Crosswords of the Day, 8/24/2009

OK, back to doing crosswords, although I'm still exhausted (I had ANOTHER family function to go to today), so this will still be relatively short.

The NYT was very good today. It had a simple theme of two word phrases where the first word started with D and the second with Q. So everything from DON QUIXOTE to DAIRY QUEEN was included. There were a couple of questionable things in this puzzle, but it flowed well, seemed perfectly suited to a Monday level of difficulty, and had no bad theme entries. ***1/2.

The LAT was kind of odd today. It was by a guy who really sounds like he has a fake name (Norfleet Pruden!!!), but apparently he's real, at least according to the xword blogs. The theme was different phrases that were all clued "Scope of a thorough search." So we get things like HIGH AND LOW, INSIDE AND OUT, and FAR AND WIDE. At first, I didn't like this puzzle at all, especially the INSIDE AND OUT answer, but as it went on, I liked it more and more. But it did seem hard for some reason, and interestingly, Orange, the queen of the crossword blogging world and an insanely fast speed solver, felt the same way. ***.

The BEQ today was a puzzle from a regional crossword tournament held this past weekend, Lollapuzzoola. And let's just say it was INSANELY hard. It was one of the final crosswords in the tournament, and man, it was ubelievably difficult. I wasn't prepared at all for the challenge, and got crushed by it. The theme was also really difficult to figure out; it took the phrase TRANSFER RNA literally, by taking the letters RNA out of two theme entries to create new weird phrases, and putting the letters RNA into two other theme entries to create new weird phrases. The puzzle was just brutal, and I can't really say I enjoyed it, or the theme, but I appreciated it quite a bit, and there was really no bad fill. ***.

Winner: The NYT, both for the puzzle quality and my level of enjoyment.

Best clue: I hate to do this, but I really don't have one from today. There really wasn't anything overly clever or even particularly interesting today, except for maybe the word BAROQUE in the NYT. Sorry.

Worst clue: The INSIDE AND OUT theme entry from the LAT rubs me the wrong way for some reason; it just seems awkward, but it could easily be me. There was a clue from the NYT that makes no sense to me though. It was "One who's well off" and the answer was...HAVE. Um... If someone can explain this one to me, I'd appreciate it, cause it seems horrible to me as it is.