First Pass Friday: I Immediately Fall Into a Trap, and You Can, Too! (Published 2021) (2024)

FRIDAY PUZZLE — Welcome to First Pass Friday, an occasional feature in which I show you how I get started solving a themeless crossword puzzle, which is hopefully helpful and makes you feel as if you are a whole lot smarter than me. I’m all about the side benefits.

When we last saw Randolph Ross, he was playing with toys, but this puzzle has no theme to hang onto. That’s both OK and expected. I started scanning the clue list for something that I knew.

And wouldn’t you know it? The first clue my eyes fell upon was an easy one. “Cowboys’ headgear,” at 24A. Has to be STETSON, right?

Wrong. Completely wrong, Deb.

I missed the plural possessive “s’” in “Cowboys’.” Right away, a plural clue would make the answer plural, because clues and answers need to match. So the singular “Stetson” is out. Also, I know that the answer to 21D is O.E.D., so the “T” doesn’t belong there.

It turns out that this is a veiled capital clue. The word “Cowboys’” is capitalized not just because it is the first word in the clue, but also because it is a proper name. We’re supposed to be thinking of the Dallas Cowboys, and their headgear are HELMETS.

Cross-referenced clues that simply point at each other make me grumpy. When I click on 16A, I’m kicked back to 22A, which says “Don’t look at me. You need to ask 16A.” It reminds me of being on the phone with the customer service department of a communications company whose name rhymes with Schmerizon. I decide not to let it bother me and try to focus. I’m being asked for two numbers, one of which is the square of the other.

I briefly think about writing in “four” at 22A, just for giggles and because I’m tired, but that would make Ravel’s piece “Gaspard de la UUIT,” which is not a thing. Then I remember that “nine” also has four letters. That makes more sense. The square of THREE is NINE.

That opens up some nice, long Downs in the northeast. I get a small thrill out of writing in ARE WE ALONE, even though it’s not a debut. And I chuckle at the misdirection of the clue at 18A, “Joe Louis in Detroit, for one.” It sounds as if the clue wants us to think about the prizefighter himself, but I already have enough letters to know that the answer is ARENA.

VETO POWER gives me I LOVE and CUKE (although I wrote in KALE first), and I know that 15A is some sort of BLUE because it’s a “Water color” — not the paint, but the color of water. Eventually, I settle on OCEAN BLUE.

PBJ at 6D gives me some sort of JOKE at 17A, although I do not yet know what kind.

And I’m well on my way. You can do that too, you know. You may be surprised to hear this, but I use the delete key quite a bit when I’m solving. It’s OK to make mistakes. Taking a guess is brave. Taking an educated guess, because you allowed yourself time to think or look it up, is braver.

Constructor Notes

I find constructing themeless puzzles easier to get started and harder to finish. For this one, my seed entries were HOT TOPICS, which I got from watching an episode of “The View,” and ARE WE ALONE, which I got after finishing Andy Weir’s latest sci-fi novel “The Hail Mary Project.” Both of these were uncommon crossword fill and lent themselves to some nice clues.

All the rest of the puzzle was trying to fill a grid with lots of long entries, e.g. 12 nine-letter entries and a couple of answers with 10 letters. I get special satisfaction when these longer answers are not often seen in crossword puzzles. WAR EPIC and NICE CATCH are two I got pleasure adding in.

With a themeless puzzle, sometimes you have to make choices that involve picking between compromises. The lower left section of the puzzle posed a “lesser of two evils” decision. RIFER is a “meh” entry in my opinion. I could have substituted NIFTY, a much better one. But that would have given me TREADER instead of E-READER and YAPPERS instead of RAPPERS. Now, I could clue TREADER as “One who keeps his head above water” and YAPPERS as “Talkative types,” but I didn’t like those “ER” entries next to each other as much as E-READER and RAPPERS, each of which lent themselves to better clues.

It is hard to know when you are done constructing a themeless, especially one with a low word count. I worked a long time trying to get rid of ELLER (a dated entry), but it would have come at too much of a cost relative to the longer words around it. So I let it stand.

I’ve constructed many Friday and Saturday Times crosswords and I still get a kick out of seeing a puzzle I made filled with lots of chunky white spaces and a variety of seldom-seen entries. They often take more time than any themed puzzle to build. And then, when the sharp New York Times solvers finish it in a half-hour or less, I sometimes feel like the chef who worked all day preparing a meal, only to have his dinner guests gobble it down. I find that my pleasure is in the challenges of constructing more than arriving at the final product.

I wish all my friends in the puzzle world a safe rest of the summer.

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