Kevin G. Der author page

The producers of "American Ninja Warrior" have a tough job. Ideally, you want fewer and fewer competitors to make it through each stage, a gradual winnowing until you're left with the final one or two people standing.

Early on, you should knock out some people who don't have great balance. In the middle rounds, you have to ratchet things up, maybe tossing in a salmon ladder.

And you ought to end with an incredibly difficult series of challenges that only the best-trained uber-athletes can complete — a wicked wingnuts to a crazy cliffhanger to a flying bar. If all goes well, a small handful of competitors will make it almost all the way through, and maybe one will even hit the buzzer.

Now that, my friends, makes for dramatic TV.

One thing you want to avoid at all costs: an obstacle that knocks everyone out. No fun to have something impossible! Today's puzzle wasn't quite that, but it was wicked wingnuts that you had to do while on a flying bar, landing on crazy cliffhanger-sized ledges.

I did like several of the feature entries — great stack in IT CHECKS OUT / BETA RELEASE / ALARM SYSTEM. Along with I MET SOMEONE, WRAP PARTY, COMMISH, TRES CHIC is an appropriate description!

So much of it nearly went over my head(bands), though. If you don't know what a "do loop" is (a programming construct designed to iterate until a certain condition is met), the cleverness of a "(hair)do loop" is lost. Similarly with BETA RELEASE and concept of "patches" applied to buggy code.

"Barrier to entry" is common MBA lingo (element that hinders competitors from entering your marketplace). Even if it is something that solvers should at least be familiar with, it's too literal a description for ALARM SYSTEM. Something like [It might ring a bell] would be a better wordplay angle.

Along with SEATO (?), the never-spelled-out-except-in-crosswords GSIX, and the baffling opposite of alt = NEU? (old and new in German), my solving muscles won't be the same for days.

That said, this is the exact type of training that one needs to become a stage 4 solver. A few years ago, I would routinely fail on Thursday salmon ladders, and now I'm finishing punishing Saturday crazy cliffhangers. Mount Midoriyama, I'm coming for you!

Technically superb puzzle. Kevin is one of the few constructors dipping into quad-stack corners, and for good reason — they're one of the toughest challenges in themeless grids. That NE corner is so well done — CHEAT DAY is a great way to anchor it, ROGUE ONE is contemporary, TEA TASTER runs through it for even more color. Some might complain about Jennifer EGAN, but "A Visit From the Goon Squad" won the Pulitzer.

We constructors love it when people with grid-friendly names become crossworthy!

Nice work in the opposite corner, too. I do love me some PLAYTESTing, Kevin and I both deep into Mystery Hunt-style puzzles. (He's roughly ninety-wajillion times as skilled as me, though.) MAGRITTE and KATY PERRY added a lot, too.

Although the technical merits are strong, I had a bit of DOLOR as a solver. That's exaggerating, but these types of wide-open grids tend to suffer from lack of snazziness. I felt like there was so much prepositional addition — TOP OUT, CRAWL IN, HOLE UP, BLEW APART, DISHED OUT. Left me with a feeling of too many precious long slots not pulling their weight.

I didn't love ADEPTS, either. Yes, it's dictionary supported, but it's so odd in the plural.

And the PIMAS / MURANO cross nearly did me in. Ultimately though, I think PIMAS is something educated solvers ought to have at least heard of.

Kevin could have made his life a lot easier by moving a black square to where the P of PIMAS is. That would have dead-ended the SE corner, making filling easier, probably making it possible to replace some of those prepositionals with more pizzazz. But I applaud his decision to go the tough road, which allows for a more open grid and thus better solving flow.

Overall, a solid, if not super-sparkly, low-word-count puzzle.

I imagine that some people will LOVE this puzzle and some will HATE it. We've had some puzzles where some entries are reversed. We've even had some where every other row is reversed. I don't think I've ever seen one where every other row AND every other column are reversed. Talk about melting the minds of solvers everywhere!

