Sunday Times Puzzle, 8/30

Sunday, August 30th, 2009

Been a while, yes, I know.  This seemed like a good week to come back. 

25 minutes for one of the worst puzzles published in a good long while.  The crosswordese was plentiful (including my least favorite of all, STOA – a word I thought guarnateed rejection of a fill, regardless of how epic it is) and many, many structural problems in my opinion (crossing DAZE with MAZE?  I’ve had puzzles rejected for such nonesense in the past).  Plus there were some really strange cluing decisions.  “Halloween Purchase” = EGGS?  There’s no intuition there.  And a solution of EUROAREA for “Currency union since 1999″ has to be one of the most forgiving entries in recent NYT history.

If the theme was killer, I could understand some of these concessions – but wow, was this one questionable.  I don’t pretend to be an expert or to “know everything” but I had to read a few of these several times over to “get it”.  I was always under the impression that theme clues were supposed to be consistently “difficult” to offer the solver some sense of reward or assistance once the theme itself was discovered – I just didn’t get that feeling of consistency here.

Again – your mileage may vary, and I may just be worse at these things than I thought.  For me, however, this one just wasn’t enjoyable.  And I can hear my mom cursing the sky right now trying to complete it. 

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