Crosswords of the Day: 7/29/09

Wednesdays are the days I do the most regular-sized crosswords i.e. not Sunday sized crosswords. Four in total.

The themes were very different today; heck, one of them (Brendan Emmett Quigley's) was a themeless! There wasn't a standout puzzle again today, nor was there a clear standout clue, but there was definitely a clue in one puzzle that I hated, and I'll explain why in a second.

NYT: **1/2
LAT: **
Onion: ***
BEQ: ***

The Onion was also done by BEQ, and those two were by far my favorites today. The NYT theme was very impressive as far as how hard it must have been to make it all fit, but completely arbitrary. The LAT theme was incredibly difficult to parse, especially with no clue as to how it worked. It took the bloggers multiple attempts to figure it out, and believe me, it wasn't worth it.

I think I have to go with BEQ's Themeless puzzle today as my favorite puzzle; it had a lot of terrific fill as usual (INFOMANIA, ANGELS IN AMERICA, and even HENRY LOUIS GATES!) and was at a perfect difficulty level. The Onion seemed very easy to me, and I liked the quirky theme, but it also had a miswritten clue; the clue was "High school type with cache, often" and the answer was JOCK. I assume they meant "with cachet." Typos = major points off for me.

Best clue of the day: Black cats, supposedly for ILL OMENS. I can't explain why I like that clue and answer combination, but I solved it without needing any letters in it, and it just feels right.

Worst clue of the day: Hindu "Destroyer" for SIVA. This is one of my biggest pet peeves in crosswords; using seldom used alternate spellings for things without noting that you're doing so. C'mon, almost no one solving the puzzle would call Shiva anything but that, right? I've certainly never seen Shiva written as Siva. Sigh.