I liked most of the thematic material. ONE WAY STREETS was a good descriptor of the puzzle. GOING IN ALL DIRECTIONS, too. TOTAL GRIDLOCK, though — don't all crosswords exhibit total gridlock? Interlock and all, yeah? I love it as a phrase, but I don't think it does a good job describing the conceit.

Okay, maybe there was TOTAL GRIDLOCK in my head as I tried nearly in vain to even crack open one corner of the puzzle.

Some awesome fill: HOT ZONE, STATEROOMS, DEMITASSES. And not much gluey fill for the level of construction difficulty, just some minor ROBO IDNO dings. If it hadn't been for the cringey ETUI, I would have given Kevin a gold star for near-impeccable craftsmanship. He has written his own software, so it's easier for him to automate rule-breaking grids like this, but it's still impressive.

I understand Will's decision to run this on a Saturday. I had a few brain eruptions during the solving process, gray matter leaking out my ears. Kevin delights in making puzzles that are harder than the hardest of hardies, so I think he wildly succeeded in today.

It's such a neat and creative rule-breaker that I would have preferred to get it on a Thursday, with the clues GREATLY eased up. It would have made for a delightful a-ha moment, such a tricky delight. And that way, I would have gotten the themeless I've come to expect on Saturdays. Give me my hard themeless challenge!

I worry that some (many? most?) solvers will just give up on this one and not appreciate the great idea and strong execution here. Puzzles are meant to be taken on as a challenge and ultimately solved — not meant to beat the solver senseless and leave him/her to bleed. I probably would have given up if I didn't want to write about every single NYT puzzle. Just too darn hard by a long shot.

I've run several half-marathons. They've all gone differently, but I've noticed similar patterns. They usually start out with a feeling of dread (only 60 words, wide-open grid; shudder), knowing that I'll be in for some pain. Not sure what kind, but there's sure to be some sort.

When the horn sounds, there's such a mass of people that you can barely move (my first pass through the clues, I filled in only one square). But when you cross the starting line and start picking up momentum, what a feeling of relief (OMG, so glad to have randomly known the MONSTER logo!).

And the first two miles? What a rush as you get into your rhythm (AMERICANA and SPEAKEASY crossing SAY PLEASE, awesome!). Even feeling decently good as you hit mile three and four (ANTICRIME … not bad).

Then come the first pangs (PACA). Whether a knee twinge or having that first sense that you might have to drop a sewer pickle (TREN), it's not good. You push right through though, and it's worth it because you have the satisfaction (SOMBREROS!) that you made it through the first twitches.

The halfway point brings a dread that you still have miles to go, and wait, what's hurting now? (That LALO / PEALE crossing, oof.) Another mile in, strange sensations erupt all over (EL MARIACHI, what? Who says TABLET PC? What's the CALDER CUP?). And then more flood through you(EMPANELS?).

But you fight, because you know there's going to be a few last highs (TEA TASTER, LA SCALA) before the finish.

Then, everything begins to sear and burn as the final mile approaches (ANSE? ALFIO who? STET. BAAL?). But that finish line is in sight. Your legs have a strange leadlike quality (TRADES IN, ARE NOT) that you have to ignore. And when the crowd starts roaring near mile marker 13 (SLAM POETS!), that's all the rush you need to bring it home.

About two hours (39:33, about 3x my usual Saturday time) filled with mixed, powerful emotions, and you come away with the awesome sense that you finished something daunting. You've earned a well-deserved rest after the intense workout.

Now, where's my "I Finished the Kevin Der 60-word Crossword" shirt?

It took me forever to figure out what was going on here, so lemme try to explicitly explain it. Kevin started with common phrases, i.e. [Handle with care] and [Calm before the storm], and ... first word ... second definition ... two-letter overlap ... I can't figure out how to explain this!

So here's how it worked in practice: [Handle with care] = handle + care = alias (as in one's CB handle) + assistance (as in giving a bit of care) = ALIASSISTANCE. It's tricky since you have to figure out that "handle" and ALIAS are synonyms, as are "care" and ASSISTANCE, then cram everything together.

