Supplementing the etymology of IRONY, I was struck last night watching MSNBC's coverage of Melania Trump's speech pledging that, were she to become First Lady, her top priority would be to combat cyberbullying.Ĭan't say I finished the puzzle, though. Talk about standing on the shoulders of giants!Īs for puzzle today, there is some standout cluing, starting with the word "pot" in four of the first five across clues (sorry to disagree with on that one). Notice that wrote the first computer program to help create crossword puzzles, a precursor to Crossword Compiler (ccw) that so many of us are using nowadays. What a nice surprise to see the byline of my friend David Steinberg, because just earlier last evening I had received an e-mail from him alerting me to this remarkable interview with Thursday's New York Times constructor, Rosen. Here's where I came to a dead-stop (not a common occurrence for me on any day that is not Saturday): running the alphabet, methodically, from A to Z (well, in this case, A to P). checking and rechecking all surrounding answers to make sure they were indisputable, and b. Sometimes your brain just gets stuck and you have to return to first principles, which in this case meant a. So DEC? Is the calendar a "tree"? Why would December be the "Top part"? Only DEC and REC were coming to mind.
Should've gotten SOUP UP without even needing a clue, but my brain was locked in on the _EC clue and for some reason "trunk" was making me think only of trees-both literal and diagrammatic (like, uh, a family tree or something). In fact, I ended up staring at SOU_UP and _EC and having to run the alphabet. I can normally kill a Friday in like 6-7 minutes, but this took me 9, due almost entirely to the center grid, which I couldn't make any sense of until the very end. Solid stacks in the NE and SW, and lots of current, interesting answers.
I frequently couldn't get a grip on the cluing-and I found all the "pot" nonsense up top juvenile and annoying-but the grid is pretty impressive.
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