Friday, August 21, 2009

Crosswords of the Day, 8/20/2009

The next several days are going to be short and sweet, as I am a groomsman in my cousin's wedding, AND I'm running thirteen miles, the longest I've ever run at once, all on the same day. So I'm going to be doing the crosswords, but won't have a lot of time to write them up. Both crosswords were good, although one suited my tastes more than the other.

The NYT was, as usual from Elizabeth Gorski, an amazing construction feat (there were rebus clues that were numbers, and if you connected them in order, you got a parallelogram). However, a parallelogram just in and of itself doesn't excite me all that much, to be honest. Also, some of the fill was really iffy, although others were excellent. So I have to give this ***, but I didn't really enjoy solving it all that much.

The LAT had a neat theme today. The unifying theme was "Middle Earth," as in the Tolkien creation, and every theme entry had the word "EARTH" hidden roughly in the middle of it. The two best ones were CL(EAR TH)E AIR and BEATRIC(E ARTH)UR. Great theme and no noticeably bad fill gives this one ***1/2, bordering on ****.

Winner: The LAT. Today really came down to how much I enjoyed solving the two puzzles; both were of very high quality.

Best clue: I have to go with one from the NYT. "Eight producers?" for ICE SKATERS is a great clue, and a perfect misleading clue, since you have no idea what it could be to start with, yet it's utterly fair when you figure it out.

Worst clue: As mentioned before, the NYT had some really iffy fill today, but I'll just go with some of the rebuses. "Like the symmetry of a starfish" for FIVE FOLD seems very odd to me, but not nearly as bad as "Time for potty training, maybe" for AGE TWO. Not good.

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