I'm usually against "definitional" entries like Go being a CHINESE BOARD GAME, but in this case, these dictionary-sounding entries were key for me to be able to solve the puzzle. Not sure I would have figured out what was going on, otherwise.

My favorite one was SERENITYPHOON, just perfect for [Calm before the storm]. It's so easy to see that "calm" and SERENITY are linked, as are "storm" and TYPHOON. And SERENITY and TYPHOON have that two-letter overlap! This is the type of creative, innovative wordplay that I like to see in crosswords.

Some nice bonuses in TOFUTTI (sounds a whole lot better than it tastes, ick), JUNGLE GYM, and ESPN RADIO. Good stuff there. CLUB SODA and OFF COLOR, brilliantly clued as [Salty or spicy], were nice too.

And with just a little AREAR and OLA kind of stuff, the rest of the puzzle felt smooth, which was a good thing given how much I struggled with grokking the theme.

Overall, I would have loved this one if every themer had been as strong as SERENITYPHOON, but there were too many stilted-sounding definitions and synonyms that felt like a stretch (ABIDE = stay?). I do admire Kevin's innovation — I don't think I've seen something quite like this.

Fun plays on Oscar-winning movies, changing a single letter to give kooky results. SILENCE OF THE IAMBS was laugh-out loud funny due to its absurdity, and the rest were generally pretty humorous. Amusing to think of Jabba the Hut as THE VAST EMPEROR.

It felt inelegant to have some THEs included and some not, but I imagine it was necessary for crossword symmetry. A shame.

Given Kevin's history of multi-layered themes, I was so sure something was going to be spelled by the changed letters. Or the original letters? After all, there would be some flexibility given that DEER HUNTER could be changed to PEER, SEER, DEAR, DEED, even PUNTER, HINTER. Alas, BIVUGFKGH (new letters) DLLAENDTF (original letters) don't spell anything. Ah well; fun to think of what might have been.

Kevin does really well with his bonus fill — COOKIE TIN, FLAGPOLES, RAVE REVIEW, RAN LIKE MAD, MONGOLIA — useful to keep up the interest of the non-movie fans out there. Even GAS MAIN, TRIPPY, STASIS added to the quality of my solve.

A few blips in short fill are to be expected in any 140-word Sunday puzzle. Kevin mostly keeps his gluey bits to the ignorable kind, with a bit of BEL, ENE, TRAC, OEO. The one place I thought was pretty crunchy was the AIT/ARHAT region in the upper right. Not surprising since Kevin chose to stack BEER HUNTER and SILENCE OF THE IAMBS, forcing a ton of letter pairs to work with. Perhaps ARHAT should be in solvers' general knowledge, since it's an important concept in Buddhism? But this is the one spot where it feels like the solver isn't 100% set up to ultimately win.

It would have been mind-blowing to get an extra layer into this puzzle, the nine special letters somehow spelling out … something. Too bad ADAPTATION is 10 letters, not nine! But it would have been nearly impossible to get a sequence like this worked in, given the rules of crossword symmetry and the difficulty of packing in so many themers.

As it was, I appreciated Kevin's efforts to shoehorn in a ton of fun movie "adaptations." Much more straightforward than I expect from Kevin, but still an enjoyable solve.

A very impressive construction given the elaborate theme concept. I'm used to seeing multiple letters in squares on Thursdays, but to have EVERY SQUARE within a long spiral contain double letters? It's a crazy idea, only doable by a select group of constructors. Kevin uses his own custom construction software, so I imagine he coded some special functions to help him fill this one.

Neat to get some theme material besides just the idea of "spiral where every cell gets two letters." SNAIL SHELL, GUGGENHEIM, and WHIRLPOOL (and YULE LOG and MILKY WAY!) are good examples of this shape. (The GUGGENHEIM's famous architecture already was memorialized by Liz Gorski, so it didn't have the power for me as it might have had.)

