Weekly Summary 5/12/2008-5/18-2008

Some general notes: The themes this week were fairly good...much better overall than last week. I did notice that 4 out of the 6 themed CrosSynergys had themes of the form "add/remove this letter or letter sequence"...I would have preferred a tad more variety...but I liked most of the individual themes themselves.

A lot of my comments this week are negative; this is not because most of my feelings toward the puzzles were negative, but because there were a lot of issues I wanted to touch on, and it's harder to write analytically about good aspects of puzzles--most of the time it suffices to just say "I liked this" and move on. That being said, I will try not to let the negative comments drown out the positive ones.

I'm thinking about moving to a daily format--I'd still write weekly essays, but that way each individual post will be more digestible. Thoughts? (I originally wanted to do it weekly because a) There are already a lot of respectable, well-done crossword blogs in daily format and I thought it might be good to have some distinguishing factor, and b) I didn't think I'd have as much to write as it turns out I do.)

Comments on individual puzzles behind the cut.


Monday:

CS: Patrick Blindauer, regarding your comment on the opening post...would this qualify, to you, as a theme that's been done to death? It would to me, I think. However, I liked the theme entries, though {Where to find a highly-placed anonymous source?} for LEAK HOUSE was an odd choice. Why not just clue it straight here as a house that leaks? *shrug* A fair amount of "awkward forms" here--AIRERS, RESAWS, UNSET.

NYS: Theme didn't do much for me here (I'll go into more detail if there's interest), but the fill was clean and lively.

NYT: I talked a bit about this theme in the previous post. Not much else to say here, except that the bottom corner could have easily been

......ISLAND
.........MOO
..FOURHCLUBS
........ISEE
........EELS

which removes the partial ATEE.

Tuesday:

CS: Nice theme; I like that MAD/STEAMED/CROSS/SORE don't mean "irked" in the phrases that were chosen. I think it's strange to clue ABC as {Start of a familiar lineup} when there are more interesting options available (the network, or the song).

LAT: ONE-ACT right next to ONE TO ASK is pretty bad. I'm not too enamored of ONE TO ASK anyway. {Aptly named Renault} for LE CAR...um...well, I guess it *is* a car.

NYT: I don't like IDEAL and IDEAS in the same puzzle; with EDEL in one corner and STOA in the other, there surely was a better fill somewhere. Nice debut for Mr. Madison--good theme with a good punchline. I wonder if ORA/SAX instead of ORE/SEX was a conscious choice. Question for Mr. Madison, if he's out there: would you have been disappointed if one or both of those corners had been changed by the editor to remove the dupe and/or EDEL/STOA?

NYS: Nice theme. SKIN FLINTSTONE was kind of weak because changing FLINT to FLINTSTONE isn't much of a trick, but other than that good stuff.

Wednesday:

CS: PLAN B is a good entry, but for some reason I find PLAN A to be a tad weak. Perhaps because it's rarely said, at least, I don't hear it often--"let's go to plan B" isn't usually prefaced by any use of the phrase "plan A". My favorite theme entry was BREW SCHOOL; my least favorite was ACHILLES' EL.

LAT: {When repeated, a winged threat} for TSE is an even less legitimate cluing angle than the {Literary monogram} approach, IMO. There's a reason BERI doesn't appear in puzzles that often.

NYS: This is the kind of gimmick theme that I like. One idea, but an elegant one, and well constructed. The only thing I didn't like was that it seemed somewhat arbitrary to have them all add up to 23, but it's better than having them add up to random different numbers, and 23 does have interesting cluing possibilities. Great fill too; cleaner and more colorful than most themed puzzles, despite a more demanding theme. My pick for the best themed puzzle of the week.

NYT: The theme here was also discussed in the previous post. I thought that FREQUENT FLYER was the more common spelling there, but it seems that they're used about equally. Nice fill in general, definitely my favorite among the NYT themed puzzles this week. ONE-ACROSS isn't the type of entry I'd rush to put in a grid, but it looks like it was the best option here. The clues were pretty interesting all around, though {Lie down on the job?} for REST is kind of a dud.

