Wednesday, January 7, 2015, Greg Johnson

9:06

I'm putting this time in because I finished the puzzle then. For some reason it took about another minute for the Congratulations! to show up, even though I changed nothing.

I don't love the theme here. I like that THESEUS and ARIADNE mirror each other. I don't like that Theseus' clue is treated like it's not thematic (13A: Maze runner?), and really there's no way to that figure out until you've moved through the puzzle, and found the other clues that refer to it. After all, the answer itself is no longer or shorter than the answer below it.

Then you have circled letters. I suppose if MINOTAUR had more unusual letters in it, it would be some kind of feat to scatter the letters through the puzzle. As it is, they're just random circled letters. And it's bothersome that KINGMINOS and his half-bestial stepson share etymologic underpinnings.

Finally, if the grid is supposed to represent a LABYRINTH, shouldn't there be some path in to the center where the Minotaur is hiding out? Otherwise it's just a cage. At least the home of the beast's lair made it into the grid as well (30D: CRETE).

Unfortunately, the fill didn't much make up for the theme either. Once again we have both NSA and NSC in the same puzzle. As if that weren't enough, we get the following alphabet soup: PDA (dated), AARP (aged), RRR (makes you want to growl), ATH (huh?), TDS (timely), MRI (more of a favorite in my life), SCI, REO, STP. I think I ran out of clever things to say.

In the category of more huh? 21A: Late TV newsman Garrick (UTLEY), 29D: Earthquake (SEISM), and 18A: Pink-colored, to Pedro (ROSA). Shouldn't that just be "Pink?"

All right. Not much to love here. Anybody disagree?

- Colum

Tuesday, January 6, 2015, Joel Fagliano

4:42

DNA runs through this puzzle like sands through an hourglass. There's a pretty nifty representation of a double helix using the black squares, and each long down answer has the genetic letters split in the same way across two words. I like TOOTHANDNAIL the best of them, with the clue for BRANDNAMES (29D: Wilson and Hoover, but not Eisenhower) making it a close second. OLDNAVY has appeared a number of times in the puzzle (with much the same clue), while ISLANDNATION feels arbitrary and GOODNATURE bland.

For all of those long theme answers, it's a very smooth grid. There are a ton of Os in the top and bottom third and weirdly only one in the middle third. All those Os really draw the eye: OOO crossing GOODNATURE, LOON crossing IDOTOO, BOOP near TOOTHANDNAIL. We also had the strange family connection of EVE, ADAM, and ENOS.

Huygens may enjoy the presence of NUDE (41A: Beige shade, right next to the aforementioned first couple, whose lack of clothes were revealed to them) and TITS (3D: Small songbirds). Me, I liked 8D: Speak Persian? (MEOW) and the hidden capital in 13D: Hall of fame (MONTY).  A reminder of Jodie Foster as CLARICE Starling is welcome too.

Oh, hey! I didn't even see the revealer until I went through each clue. I'd answered that small section entirely with acrosses. I kind of like it better without the revealer.

Thumbs up, on the whole.

- Colum

Monday, January 5, 2015, John Guzzetta

4:34

This puzzle was for the birds.

Besides the 5 theme answers, we also had EMUS (15A: Cousins of ostriches). Actually, it's not a bad puzzle for a Monday. I don't really know OLDBUZZARD (24A: Cantankerous fellow) as a phrase I'd use in conversation, but the other four are solid. On the plus side, you have the nice pairing of AMENABLE and QUATRAIN, mirrored in the other corner by SHOUTOUT and PANDEMIC. The NW and SE are likewise nicely chunky, with SEDERS an unfortunate unnecessary plural.

But the middle has some stuff I don't like. What's with 21D: Like many Mexicans' forebears (AZTECANS)? Wouldn't they just be Aztecs? I'm also not fond of 34D: Not touched, as a boxer (UNHIT). Can we just put "un" in front of words and make an acceptable entry? The two partials USEIT and IREST are at least unusual (the former clued nicely with a spelling bee reference).

Things I do like: 25D: One trying to grab a bite at the theater? (DRACULA), 59A: N.Y.C. home of Magrittes and Matisses (MOMA, because it's a great museum, if expensive. Helps to have a mother with a Met ID), and 49D: Like 18 1/2 minutes of the Watergate tapes (ERASED).

Well, they can't all be gems like last Friday and Saturday.