As soon as I cottoned to this theme, I worried about how much glue Kevin would need. Yes, he's a top-notch constructor and programmer, but the level of constraints here are incredibly difficult. I could hardly believe my eyes to get such little glue, only a STATAL, FIT TO, N TEST = nothing major. Well, HUMBUGGED and SIDELINER felt sort of made up, and BESTRODE … okay, maybe that one's fine. Still, for a grid that works in a mind-boggling 25 words of seven letters or longer, it's great work.

As a solver, I found this one really difficult, my brain struggling with trying to fill in two letters at a time. The NW was especially difficult, with the unfortunate STATAL being one of the few entries into that section. I thought the idea was really cool when I first encountered it, but it became so hard to solve that my enjoyment level decreased toward the end.

Overall, I appreciated Kevin's not just pushing the boundaries for this theme week, but demolishing them. I don't know that I ever would have come up with such a crazy idea. Even if I didn't have as much fun solving it as I would have liked, I do admire both the concept and execution.

★ Kevin has hit for the cycle, thus displaying a wide range of skills across early-week, tricksy Thursdays, themelesses, and Sundays. Impressive to be a generalist that can handle pretty much any sort of construction, but even more impressive is that he might just be the best constructor out there right now, when it comes to quad-stack themelesses.

Now, I use the term "quad-stack" differently than others, broadening the term to mean any stack of long entries of 8+ letters. It's an incredibly difficult task to pull off cleanly and colorfully. Two entries stacked atop each other is easy — even when you have a difficult letter combination, you can usually move black squares around to accommodate. Three atop each other is much harder, requiring the constructor to try many more long answers in order to generate friendly letter triplets for the crossings.

Quad stacks … hoo boy. Not quite an order of magnitude more difficult than triples, but at least a factor of three or four. So it is just amazing to see Kevin's NW corner. TIME BOMB / EGOMANIA / ALSO RANS / COURT VISION are all vivid entries, and there's not a single gluey bit running through them. Not even a minor offender!

The SE does have PERSONAL, which feels to me like it just takes up space, but Kevin more than makes up for that by running TEEN POP / BOX SCORE / WIN THE WAR ... right through the quad-stack! It's a crazy bounty of goodness down there.

The rest of the puzzle is awfully nice, too. Neat to give an insider's nod to violist Liz Gorski with VIOLA SOLO. LIBRARIAN is not a sizzling word … until you clue it with the uber-catchy Marrrrrrrrrr …. IAN! from the Music Man.

Aside from the usual suspect of ARA and the oddity of AROINT, the puzzle is squeaky clean. Liability count of just two = amazing work, especially when considering the difficulty of construction.

And a beautiful clue in [Northern hemisphere?]. Funny to think of an IGLOO as a hemi-sphere.

It'd be tough for me to find another puzzle with quad-stack regions as good as these. Stunning work and such a fun solve.

"Around the World in 80 Days" amazed me as a kid. A book written over a century ago, capturing the attention and imagination of a ten-year old boy is a pretty good criteria for defining a classic. So it was great to see the book commemorated in a crossword. I really enjoyed how the letters A R O U N D … roamed up and down in their quest to circumnavigate the puzzle.

As Kevin and I discussed over email, some compromises. There's so much short fill that it's tough to avoid some clunkers. But for me, the biggest source of frustration was not being able to see the cities embedded in the theme answers. I had to look up Fogg's path in order to figure them out:

• LETTING ONES HAIR DOWN: LONDON
• LEMON SQUEEZERS: SUEZ
• BORN TO BE MY BABY: BOMBAY
• SPECIAL COURT MARTIAL: CALCUTTA
• THE LONG KISS GOODNIGHT: HONG KONG
• YOU KNOW WHAT IM SAYING: YOKOHAMA
• SAINT FRANCIS COLLEGE: SAN FRANCISCO
• THE NEW YANKEE WORKSHOP: NEW YORK

So, a really cool idea to 1.) trace Fogg's journey through different cities and 2.) circumnavigate the puzzle, but with some execution problems both in gluey bits and the ability to see Fogg's path. Made for a frustrating solving experience at times.

