Thursday’s Puzzle Commentary

If you remember we told you before that if a clue includes “e.g” it most certainly means that the item in the clue is part of a speficic category. For example in the clue “Lemon, e.g” might lead us to an answer such as LEGUMES.

Sometimes however you might want to forget all that. And remember that puzzle creators are very playful and make tricky connections. One way to imagine it is to imagine the puzzler as they climb and swing on various ideas of crossword conventions as if they were playing on monkey bars. Very few things are off-limits in terms of using or breaking a “convention” except of course if you were to push another puzzle construction off the monkey bars.

This Thursday Trenton returns with a crossword that will leave you bamboozled, unless you talk back to it or experiment with another puzzle such as WSJ Crossword which comes up several times per week.

1A/14A. Kinda cute cross-referenced clue. (Yes, it is possible.) A “Creative nugget” is an IDEA,  the “Start” of which is not the letter I but a GERM.

5A. I had POOF before PFFT for “[Just … disappeared!]”

20A. “Introduction to physics?” sounds like a freshman college exam, but here in this puzzle we are only looking for a prefix. The solution  is ASTRO, as in ASTROphysics.

21A. I you are a puzzle history nerd, It is always fascinating to see entries that have not been used for a long time. INKSAC returns to the New York Times Crossword for the first time since 1947.

Thats it folks for today’s puzzle commentary

For full solutions for today’s puzzle open this Link.