Crosswords of the Day, 8/19/2009

Ah, Wednesday. Four puzzle day. And today, three were great, one incredibly lame. Can you guess which one was lame? Well?

It was the NYT. Absolutely lame puzzle today, maybe the stupidest theme I've seen in months. The idea was that there were randomly circled letters throughout the theme entries, and that the randomly circled letters could be put together to spell THE SECRET GARDEN. Now, c'mon. What is the point of just randomly circling letters (note that they weren't consecutive at all, just scattered throughout the theme answers)? It just seems insanely lazy, not to mention annoying to solve, since none of the theme entries related to each other in any way, and most were boring (GARAGE DOOR OPENER, anyone?). And, as Rex Parker pointed out on his blog today, if the theme is supposedly that it's a "secret," why would you circle letters in the first place; that's kinda giving away the secret. As is often the case when the theme is bad, the surrounding fill was completely uneventful as well, save for THE DEAD and I guess TWIN-PAC. *, and that's being generous.

The LAT, by contrast, was very good. The theme entries were all phrases that had musical artists at the end of them, like TICKLED PINK, FROG PRINCE, and CROWN JEWEL. These were tied together by the entry CLOSING ACTS, which is what each musical artist is doing by being at the end of each phrase. Clever theme, two Z's, and no bad fill whatsoever in a puzzle make for a good time. ****.

The BEQ was a lot of fun today, even though it was very hard to parse out the theme until the end. The entry C-SPAN was the unifier. Basically, all the theme entries were two word phrases, and the last letters of the first word and the first letters of the second word spelled out a sea when they were put together. In other words, a sea "spanned" the entire phrase. For example, HIGHER EDUCATION has the RED Sea, and my favorite, MARA LIASSON has the ARAL Sea. As usual in BEQ puzzles, there was some wonderful cluing, like "Walk-ons e.g." for NO NAMES and one that tickled me for some reason was "12, 13 and 14 in a series" for NOP. ****.

The Onion today was terrific. The theme was multi-layered, as it often is with The Onion. The basic idea was that the word TAG was added to phrases to create new, wacky phrases. For example, "Missing primrose with a ransom note, for example?" was GARDEN HOSTAGE. What made this cool was the unifying entry, which was GRAFFITI. In other words, the theme entries were "tagged." Love it. But what made this puzzle truly great was the surrounding fill, which was really smooth and surprising. I particularly enjoyed "Wang creation" for DRESS, and also my favorite clue of the day, which I'll mention below. ****1/2.

Winner: Except for the NYT, the puzzles were excellent today, but I have to give the edge to The Onion for its wonderful fill.

Favorite clue: From the Onion we get "Film genre that often takes place in one room" for PORNO. Brilliant, and it utterly confused me for a while, but when I got it, hilarity ensued.

Worst clue: I dunno, there weren't really any noticeably bad fill/clues. Again, the theme entries for the NYT were all really boring, and thus really annoying to answer, but the cluing/fill was OK today. Just stay far away from the NYT, and you'll be good. :)