Overall though, a very fun concept, attempting to capture the magic of the book.

I might start a series on how to break open the NYT Saturday crossword. For the longest time, I wouldn't even attempt a Friday, because it seemed too daunting. Kevin writes some of the toughest puzzles around, so today's a perfect place to start.

My first pass through Kevin's wide-open grid gave me just an S at the end of 11-Down. One. Letter. Filled. That's it. Daunting! But I've since learned to try a few things, and a guess will often open something up. For me, that was [Gay partner?]. Perhaps ENOLA, but it could easily be an LGBT term, or a reference to Zorro, the Gay Blade. But with no other toeholds, why not try it out?

Off ENOLA's A came A?? with the clue [Scene]. Not a lot of A?? words, so some thought about what a "scene" could be had me tentatively try ADO. And 45-Across, [Requirement of Mormonism] felt like it ought to be MISSION … except that ENOLA wouldn't be right then. Could the N of ENOLA be part of an –ING ending? Wracking my brain, I dredged up information on how rich the Mormon church is, due to required 10% TITHING. 38-Down, [Certain Sorority member] had to be some Greek letter, and THETA fit the ?H??? pattern. Bingo bongo, it all felt right!

I got lucky with trying DETECTIVE WORK off the D — the "case-by-case" language got me thinking. And the –TCH ending of 6-Down, combined with the "win" part of the clue felt like the entry would end in MATCH. Little things like that, maybe two dozen trial and error points, eventually helped me crack the puzzle.

Because of the huge difficulty in pulling off a wide-open 64-worder — check out how well every section of the grid connects up — I might have given Kevin the POW! But Kevin Der is Kevin Der, and I tend to be pickier with the greats, docking points for the tough KENTISH / AVA crossing (you mean KANT(ish) wasn't British?), a DEFILER, a DENISON, the odd VELURE, and a UNICUM. Everything is perfectly reasonable for a wide-open 64-worder, and if it had been anyone but Kevin …

A tough solve, perhaps the hardest Saturday in months. Dang was I happy to finish! (With a bit of cheating. Or maybe a lot. Ahem.)

★ As a solver, I've come to fear the 64 and 66-word themeless. At 68 or 70 words, there's huge potential to cram a huge quantity of assets into a puzzle with not many liabilities. And grids with 62 words or fewer may not have as much in terms of spotlight entries, but they can look jaw-dropping, giving a tremendous visual impact with their wide-open tracts of white space. Too often, the middle ground means not enough assets, a slew of mostly neutral entries, and/or too many liabilities. So a puzzle like today's 66-worder packed full of assets and low on liabilities, is very welcome. Great feat of construction and a very enjoyable solve.

When I opened it up, I wondered how those NW and SE corners would turn out. Not many people attempt quad-stacked 8s, because they too often require pots of glue to hold them together. Kevin has done at least one before, and the experience shows, as both of those corners come out clean as a whistle. Better yet, the long answers are generally fresh and snappy, not at all the neutral types of entries I expected. POT FARMS, AFROBEAT, STARBASE, TENTACLE makes for quite a quartet.

The other corner is anchored by NET SALES, a bit dull since with its common letters, we see it quite often in themelesses. But otherwise, to get PRENATAL with its great clue, HATE MAIL, IPAD MINI with clean crossings is really impressive work.

Normally I'm not one who notices how Scrabbly a puzzle is. Patrick Berry quite often stays away from the Big Four (JQXZ), and his work is almost always standout. But he does usually pepper a grid with a few Vs or Ks to keep things interesting. With just one K, this puzzle did feel a bit "Wheel of Fortune" to me, leaning heavily on the RSTLN E.

And there were a few entries that I didn't care for. UNO DUE TRE felt like a wasted slot, not nearly as in the language as UNO DOS TRES or UN DEUX TROIS, but of course I'm sure Italian speakers enjoyed seeing it. ULSTER was interesting to learn about — a type of coat worn by Holmes — but the clever clue was lost on me, as even after filling in the letters, it didn't make sense until I went to go look it up, and at that point I had forgotten what the clue was.

