Gareth Bain author page

One of the great silver linings of this extended quarantine is my weekly chat with Jim Horne. It's such a pleasure to exchange thoughts on a week's worth of puzzles, our version of "At the Crosswords with Siskel and Ebert" (I call dibs on Ebert). I enjoy it most when we respectfully disagree on what is funny and what is not. Today went something like this:

Jim: ABOUT A FOOT, that's hilarious.

Jeff: Hilarious? Does "hilarious" mean something different in Canadian?

Jim: What's not to laugh at? Barbie is ABOUT A FOOT tall, and these body parts are ABOUT (around) A literal FOOT.

Jeff: Why Barbie, though?

Jim: (extended pause) I have a feeling you're going to dive down a rabbit hole --

Jeff: Is Barbie made to be about a foot tall? Let's see, going to Wikipedia … a-ha! She's "11 and a half inches tall." Surely there's some subversive social commentary behind that.

Jim: Does "surely" mean something different in American?

Jeff: Back to my question, is Barbie known for her feet? Maybe that's the reason she's referenced today?

Jim: Should I call your therapist's emergency hotline for you?

Jeff: Probably.

Anyhoo, ARCH, TOE, HEEL, SOLE were hidden extremely well, inside such colorful theme phrases. Huge bonus points for that.

More bonus points for fill bonuses! Even if you don't know the LA GALAXY, what a neat name. Add in the PARTHENON, SESAME OIL, and spicy SEX TALK on top of LEMON SOLE, you've got yourself quite a meal.

Speaking of LEMON SOLE, though, I had a bone to pick with a flood of non-newb-friendly entries. VIREO would be tough on a Thursday, let alone a Monday, and TALESE OPEL along with some ACS DELA RAH VAVA … I'd have gladly sacrificed many bonuses for a more approachable grid.

Check out the top row — often a 3/6/4 (word length) division is harder to grid around than a more standard 4/5/4, because the 6-width creates a big space to fill, causing ripple effects throughout the rest of this puzzle.

I wish everyone out there could find a Jim Horne to brighten their quarantine days. I enjoyed the cleverly hidden FOOT parts today, but my back and forth with Jim amused me (I'll let Jim speak for himself) even more than today's ABOUT A FOOT revealer.

CORY Booker finally gets his due in the NYT crossword! Stanford undergrad, Rhodes scholar, Yale law, mayor of Newark, and now New Jersey senator. Not to mention his saving a woman from a fire back in 2012. Sure takes a lot to supplant the "Boy Meets World" CORY that's usually used!

Some nice entries today, DANCE CRAZE such a fun one. SPREAD EM is also catchy, although it reminds me a little too much of when I got harassed by a cop a few years ago. Sometimes I wonder if a white guy would have been asked to step out of his car and then shoved against the door, only to realize that he indeed wasn't drunk or even tipsy, as he protested. Anyhoo, hopefully SPREAD EM doesn't induce similar reactions for other solvers.

The top left triple-stack is pretty nice. I wasn't familiar with CABOT COVE, but apparently it's famous from "Murder, She Wrote." These proper nouns are tricky — I'm sure MSW fans will squee in delight over this one. Others will need every cross to piece it together. Divisive.

I wasn't as big a fan of the opposite stack, as it reminded me of Rich Norris' advice to me a few years back: single-word entries can be tough to make snazzy. ELECTIVES has some potential for a clever clue to make it sing. OBSOLESCE feels slightly off to me, as "goes obsolete" is much more common to my ear. MARTINETS is pretty good, but even as the best of the three entries in my opinion, it's not an entry that makes me want to incorporate it into one of my puzzles.

I much prefer entries like MAKE NICE, HOT MIC, and even DNA LAB. All are colorful, and it's fun for me as a solver to have to figure out where a space should go.

I appreciated the low number of gluey bits. With just a few (minor) entries like ADAR and RECTO, which will be perfectly fine to many, it made for a smooth if not pizzazz-filled solve.

★ Such a great example of the "both words can precede X" theme type. This trope can be a little dry, in that the theme phrases are often so hard to come up with that they end up being dry. Not here! BIRDS NEST (soup), MATCH GAME, LIFE STORY are fantastic. CHILD SEAT isn't bad either, although to me it's not quite as vivid as the others.

With five themers and an expanded 16x15 grid, I'd expect there to be maybe four pieces of good long fill worked in. Glad to see Gareth hit that mark with strong material, giving us TANDOORI, UBERGEEK, MAGNOLIA / DAHLIA, and RATED AAA. (I'm a finance UBERGEEK, so sue me.)

The wide-open upper-right and lower-left corners are especially nice. A lot of six-letter entries enmeshed with an eight-letter one usually requires some glue to hold everything together. True, there's an AOUT and a TERR in those corners, but those are miniscule prices for the nice material. TUSHES and STREAK in symmetrical places — a hidden mini-theme, perhaps?

And to work in a bonus bit of material in TRYST in an elegant location — here, in the SE-most down slot — added to my solving experience. I usually find that "bonus material" strewn randomly through the grid is distracting and a bit of an annoyance, whereas this felt more planned and elegant.