Thursday:

LAT: I really don't like this kind of theme, where you add a whole word to a phrase (here COLOR -> OFF-COLOR, LINE --> OFF-LINE, etc.) It seems you can do this with just about any word; it's really close to the "Word that can precede the starts of..." type. In all fairness, I actually made a puzzle of this type in "Crasswords", but I think that it was warranted in that case because the newly-formed words were members of a category of their own, as opposed to OFF-COLOR/OFF-LINE/etc., which are only members of the category "words that start with OFF".

NYS: I don't like that 4 of them split one longish word (like MUTATES -> MUM STATES), while the other two split a shorter word (MOD -> MOB AD)...the shorter ones aren't very interesting to me. Great title though.

NYT: This puzzle brings up another point about the use or non-use of titles--if "Sunrise, Sunset" were the title and not in the grid, the puzzle would feel a little thin--just 8 four-letter theme entries. However, there are still possibilities for other titles. Even something simple like "A Day In The Life" could work. I like SEA OTTER and WANNA BET; I don't like TEXAS U or NOT FOR. (From what I can gather, TEXAS U isn't a very common way to refer to the university--I know, that, for instance, if VANDERBILT U appeared in a puzzle I'd hate it. TEXAS TECH, TEXAS STATE, those would be fine.) MAC USER looks like the type of entry I'd hate, but from what I can glean by websearching, the phrases "Mac user" and "PC user" mean something more than just "someone who uses Macs/PCs"; they seem to carry the connotation of "someone who believes that Macs/PCs are superior to the alternative". This may be overcorrection on my part, because I know that a couple of readers here are Mac proponents; I'd be interested to hear your opinions.

Friday:

LAT: {Locks that can be removed without a combination} for WIG is a type of clue I don't like...adding a negative phrase (here "without a combination") which doesn't really relate to the meaning of the clued word. These types of clues can be done well, but very rarely--the one I recall is {Band that doesn't play much music?} for AM RADIO, which works because it's a salient fact about AM that it mostly airs talk-format shows. LIS HOWE sounds strained to me; the only theme entry here that worked really well was REL SHARON.

NYS: I think FRANZ LISZT, ALEX TREBEK, WALL STREET, a few others from this puzzle are good entries. I think A BIT OF is mildly weak. I think R-LESS is a very, very bad entry. Tied with the NYT for the top themeless this week.

NYT: JETS FAN is the only NDP here, but I think ONE MILE and WAVE TO are pretty weak. At the very least, I certainly don't consider WAVE TO a better entry than just WAVE...just because it's more than one word doesn't automatically make it fresh. That said, there is a lot of stuff in this grid I do like (FACEBOOK, JACUZZI, MARS BAR, QUIXOTE, A. A. MILNE) and there weren't many clunkers among the short entries (AMBS and RETE were the worst, and both of those I can live with).

WSJ: I'll write up something more detailed about this type of theme later--this post is already long enough.

Saturday:

CS: Has anyone heard "have a few" used stand-alone? I'm putting it in the NDP list for now...if someone can show me a clip of some show or something where this is used as a phrase, I may remove it. I don't much like SPLINTERS becoming SPLINT HATERS, because the SPLINT part means pretty much the same thing, so it's not very interesting of a change. Plus it's inconsistent with the other two, which just turn a word into another word without splitting it up.

LAT: IN LA is a partial {"To Live And Die ___"}, but its clue here {Visiting the W. Coast, maybe} doesn't distinguish it from the IN MICHIGAN/PRAGUE/CHINA/etc. type of entry that I listed in the very first post as examples of non-dictionary phrases. This, to me, is like cluing YELLOW SUBMARINE as {Banana-colored underwater vessel}. I also dislike the cluing of ANI as {Game show buy}; this and the {What an Idaho cheerleader asks for} clue types got old a long time ago for me. Most of the 15ers here didn't excite me...TOO GOOD TO BE TRUE, MAKE MINE A DOUBLE, PETER COTTONTAIL were the only ones that I'd consider good...the others are kind of blah (HEAT PROSTRATION, OBSTRUCTIONISTS, TESTS ONE'S METTLE) or IMO on the bad side of the borderline between legitimate and not (CLOSE THE CURTAIN, AS BAD AS BAD CAN BE, I CAN'T SAY FOR SURE). And there are a good deal of awkward short entries (ARRS, DUCO, AST, DURN, LOSIN', OTTS), as is usual with this type of grid design.