- Colum

Sunday, January 4, 2015, Finn Vigeland

The Descent Of Man

A Sunday puzzle is best solved in a lazy way, just after breakfast, with your family around. Hope started this one, and Cece and I finished it. It didn't take very long, as there were only one or two challenging spots, but it was enjoyably smooth for the most part.

The theme is cute, but surprisingly sparse for a Sunday puzzle: only five theme answers. If I were to quibble with it (and isn't that exactly the point of a daily NYT XWORD blog?), I would say it could have been more elegant had the answers avoided using the letters MAN in the original sense of the word. The first answer, BILDUNGSRO[MAN], does that perfectly. All the others, however, use them in a way that is directly or indirectly derived from its sense of humanity: IMONLYHU[MAN] most directly, MORGANFREE[MAN] most indirectly. I presume the seed of the puzzle was DOYOUWANTTOBUILDASNOW[MAN], which is pretty amusing.

To quibble further, wouldn't it be wonderful if all the down answers that supply the MAN also hid the original sense? And mostly they do: PAXROMANA, OTTOMAN, LEMANS. But SCHUMANN (an answer I starred because who doesn't love Schumann?) is not as clean, and AWMAN just blew it.

But these are just quibbles, really. I liked the concept and it's reasonably well carried out. On the plus side, the sparsity of theme material allows more clean fill. The puzzle started out well with 1A: The "1" of 1/4 (JAN), which for a 3-letter answer is pretty good cluing. And ANOMIA is near and dear to my neurological heart, not to mention 17A: Subj. that gets into circulation? (ANAT). I also liked 51A: What a hippie lives in? (THENOW), 100A: What may eat you out of house and home? (TERMITES), and 74: Summers of old? (ABACI), where I was initially looking for a hidden capital.

Some non-question mark clues also shone: 31: Award for Hunt and Peck (OSCAR) got a smile, and 34D: Its drafts may be crafts (BREWPUB) was also fun. Speaking of which, there was a definite beer-laden slant to this puzzle. Besides the aforementioned, we also saw ALEGLASS (is that even really a specific thing?), TENDSBAR, and PBR, which is apparently short for Pabst Blue Ribbon. Why is that a hipster beer? I couldn't tell you. I only had facial hair for one year, and it didn't quite work.

I'm not sure about 28A: Part of U.N.C.F. (NEGRO). It is, after all, still an ongoing and important organization. On the other hand, its website barely spells out what its acronym stands for, and that only at the bottom in tiny letters. Google says up front the word is "dated, offensive". I feel it could have been altered somehow (maybe in its crossing with ATWO?)

Props to Cece: she got ATEAM, TERRA, and TACKLES.

Overall, thumbs up for a relaxed Sunday solve.

- Colum

Saturday, January 3, 2015, Sam Ezersky

26:36

Here's a classic themeless with symmetric stacks of three 9-letter answers in each corner, two 10-letter answers crossing them and crossing a 15-letter answer across the middle. I broke in with 5D: Traditional three-liner (HAIKU), giving me KEELS, but then skipped around a bit with 25D: Test letter? (BETA) and 25A: ____ Rebellion (colonial uprising) (BACONS, a nice clue to avoid an annoying plural). That then gave me MOZZARELLASTICK, a surprisingly easily clued 15-letter answer. The SE followed, and then the NW.

I wasn't fooled by 32D: Taste (SAPOR) as I had been in the past (having put a V in the place of the P had led me to a FWOE once). The hardest section by far was the SW. Even with SOFTTOP and HOLDONASEC in place, I had a very hard time finding any footholds. It took incorrectly putting SAidso in place to figure out BOGART to make any headway. My last letter was the H in the BOTHA/HUPMOBILE crossing. I'd never heard of the latter, but I see it is a handsome vehicle indeed.

Some nice clues: 22A: Notice after the expiration date? (OBIT), 33A: Rear of a disco? (BOOTY, answer supplied by Hope today), 62A: Eschewing a higher calling? (ATHEISTIC), and 29D: Flat sign (TOLET).

Some nice answers: SKYYVODKA, BYTHEBY, IDIOCY. So that I don't leave you with the idea that Hope's mind is only in Huygens territory, she also knew NEMEROV immediately.

Some things I didn't much like: 53D: Start to ski? (HELI) is nothing I'd ever heard of. ELUL next to VALS next to ENL is pretty ugly. And that's about it.