With two strikes against you from the start (having to keep the solver entertained through an oversized grid and using a well-worn theme type), it takes a lot to create a memorable solving experience. For me, Gareth succeeded in spades.

I was glad to read Gareth's note, as my ineptitude with pop music did me in today. I was trying to figure out if the four songs were all ones that had repeated words? Or maybe the artists all tied together somehow? Now it makes more sense, all of the themers being ones featuring sound effects. And I was a little embarrassed to find out that there are actually six themers, including IKO IKO and SHBOOM. Pop music, my arch enemy!

I really appreciate Gareth's comment about not trying to do too much. Shows a level of self-awareness and maturity that not a lot of constructors (or people in general — sigh) get to. I was all set to comment about the flow of crossword glue around the EMI / RMN / CSA region, but now that pile-up makes more sense given how many constraints Gareth put on himself. Just dealing with a huge string of M's is a tough enough task. Throw in IKO IKO and SHBOOM as further challenges, and I'm impressed that Gareth got the grid as clean as he did.

All those constraints in the middle of the puzzle did force him to deploy a lot of his black squares, which is a reason why we see big swaths of white in the NW and SE. Working with a maximum word count of 78, placing a lot of short words in one region usually means having to fill a few longer spaces elsewhere. So getting the unfortunate pile-up of ONT / OTT / DEO is a side-effect, in a way, of the huge theme density and high constraints.

It's tough for me to assess pop music puzzles given my fourth-grade level of knowledge there, but I think I would have appreciated this one more if there were a more overt way all the themers tied together. Even a music moron like myself can grok the repetition factor of IKO IKO, MMM MMM MMM MMM, and DOO DOO DOO DOO DOO. Not as easy for me to tell how the others fit in. I don't often like being hit over the head with a metaphorical hammer (or a real one, for that matter), but in this case a little noggin-tapping would have been a good thing.

Letter substitution theme today, words ending in A changed to ER with wacky results. Some of them really amused me, TUBER PLAYER eliciting a laugh and FRANK ZAPPER being gold (if the FRANK ZAPPER were sold on infomercials, my grandma would buy at least one). CONGER LINES could have fallen flat, but a fun clue rescues it. "Eel Trovatore," a pun on "Il Trovatore," still makes me giggle.

Five themers are no joke, especially when they're all long. At 11/11/15/11/11, this puzzle is packed to the gills. Gareth and David do a nice job with the fill, even incorporating two long pieces of fill. FOAM PEANUT is nice, and WHAT A LAUGH is snappy. My personal preference is to fill puzzles with uplifting entries, hopefully sending the solver off on a high, so it would have been perfect if WHAT A LAUGH had somehow been clued as a reaction to something actually funny. I suppose the sarcastic approach is more accurate though.

For such high theme density, it's amazing that really only one spot stuck out to me, the OESTE and ITA area in the middle. Unfortunately, they're sort of linked by ICK — not the greatest subconscious influence on solvers. I might not have even noticed those two entries if they had been spread out. For example, I glossed over ERST and MOR because they were all by themselves, almost unnoticeable pieces of glue.

Sometimes I wonder if the trend toward more and more theme density is a good thing. CHARLIE THE TUNA didn't do much for me, and without it, there could have been a lot more long fill in the puzzle without the need for any glue. As always, trade-offs.

Super-clean start to the week from a highly experienced constructor and reviewer over at Crossword Fiend. Today's theme uses three grid-spanning entries, the three homonyms THERE, THEIR, and THEY'RE. Not a ground-breaking theme, but certainly workable for a Monday.

What I appreciated most about this puzzle was its high level of smoothosity. Normally we see at least a little OLEO, some entry rarely (or never) used outside the world of crosswords. Gareth works over his grid with obvious care, allowing me to sail right through the puzzle. Nice stuff, excellent workmanship.

With only three themers, it's extremely important to choose them wisely. When there are five themers, if one misses or falls a little short, an 80% hit rate isn't bad. But with only three, a miss on one means a dismal 67%. So I was glad to see these three sparkly phrases, each of which I really appreciated. It would have been perfect (GRRRRREAT, should I say?) if the third had been another political line, for consistency's sake. But I can't think of another right off the bat, at least not one so iconic as the first two.

Given the light theme density, I would have liked to have seen more long fill out of this grid. ST LUCIA and AGE GAPS add some zest, along with FOODIE and PAYOLA, but there's not much else to pep up the puzzle. Having a few eight-letter (or longer) entries would have been really nice — removing one pair of black squares (or moving one set) to create a pair of long downs could have given the puzzle more pizzazz. But it's quite possible that doing this might eat away at the smooth factor, and I wouldn't want that. Always the trade-offs.

Overall, I enjoy seeing the variety even within Monday NYT puzzles. I could imagine giving this one to a beginner friend, in hopes of him/her finishing — a doable first puzzle for someone (aside from perhaps the AGRA/ST LUCIA crossing, which I think is fair but possibly hard for beginners). That's important in my opinion, as I believe drawing in new solvers is critical for the NYT crossword to survive and thrive. This puzzle likely will fall short for more experienced solvers whose expectations are higher, but the good thing about a daily puzzle is that over the course of a month or even a week, there will usually something for everyone.