(Edited to switch the position of MAKE MINE A DOUBLE. I was under the erroneous impression that MAKE IT A DOUBLE was the canonical form of this phrase, but I discovered I was wrong.)

NYT: OK, bear with me here...

	"a ___"	"just a ___"	"a ___ much"
bit	28.7 M	1.9 M	3 M
tad	11 M	.4 M	12.5 K
little	535 M	32 M	.97 M

The numbers represent the # of Google hits for the phrase formed by filling in the blank in the column with the word in the row. K is thousand, M is million. (The "a bit" count was produced by searching for ["a bit" -abit], because searching for just "a bit" gives a lot of pages about the ABIT company, which produces motherboards or something.)

Anyway, "a bit", "a little", and "a tad" are all pretty interchangeable, with "a little" being the most common and "a tad" the least common. Adding "just" to the beginning of these phrases does not change the order of commonality, and in fact, the ratio of "just a bit" hits to "a bit" hits is approximately equal to the "just a little"/"a little" ratio. In contrast, despite "a bit" being less common than "a little" by a factor of 10, "a bit much" has a 300% larger hit count than "a little much". To me, this suggests that "a bit much" is a phrase unto itself, because it appears more often than would be expected by the frequency of its parts; similarly, it suggests that "just a bit/little" aren't as cohesive. I'm not sure that I'd include them as non-dictionary nature phrases, but I do think that they're weakish entries rather than strong ones. This puzzle has a few other multi-word phrases which I find to be on the weak side: NO MAYO, I OWE YOU (as opposed to the more canonical I OWE YOU ONE), HE SAID, RED HATS. Entries I think are strong: I LIKE IKE, THE DEAD ZONE, LIONS' DEN, TOWN AND GOWN, UNREQUITED LOVE, and (my favorite entry of the week) KITE-EATING TREE.

Now, obviously I don't expect constructors to bust out Google and a slide rule every time they run across a potential phrasal fill. But, it is often worth asking oneself if a potential fill entry is an actual phrase, or just a group of words that are seen together often.

Sunday:

LAT: I find this type of theme dreadfully boring, even if it appears close to the time a celebrity dies or turns 10*n years old for some integer n. Should DRIPT have been clued with an (arch.) tag or somesuch?

NYT: Neat theme; all of the theme phrases are fairly interesting in their own right, too. I don't think A MENU is a partial of any legitimate phrase, so I put it in the NDP list, as I explained I would in the "Partials" post. The area with the much-maligned AZAN also contains the entry LALAS, which doesn't make much sense to me. LAS are {Refrain syllables}. I'm on the edge of my seat waiting for someone to use OLE OLES {Soccer chants}...what a glorious day that will be :) ASTOOP would be classified under the "awkward forms" umbrella, I think. My vote for the best Sunday puzzle this week, though competing in a weaker field than last week.

I'll post my lists of favorite clever clues and favorite trivia clues tomorrow. This has taken forever so far.

Entries I don't think have dictionary nature: A MENU, HAD DONE, HAVE A FEW, HE SAID, I'LL GO, IS ONTO, JETS FAN (again), NO PAIN, NO SUPPER, NOT FOR, ONE TO ASK (maybe), TEXAS U. HE SAID and NO PAIN are interesting companion entries to ON AGAIN from last week--I liked ON AGAIN because I think it's often used by itself..."looks like Jim and Samantha are on again", or what-have you. But "he said" or "no pain" by themselves don't really ring true to me. I'm putting them here because I think they're worth pointing out, and if I just put them in the partial count then I doubt anyone would notice. NOT FOR is also a partial, I suppose, in the Sorkin screenplay staple {"___ nothing..."}.

Clarification: I won't include entries in the non-dictionary nature list if I don't think they were intended to have dictionary nature--CRUISE SHIP LEVEL from the "Deck" clue theme last week, e.g., or NINE YARDS from this week.