice that OSCAR WAO gets his due. I haven't read that book yet (The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao) but it's on my TBR (to be read) list. And seeing SODIUM PENTOTHAL down the center of the grid was really cool.

Themeless construction is a tough way to break into the crosswords game. The more typical path is to make a few themed crosswords working with 78-word grids, practicing filling tiny 4x4 or smaller sections cleanly. I had been constructing for nearly a year before attempting my first themeless, and it was a full notch harder than I expected. It's so rough to balance everything, trying to work in snazzy long entries (usually prioritizing multiple-word answers like NO IFS ANDS OR BUTS) while minimizing the rough stuff.

There's a lot of neat work here. SODIUM PENTOTHAL crossing THE TRUTH WILL OUT was pretty cool. I had to look up the latter, but was glad I did, since it's something I should have recognized. It's a fun change of pace to get a sort of mini-theme when you're not expecting it.

The NE corner is a bit rough. There are some answers I enjoy learning, like TATARY, which my ancestors apparently ruled (people* whisper in awe that I likely have some Genghis Khan blood running through my veins). Other things like KARSTS which will likely never come up in my lifetime, aren't as fun to uncover. It was right by NIIHAU (I'm mixed on that one but more positive than negative) and TATARY, so the confluence detracted from my solving enjoyment.

Good workout today. A final note, it's amazing how much one clue can color my personal solving experience. The clue for SNAPE ("He cast the Killing Curse on Dumbledore") made me choke up, remembering the first time I read Harry Potter book six. It gave me a mixture of melancholy tinged with the amazing experience of reading that entire series, leaving me with a positive memory of the puzzle. That's one way a clue can be great.

*me, mostly