Crosswords of the Day, 8/29/2009

This is being written to the lovely sounds of Stellastarr's My Coco, just for reference.

Well, here we go. I think this is the first time I've done the NYT Saturday in under ten minutes, and I did the LAT in about eight. Now, I am very good at crosswords, and have been doing them for a long time now, but these times I'm posting aren't just indicative of my skill; both puzzles are really easy today. In fact, a number of people on the forums think the NYT puzzle from yesterday was harder than today's, which I completely agree with. These are close to perfect Saturday puzzles to start off with, as there is very tricky cluing and hard references, but they are both very accessible. This was also true of yesterday's NYT puzzle. Interesting.

The NYT was a lot of fun today. Lots of unique fill, hard cluing, and nice long answers. My favorite clue was in this puzzle, so I'll save that one for later. But I should note that this puzzle includes everything from the Dreyfuss Affair to Yankees baseball, and throws in Italian numbers and Shakespeare for good measure. This is why it gets a lot of fun when you get to Saturday-level puzzles; anything is game, and you tend to learn things. ****.

The LAT was also themeless, but seemed extremely easy to me. The long Across answers were practically all gimmes, like TOM SAWYER, which was straightforwardly clued "1876 Twain hero," and "Long distance messages?" for SMOKE SIGNALS. I got these and most of the other long across answers right away with no pre-existing letters, so the puzzle kinda got dull. There wasn't really any other memorable fill. ***.

Winner: The NYT. It was just of a much higher quality level, and way more fun to solve. It was also a very diverse puzzle subject-wise, which I always love.

Best clue: This is certainly one of the more out there clues. From the NYT we get "Creator of the stuff of legends?" for... MAP MAKER! Wow, man. I actually figured this out pretty quickly, but that doesn't make me appreciate this any less. How do you come up with a clue like that?!

Worst clue: Nothing specific again, but there were some semi-awkward phrases peppered through the NYT, like SKATEBOARD TRICK and CELL PHONE TOWERS, which just stand out as relatively stiff compared to the other great fill. Yeah, I'm really stretching today. :)