I'm seeing your starred favorites as question-marked favorites for some reason. I have to agree with you 100% on the ones you picked though.
JerryR | Homepage | 05.22.08 - 11:30 pm | #

The star character isn't a normal asterisk but a true five-pointed star. It's probably not in your character set or something.

I know Leibniz from his work in calculus and his superior derivative notation. I didn't know he was a philosopher too.
John | 05.23.08 - 12:05 am | #

I had the same thought looking over the NYT: no crappy fill! At all! Of the phrases, I think ON LATE, MAY I SEE, and SO THEN are the 'worst'... and NOT IT is only in the language in the "Not it!" sense. Like when Michael wants Pam or Jim to go with him to the party in New York, in the Office rerun I watched tonight.

My mother went to the LEAN ON ME school: Eastside High, Paterson, NJ. No baseball bats in her day, though.

NYS: yes, easier than usual, but not ridiculously so. The clues also seem awfully dry for the Sun - [Tref 'wich] is about the only fun one.
Dan | 05.23.08 - 12:05 am | #

I also enjoyed this puzzle and appreciate your notation on a mini-theme. NESS crosses one Mafia family and Romano (a character in the Sopranos) crosses the other Mafia Family. ISITSAFE and LEANONME are nicely balanced.

Orange, 27A seems to represent the end to our banter about Olde English words for milking when parsed a certain way.

Ah, to be young and talented, the best of all possible worlds.
PhillySolver | 05.23.08 - 12:30 am | #

In Leibniz's day, scientists and mathematicians were also philosophers. However, at first glance I thought this clue (51A) referred to Dr. PANGLOSS from "Candide", who, at least in the Bernstein/Sondheim musical, sang "All's for the best in this best of all possible worlds." Alas, it would have required one too many letters.
larry | 05.23.08 - 3:01 am | #

I knew that LEIBNIZ was a philosopher (monads & all that)-- what I didn't know was that there's no 'T' in his name. Live and learn.
Matt | 05.23.08 - 6:02 am | #

Got hung up on the Leibniz spelling, and prematurely filling in SHIATSU for JUJITSU with the TSU already filled. Serves me right for making assumptions.
That's a pretty impressive debut!
Howard B | 05.23.08 - 8:10 am | #

Antonio Gaudi is kind of cheap as a theme entry. The architect's name was Antoni Gaudi -- Catalan.
Anonymous | 05.23.08 - 9:13 am | #

@John: too right you are. On my work computer (which is about five years newer than the one at home) I see it as the proper five-pointed star.
JerryR | Homepage | 05.23.08 - 10:17 am | #

Jim H explained the Leibniz/Pangloss connection thus: "Leibniz (who invented calculus — yes I know, so did Newton) was a rationalist who deduced by logic alone that our universe was the finest God could have constructed, the best of all possible worlds. Voltaire satirized Leibniz as Dr. Pangloss in Candide. Lenny Bernstein wrote the musical. NYT blogger Dick Cavett used one of the songs as the theme music for his talk show."

Anonymous, yes. But it's commonplace for us to refer to that explorer guy as Christopher Columbus, an Anglicization of the Latin form of his name. Wikipedia informs me that Gaudi is "sometimes referred to by the Spanish translation of his name." In the Czech Republic, non-Czech get an -ova appended to their surnames (e.g., Paula Radcliffeová).
Orange | Homepage | 05.23.08 - 11:05 am | #

i found the sun easy for a friday, but not ridiculously so. the jonesin', on the other hand, was not at all easy for a jonesin'. there was tons of stuff that i had No Idea about, including POR siempre tu, runaway ORE cart, HOB (no idea what this is or stands for), nicholas LEA, BAZ luhrmann (or maybe luhrmann BAZ?), CASA bonita (we are supposed to know names of south park episodes?). BOBROBERTS. and of course CARLCARLTON. yikes. i solved it, but it wasn't fast by any means--needed a lot of crosses.

by the way, manu ginobili isn't italian. he's argentinian. but there is a great deal of argentinian-italian cross-pollination. the argentinian national football team is full of guys named abbondanzieri and cambiasso and coloccini and zanetti. and a ton of those guys play their club football in italy, mostly for inter milan.

100% agree on the goodness of the duggan NYT. no crappy fill, and lots of good stuff here. i just wish the clues had been a little less straightforward overall. i felt undermisled (is that like misunderestimated?) for a friday.

liked the CHE puzzle, but i have very high expectations for a patrick berry. very cool theme, and the usual number of "i didn't know that, but now i'm glad i do" clues. i feel like i've seen IPOH recently. perhaps it came up when i was trying to fill a grid and found that only that and IEOH (the "I" in i.m. pei) would fit, but i rejected it as being too obscure. it appears to be the sixth-most populous city in malaysia, at around 0.7 million. hmm.
joon | 05.23.08 - 3:51 pm | #