Thursday, November 30 2024, Jeffrey Martinovic and Jeff Chen

I have nothing but admiration for anybody who can set a NYT crossword.  I wish I could do it myself, and some day I may take a crack at it, but meanwhile, I appreciate the effort and inventiveness that goes into a puzzle.  Especially the themed ones.  I am a sucker for themed puzzles.  Having said that - I found this one particularly outstanding.  I worked my way down a medium-strength grid, encountering + skipping a few answers that didn't seem to make sense, until reaching the science-fiction-y revealer : TIMETRAVEL.  Aha!  But even with that in hand, it took a bit more time to parse everything.  What the setters have done, three separate times, is to put two answers side by side, one containing a time-related word, and TRAVEL the time word over to the other answer, leaving two different answers that are *still valid words/phrases*.  To wit:

• MAN and PAGELAYOUT
• SHOERACKS and SING
• GALL and IMPROVEON

So much going on!  In case it isn't clear, the third one (my favourite as I dabbled in the latter answer back in the day) is clued "Armada ship" and "Unscripted comedy", which, absent the above wizardry, would be GALLEON and IMPROV.  See?  The travelling time-words are even taken from the "correct" side of the words!  Bravo, I say.

What else, what else ... A nice collection of amusing clues, starting with "Evidence that one is going into labor?" which, after a bit of pregnancy-related thought, turns out to be UNIONCARD.  (Funny that a few clues later, we get "Sudden contraction" (SPASM)!)  I liked "Zippers on a snowy day" (SLEDS) too.  Brought back memories of metal zippers, jammed and stubbornly refusing to open or close, that when they got cold enough, they'd sometimes freeze painfully onto one's lips.  Neat that a LAKEBED can turn into a salt flat; one thinks of a lake as a body of fresh water...  And ENZYMES ("Chemical kick starters") - a straightforward clue to be sure, but puts me in mind of the manifold miracle of what goes on inside a living thing.  Finally, "Takes in the paper?" is OPEDS, not READS.  Oh and p.s. I bet I'm not the only one who put in ARIA for "Opera piece" (it's ACTI)!

Top marks for this Thursday puzzle.  OK Friday, your work is cut out for you!

-philbo