Wednesday, July 8, 2020

Today's crossword was a great mental workout, replete with fine, fabulously deceptive clues -- just the kind that you hope for on a Friday. For example, we had 36A, A real no-name, ANON (of course!); ...

8 Maalis 20259min

At least one of our cohosts wasn't quite on the same wavelength as today's constructor, Kiran Pandey: the clues and answers just felt a wee bit ... out of sync. Still, professional that they were (in ...

7 Maalis 202519min

This was a spookily fun crossword by Rebecca Goldstein, who we are fairly certain won the ORCA Constructor of the Year Award sometime in the not too distant past -- 2024, we read on the internet -- fo...

6 Maalis 202513min

This was a fine Tuesday-level crossword, the fourth (on the 4th!) for Hanh Huynh. The theme shone, the rest of the fill was quite good, and the end result was, as you will hear in today's episode, hig...

5 Maalis 202517min

If you didn't know anything about today's constructor, you'd likely conclude, as did we, that this was a fine Monday crossword. But then, if you discovered that the constructor was 13 years old, you m...

4 Maalis 20258min

Even a casual glance at today's grid will reveal that something's up - seven vertical colored lines that, unsurprisingly, play a huge role in today's theme. The cost of that theme was complexity, but ...

3 Maalis 202522min

March reputedly comes in like a lion, and today's crossword does the same -- parts of it are ferocious, and it seems to have lots of claws. OK, that last bit might not be true, but it certainly was a ...

2 Maalis 202515min

Michael Lieberman is an accomplished crossword constructor, having written 27 for the NYTimes. Today's oeuvre had some great clues, including 63A, People may visit them just for kicks, SHOESTORES (ha!...

1 Maalis 202515min