Thank you for offering this blog. Such a nice place to visit after solving, with the added benefit of not having to shut up until noon about anything significant, like *cough* which has always struck me as the silliest rule on the internet.

But I want to say 'bleh' to Ed's puzzle . No wait, 'yay!' Just to dispell the premise of the quote. No wait, to prove it.

See? now the puzzle's making me try to show I'm not a fool and I'm not dead even though I think it's a lame quote. The thing is, I never cared much for quotation puzzles. In the private world of my brain, they don't make a decent theme because they're based on something somebody else said instead of something the author of the puzzle said, originality, so often startling, being one of the satisfactions of the best puzzles. Also, in a quotation, one single theme entry doesn't much support another , especially if the quote is stilted . Then, when I'm done with it, I go, "All that for just that?" This quote strikes me as pedantry. I get a bit annoyed, hardly pleased at all with discovery or filling in all the little empty spaces. Pffft. Having said all that, outside that private world, I acknowledge the tour de force for the constructor to find an appealing quote and fit it into a crossword, and I must never sound ungrateful for the continuous stream of genius. And I'll never dis a Stephen Wright quote even though I pretty much know them.

The vertically symmetric pattern reminded me of an old arcade game I became nearly good at, Space Invaders.
boure | Homepage | 12.28.06 - 8:19 am | #

Is that Yosemite Sam I see in the grid?

Boure, I generally agree with you on quote puzzles. I like only a small percentage of quote crosswords—this was one of them, and I liked it for non-quote reasons. The themeless vibe, the unusual layout, the tough clues.

And I should tell you that the "spoiler rule" is no more at the NYT forum.
Orange | Homepage | 12.28.06 - 9:14 am | #

A neat puzzle, I thought... a wide range, from NAVEL (the omphalos) to LALAW...

I do wonder whether the grid pattern is supposed to be a picture of something.
Matt | 12.28.06 - 9:23 am | #

Hi Amy, glad you liked the puzzle! Peter Gordon, though, must take the credit for putting in many of your favorite entries from it. The original grid I submitted had SIREE with only one R and DOV crossing OPORTO (I must admit I was intrigued by the idea of clueing a 3-letter "Exodus" character that was not ARI, so I overlooked the crossing obscurities). Peter redid the whole bottom right corner and a good chunk of the bottom left, resulting in today's puzzle. Like you I really enjoyed the result.
kmtracey | 12.28.06 - 12:20 pm | #