That's all nit-picking though, as my enjoyment level was really high. To get such a high quantity of assets and few liabilities in a 66-worder is an impressive feat. Along with Will's in-depth commentary of how he analyzed and edited the clues, it was a real joy from start to finish to post-game analysis.

A nice construction from one of the best in the business, Joon. Er, Jeff. Darn it, I mean Kevin!*.

One aspect I like best about Kevin's work is that he's always pushing the envelope, trying to figure out what he can do new that others haven't done before. Look at the NE and the SW today: beautiful chunky white sections, smoothly filled. Typically themeless constructors stay with triple-stacked areas, because moving to quad stacks exponentially increases the difficulty. It's definitely been done many times before, but check out how snazzy and clean he makes them. HOTEL BARS / ANIMAL FAT / AS I RECALL all crossed by BLACK OPS? Must have taken days, perhaps weeks to figure out that one subsection.

Usually going to 66 words in a themeless means you're going to have some compromises. But Kevin takes so much care in his work, leaving us with only ONE LS and KIEL as misdemeanors. And it was great to hear him say he struggled to see if he could eliminate KIEL somehow. But given the giant ell of white space up in that corner, it would be very difficult to do while still retaining BLACK OPS crossing all the long stacked answers. That NE corner has so many great answers though; they're easily worth the price of KIEL.

The one knock on today's puzzle might be that there isn't a marquee answer that jumped out at me with that hurts-so-good slap upside the head. I smiled when I finally pieced together DIME STORES — very cool clue — and I really liked the colloquial NO BOTHER, but I really appreciate getting at least one whiz-bang answer (usually themeless constructors place their best answer at 1-across).

Kevin took a stretch off of constructing for a while during his stint helping Obama get reelected among other pedestrian activities; very glad to see that he's in the kitchen again, mixing up more magic.

*I can joke about this, you can't. Ha.

★ Before we start, let's acknowledge the elephant in the room: all Asians actually do look alike. So as a public service, here's a quick primer. Kevin is the brilliant Asian, Joon is the Asian of Einsteinian brainpower, and I'm the smart one (and Asian). Seriously though, Kevin has worked in high-tech, helped President Obama get re-elected, and has a top-secret in-his-garage project in the works. Joon is the physicist who blew up Jeopardy! records. I'm the one who can morph the space-time fabric (as well as reality)*. Claro?

Excellent Monday puzzle from Kevin. It's not often that a Monday carries a novel theme, one I've never seen before. Bravo for breaking the mold! Neat to see this collection of well-known bumper sticker starters, each one immediately apparent to me. Even better, I couldn't think of any others right away that would fit in. Consistency and specificity, that's excellent theme work.

Far more impressive though, is the quality of his construction. It starts with the fact that the four themers are of inconvenient lengths (12 and 13), which makes grid layout challenging from the start. But Kevin sets it up so that he takes advantage of these lengths, using the black squares in rows 4 and 12 to end long downs (SIDE BENEFIT and DNA SAMPLING).

Then look at the sheer quantity of long downs: TEAHOUSE/EXPELLED, FUTURAMA/IN HEAVEN stacked together, along with RHESUS, MILADY, SANDPIT, BAD OMEN. With so much packed in, I'd expect a host of ugly entries (especially around the stacked long downs), but I didn't notice anything during my solve. Going through a second time I saw the unseemly ERGS, but that was it. Just amazing how clean and Monday-friendly this thing is.

Will brings up an interesting point about PLEB. To me, PLEB is perfectly fine — it's more esoteric entries like AMOUR PROPRE that I don't care to see in a Monday puzzle. So much about crosswords is subjective, isn't it?

Finally, I always enjoy getting a constructor's personality shining through the puzzle, and seeing FUTURAMA, CHANG (another dude who looks like Kevin, Joon and me), SATAY, all felt Kevin-ish. Man, that's some good stuff. Great way to start the week.

*I'm also the good-looking one.