Today was a dramatic contrast in quality to me. The NYT was a perfect if not slightly easy Saturday puzzle. There were difficult obscure words (although not enough to make it aggravating), fun and different fill, and some brilliant, utterly tricky misleading clues. People often think that Saturdays are impossible, but I tend to find them doable, just MUCH trickier cluing than on other days. The NYT gets an easy **** from me today, maybe even a ****1/2 for being so pleasant to solve.
The LAT, on the other hand, was not good today, at least for my taste. It just felt dull to do, and there were a lot of questionable clues and answers in it. I'm particularly surprised because the LAT is by Barry Silk, who is usually excellent, although not really my taste. But this was just not fun at all. **, and that's because it had SPECIAL K crossing REYKJAVIK. :)
Favorite clue: There were several clues in the NYT that were great. Probably my favorite was "Demonstrate banking skill" for AVIATE, which is perfect. But there was also "Sentences may end with them" for PARDONS and "They remove letters" for EVICTORS. You can see why I enjoyed the NYT today.
Least favorite clue: I have to be fair here and point out a really lame clue in the NYT today, or really a lame answer. Tehran was spelled TEHERAN in the NYT today, which just seems really really wrong. According to one of the x-word blogs, if you put TEHERAN into Google, the first thing that shows up is the Wikipedia page for...Tehran. Yeah. It's unny. I can't really single out one bad clue that stands out in the LAT; they just all seemed really lackluster. There you go.
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