And exiting that SW corner is a bit of a rough patch, with DIONE / ROODS / ISERE. AVERYS is a bit inelegant, in that it's difficult for me to think of one famous AVERY, much less two. What with OUTLANDERS already being fixed in place, it becomes super hard to find clean crossings. However, check out the huge spaces that allow a solver to get in there. I have such a high standard for both of these guys' work that it was a bit of a surprise to see ASK AN, even with a neat clue.Īnd look at the SW corner, SUCH a great triple stack of STALIN ERA / HOVER OVER / E LEARNING. With the long OUTLANDERS and TAD LINCOLN running through it, it causes all sorts of constraints. However, it does make grid-filling a real challenge. That NW corner is so wide open, with so many different ways to break in. On one hand, this helps a puzzle flow for a solver, making it so easy to move into different parts of the grid via multiple entries. And E LEARNING is a great example of an in-the-language term adding some recency to the NYT puzzle. That crossing OUTLANDERS was awfully nice. Some beautiful entries today, NADERITE is not a term I knew but it's highly inferable. But fill like SKI TEAM and PINE NUT help to take advantage of those spaces. This can make it tricky to fill a grid with snazzy stuff, as most of the time pizzazz comes from those 8+ letter entries. It features a lot more seven-letter entries than normal, while leaving less room for entries of eight or more letters. An interesting grid layout I haven't seen before - always neat to see a new skeleton. Hopefully the headaches are spread evenly and pass quickly.Īnother nice themeless from the BOY WONDER duo, Brad Wilber and Byron Walden. I imagine that would be easier for some and harder for others. Several clues are like that, especially 52A, which was clued in one option as the recentish Jake Gyllenhaal movie. I'm not even sure the 16A clue I wrote is harder than what's in the puzzle, just hard in a different way. Beyond his greatness as a constructor, Brad really just shines as a co-constructor. Then I slogged through with something OK in the SW but Brad noticed a bit of a dupe and buffed up that area to fix it. Brad zipped off at least a couple of excellent SE corners. My memory of the construction was Brad started with the lovely NE corner, I got the TAD area working with a helpful assist from the egregi., um, I mean innovative partial at 2D. I particular liked the Walden clues for 40A and 59A - I think the upper left might have been too hard with his original clue for 16A, but I'm keeping it mum so he has a chance to use it again. 36D was a new word to me, and having Byron slot that in really tidied up that immediate area. I recall that we had more back-and-forth choosing the fill for the bottom than we did for the whole of our puzzle of Nov. I hadn't mentioned it to him in advance we won't call it mind-reading exactly, since the –LN ending was one of the better choices. I had to laugh that he engineered a nifty section with TAD LINCOLN, as I had tried that over and over again with no clean fill. My original intention was to do the entire top half and tag Byron, but I ended up giving him just a corner.
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