Karen Steinberg author page

GRECO-ROMAN wrestling in today's grid, pairs of analogous gods crossing each other — fun concept for this lover of all things mythological. A shame that ARES and MARS didn't get a chance to go to war.

Why not, you might ask? Couldn't they cross at the A or the R? Yes, but I like Karen and Paul's choice to employ long names. POSEIDON, ARTEMIS, DEMETER, and DIONYSUS are hard to ignore during the solve, as they're some of the beefiest entries in the puzzle, whereas poor ARES and MARS might have gotten lost in the shuffle.

Fun touch to have IM SO DEAD crossing GRECO-ROMAN, too, considering how those old bastards' penchant for killing on a whim. That story of Apollo and Marsyas always spooked the heck out of me, not to mention Procrustes' habit of chopping off legs.

Not MEDIA SHY, were they!

Excellent bonuses woven into the fill, a la Athena. There's so much beauty in D LISTER, SNOW PEA, SPARE ME, TUMMIES, IMPASSE, which is a Sisyphean task in a grid featuring four pairs of crossing themers plus a central revealer. Every time you have one, two, then three corners done, whammo! That stone flattens you, and you have to start back up the hill.

There is some SSE EIN ESO and Zeus-forsaken MNO, but every crossword grid must have flaws or risk the wrath of the great goddess Cruciverba. We all know what happened to Arachne when she dared to risk perfection …

Such an apt revealer to breathe Promethean life into this puzzle.

REDUCING FRACTIONS is exactly the revealer I wanted! I'm so glad David pointed that out because it strongly pulls the concept together. I couldn't remember that term for the life of me, but now I can casually toss it around as I continue faking being a genius around my kids.

Neat progression, from 4/8 to 2/4 to 1/2. That sure was hard to see during my solve, though, and without a revealer, I missed the consistent steps until well after I finished.

Part of that was I was convinced the last one was 1/9, as in TOP (of the) NINTH, but TOP HALF does fit the clue. It's a shame that this themer didn't sing nearly as much as HALF-CAF. The layout is so constrained that it didn't take me long to search out and evaluate any other possibilities. I might have preferred HALF TIME and ON BEHALF (of), but not being able to include the (of) makes ON BEHALF half strange.

Interesting clue for VOODOO. I was only vaguely aware that it was a religion, and I had no idea it had Catholic influences.

Although SEAS is much more common in crossword grids than VOODOO, I found it almost as fun because of the delightful clue. "Naval gazing," indeed. And FORMAL's clue was hardly formal, misdirecting to a coin toss in [Calling for tails, maybe]. These touches were a big help as I pushed through my frustration.

I love the concept, and this would have gotten my POW! if some sort of REDUCING FRACTIONS revealer had been in play. Perhaps split it 8 / 9 in two nearby slots? That opens up a can of worms in grid construction, but it sure would have packed a huge punch.

What, this puzzle didn't run on Europe Day? It's amusing that the "Day of the united Europe" is disagreed upon (May 5^th vs. May 9^th). Agree to disagree, just like today's theme.

I had a tough time figuring out what was going on, so I asked my French friends down the street what CONCURRENCE meant. The answer came back quickly: rivalry, bien sur! We were all amused that the word nearly flipped in meaning from French to English.

GYMNASIUM was easier to suss out since there's a Wikipedia article about Danish GYMNASIUMS. No wonder the Danes are ahead of us academically, jumping through metaphorical school hoops while we take things literally.

SEMESTER was tougher to figure out. I found a couple of references, including one that made some sense — after I watched several "learn basic Swedish" videos. Tack, YouTube!

Digging got even deeper with MULTIPLEX. Bing proved useless, as usual, though Google maybe found something useful. Is Interglot a trusted source?

OLD TIMER was the hardest to research. Ultimately, I landed on what appears to be an authoritative explanation, although I still am not sure what TÜV NORD means.

After spending an hour researching and thinking about this theme, I still have difficulty describing it. It's not "letter sequences that mean different things in different languages," like CHAT = cat in French. It's … ported words? From different languages to English? Or English to different languages?

Le poulet oder ägg?

Whatever it is exactly, it made me stop and think, and I'm always appreciative of those opportunities.

Why do I love up and down stripes so much? They win me over almost every time.

Not surprising, given how Charlie Brown-y I am.

Neat that TWENTY FOUR HOURS and SLEEP WAKE CYCLES are both 15 letters long. It's fortuitous enough when two theme answers are equal in length, allowing thematic symmetry, but both of them being grid-spanners gives so much more flexibility than if they were 12-14 letters. Note that the singular SLEEP WAKE CYCLE would need to be placed in row 12, thus compressing the themers and creating yet more challenges.

Will Shortz isn't taking many themes requiring diagonal entries these days because of all the fill compromises they tend to require. Filling a subsection like the middle is easy if you only have one Across entry to work around, but when you pin letters into fixed locations like D I A N R, you strip away many possibilities. Smart to deploy so many black squares in the center to section off the most challenging part of the grid.

Using up so many black squares creates snags elsewhere, though. With the word count already pushed to the max of 78, you must work with big swaths of white space in the bottom corners. When the diagonal C I R takes away flexibility, that region becomes much harder to fill.

With all the technical constraints, it's a fine result to escape with minor dabs of FAA GYN LOA SLC.

What a beautiful clue for ONE DIME! I confidently plunked in ONE CENT, but that's the smallest denomination, not size. Along with so much great wordplay in "the 1%" as LOWFAT and horns on both impala animals and Impala cars, there was so much more wordplay fun than we usually get on a Tuesday.

Great DAY to NIGHT touch. I admired Karen's solo debut.

★ You know what they say: the family that crosses words together never says cross words to get her!

Well, they should.

I loved seeing the three pics here: son, mother, and father, each contributing to the creation. I'll remember this one for that aspect alone.

Some great finds, too, especially those involving a space change. NO REG(R)ETS split into BERGERON and BERETS is excellent. And what a winner in DE(P)OSITION forking into PLUMPED / PLUM POSITION!

I didn't notice the Notepad until well after finishing, but I'm glad I did. I assumed that the circled letters had to be random because getting them to spell something out while adhering to the theme constraint and crossword symmetry would be near impossible. The key word is "near!" Spelling out SEPARATE separated this one from the pack.

All that, plus mid-length fill! Seven-letter slots often work best with boring entries like CHAPTER, so BIG NEWS, BODY ART, DETOXES, KASHMIR, MASCARA, PROGENY, TRILOGY add so much spice.

Entertaining discoveries all tied together with a solid meta-answer, put together by a family all contributing their parts? I could hardly ask for more.