October 08, 2006

Monday, 10/9

NYT 3:51 (Wait! I can explain!)
NYS tba
CS 3:02
LAT tba (if Cruciverb.com comes back online)

My family and I dined on African cuisine for the second evening in a row—Moroccan this time. Tyler Hinman joined us, and we all had sweet entrĂ©es. Can't go wrong incorporating fruit and sugar into your dinner food, really.

So then I returned home, satiated and sleepy, to tackle Sarah Keller's Monday NYT. I once again had the opportunity to demonstrate the utility of the Ellen Ripstein Axiom: Check the crossings. I zipped through the puzzle in about 2:30...but I put in an incorrect letter—UTMOST instead of UPMOST for [Highest]. The crossing THI (in lieu of PHI) made no sense, but I never even saw it there. Alas, it took me well over a minute to dig out of the T-hole. According to this commentary, upmost is often best cashiered in favor of the longer synonym, uppermost. This puzzle also gave NYT solvers another -gram: TRIGRAM. I like that better than DIGRAM and ENGRAM, but all three pale beside CANDYGRAM, no?

Updated:

Harvey Estes' CrosSynergy puzzle, "Game Center," has a double-edged theme—three "before and after" combo phrases (my favorite was [Small, hard buns?] for LITTLE ROCK BOTTOM) in which the center words also form a set of their own to add a fillip of goodness. Or have I not been paying attention? Maybe "before and after" theme entries are always tied together by their contents. Yes? No?