Crosswords of the Day, 7/31/2009

Today was kind of a weird day for all three crosswords I do on Friday. I liked them all, but two of them weren't that much fun to solve (NYT and BEQ), and the other was great but had some really iffy answers that keeps it from being great to me, including a really questionable theme entry.

The NYT was a themeless, and had a bunch of nice answers, but kind of felt weird and boring at the same time. This happens occasionally, where I'm doing a themeless and liking some of the answers but in general just kind of feeling blah about the whole experience.

When I first got into crosswords and found out about themelesses (which are almost always more difficult than puzzles with themes), I thought they'd be a cool challenge. But in general, I don't like them for exactly the reason I didn't like the NYT today; they often seem arbitrary and like I'm just doing work rather than enjoying trying to figure something out like a theme.

Last Saturday's LAT themeless was a rare and wonderful exception, where for whatever reason, the answers were incredibly lively and different (FRAID NOT, EXUBERANCE, MALT LIQUOR, and LIZA WITH A Z were just a few of the really great answers in that puzzle), and while solving it, I felt that there was something really cool coming next, which there always was. By the way, BEQ's themelesses almost always follow this pattern of incredibly fun, lively fill and a solidly hard but fair difficulty level.

So, after all that, the NYT gets **1/2 from me today. Nothing terrible, but certainly not fun to do.

The BEQ was a quote puzzle, which he tends to do very very well. This one though didn't strike me as particularly funny or clever, so this one wasn't too much fun to solve. The fill also didn't have BEQ's usual sparkle of cleverness, there was a Roman numeral, the difficulty level was all over the place, and my tie for worst clue of the day is in this puzzle. ** for this one.

The LAT had a cute theme that lent to there being a whole bunch of X's in it. It was also pretty tough, which has not been the case for LAT puzzles of late. I had a lot of fun solving this one though, and some of the answers were truly great, like FRITATTA or LECARRE. This puzzle though also has my tie for least favorite clue of the day. But it also has my favorite clue/answer in it, so there you go. ***, and my favorite puzzle of the day.

Best clue of the day: "Service provider?" for PREACHER in the LAT. Love it. The same puzzle also had LAY AN EGG, which I just really enjoy as an answer.

Worst clue of the day: This is a solid tie. In BEQ's puzzle, there was a clue that went "City whose zip code is 44301" which is already a pretty annoying clue. The answer? AKRON OH. Yes, for a completely arbitrary reason, he threw in the OH at the end, which just bothers me to no end. I mean, OK, it's valid, but c'mon, man. It's VERY rare for BEQ to do something as arbitrary as that in a puzzle. My other bad clue of the day is from the LAT. "Not a whole person?" is the clue for HALF MAN. What? Very strange and arbitrary answer, kind of like EERIEST from yesterday but much worse.