My final note is a shout out to Frannie and Hope's favorite movie, Auntie Mame, with AGNES Gooch. Fun when you can get an answer like that without much thinking!

Three good puzzles in a row! I'm a little nervous about tomorrow.

- Colum

Friday, January 2, 2015, David Steinberg

18:35

What a year 2015 is turning out to be! Two puzzles, two fine grids. Just 363 more, Mr. Shortz, and you'll have a perfect year!

A pleasant surprise for me today when I opened the H&F crossword blog to find I was featured right up at the top. If we really keep this month by month switch-off through the year, I suppose I'll deserve to be listed up there, but I don't know that I've earned my byline just yet.

But to the real stuff here. Interesting how yesterday's grid and today's grid mirror each other, although Mr. Steinberg, whose puzzles I've learned to anticipate with glee, has chosen a much chunkier middle section, with 5 11-letter answers offset on top of each other. Not satisfied with that, he's put two other pairs of 11-letter answers atop or below 2 15-letter answers at the top and bottom of the grid. You may have read my literary moans and groans when having to slog through a puzzle of quad stacks. How much more elegant and well managed this grid is.

My favorite long answers are 14A: They may be marked with X's (ADULTMOVIES) - a bit of Huygens material there; 49A: Hocus-pocus (LEGERDEMAIN); 33A: Brand maker? (REDHOTPOKER (ew)); and 34A: Classic computer game played on a grid (MINESWEEPER), a game I played an awful lot of when I was supposed to be doing work in the Serial Records dept. at Widener Library. As an aside, what's with the apostrophe after the X in that first clue? Is it really necessary? I don't like it.

DEMOCRATICPARTY took way way too long for me to figure out (I wanted something with "depression" after seeing the first D). I don't like 33D: It might change color (RIPENER) or 43D: New ____ (AGER). I'm not sure why 35D: Fist-pounding boss, say is a TYRANT; seems like there are plenty of other possibilities there.

Benefits of having kids around: I knew 54A: Newbery Medal-winning author Eleanor (ESTES) without any crosses. On the other hand, why was POTATOES (11D: Fries things?) one of the last answers I put in? The brain works in mighty peculiar ways. Glad I'm a neurologist.

- Colum

Thursday, January 1, 2015, Jill Denny and Jeff Chen

22:10

Happy New Year!

So apparently, as per Horace, I'm going to be writing the crossword blog for the next month. This is something we discussed in October when my family was visiting Boston to look at colleges for my older daughter. And he sprung it on me again while we were consuming an astonishing amount of wine, beer, rye, and champagne last night. I think I can't be held responsible for decision making in those frames of mind.

Okay, seriously, I'm actually looking forward to it. And it was a good way to start off the new year, with this well-constructed puzzle. The first thing that struck me was the unusual shape of the grid. There are a fair number of extra black squares, making for long crosses across the top and bottom around the two 15-letter answers and then two chunky portions in the middle E and W. The downside to that sort of situation is that the isolated sections (NW and SE) can make for difficult solves if you don't get a solid entry.

This happened to me with the NW. I knew 17A: Neal Armstrong declaration was going to be THE[eagle]HASLANDED, only there were only three squares for the word "eagle". Was it going to be a rebus? I couldn't see any way to fit a rebus in. The down clues were no help. I got SAHL and TREY quickly enough, but 4D: Until (UPTO), 5D: Beginning (DAWN), and 6D: "Now____ shakes my soul": Sappho (EROS) were vague or obscure enough to make finding the crosses difficult.

I worked my way through the remainder of the puzzle, getting the other theme answers THEONEMAN and BYEBYEONE easily enough, so that even though they didn't make sense, the crosses were so solid I had to accept them. And the revealer at 53A: PARFORTHECOURSE made the substitutions of "bogey" and "birdie" clear enough. But what were these numbers?

Horace and Frannie had already solved the puzzle while I was frying up some bacon and eggs for breakfast, and after I had filled everything in, they pointed out that bogey is one over par, etc. But then I saw the PARs scattered through the puzzle. A long way around to figure out the clever theme, but worth it. Not to mention the extra theme answer of PGA.

And the fill is outstanding. I love 1A: Person close to 100? (ASTUDENT), and its symmetric clever clue at 61A: Game for which it's helpful to have hands-on experience (PEEKABOO). And then we have HOLYTERROR and KIDNEYBEAN, as well as POOLPARTY and WATERPARK pairing off.

Definitely thumbs up from me.

- Colum