PUZZLE #46 & the triple stacks

ACROSS LITE PUZZLE: [ AT THE CROSSROADS] 
PROGRAM: [Across Lite]

PROGRAM: [Java]

PRINTOUT PUZZLE: [ AT THE CROSSROADS]
PROGRAM: [Adobe Acrobat]

Ah yes, the triple stack. For years, this feat was the gold standard for showing off in puzzlemaking. It separated the men from the boys. (I'm pretty sure I got that gender right as no women constructors who've done the stacks leap to mind. Although, now that I've typed that, I'm thinking Paula Gamache and/or Sherry Blackard might have done it. I'm confident somebody will correct me in the comments section). Anyway, Frank Longo (who else?) teamed up with Dave Tuller to do the first triple stack crossing the other triple stack. These grids look formidable, but they aren't that tough to solve.

Oh, before I go too far into this post, I wanted to say two things: I'm going to do a little bit of crossword construction 101 with this grid so I will be getting into some of the nuts and bolts of this puzzle. In short, spoiler alert, for those who can't have any sorts of hints.

Secondly, this grid was all due to the beauty that David Levinson Wilk dropped in last Friday's New York Times puzzle. The grid was nasty, and the four 15s that sort of framed the whole puzzle was insanely nice. If you haven't done it yet, please try it here, or if you don't have a subscription to the Times puzzle page, you can see a picture of the filled in grid and read about it here. David's all right in my book, a super bright guy, and funny as hell. He not only writes a syndicated puzzle for some alt-weeklies, but also, and probably more importantly, writes for "Who Wants to Be A Millionaire?" as well. (Hey, David, they coulda used your help in "Slumdog Millionaire." That million rupee question was pretty easy).

So, back to my puzzle. When you make a puzzle, you really want to have an overemphasis of the good stuff, and a deemphasis of the bad stuff. All the long entries should be colorful and/or never seen before. I think I did a pretty decent job there. INTIMATE APPAREL was the first entry I started with, as roughly half the letters are vowels, and the rest are fluid letters, that is to say, they can appear pretty much anywhere in a word. The other two 15s surrounding it came quickly with really only the nasty bit being the CIA trigram along the top. The middle 3x3 section was especially fluid, with TTO and IED offering the most amount of flexibility. Only the NAI was the slightly less friendly one. After a went-nowhere attempt using HIGH RENAISSANCE, GO AT A SNAILS PACE came up and shortly thereafter, the other two 15s.

Here's where the wheels came off. By the way, I used David's grid as the starting point. I really did try to do the four additional 15s framing the whole grid together with that amazing 4-way symmetry. But, damn, no dice. You can see that had I pulled that one off, I too would have had the parade of not-beautiful, but passable 3-letter entries in the middle bits: SIE (yuck), EME (Jesus, that's bad), NAT, GPS, APA (all right, I know it sucks, but Liz is a member.), and DAG (move along, nothing to see here) going across, and the more passable VAT, ERA, IRS, CPL, HES, and ARP going down. But trying to get those four extra 15s, forget it. Too tough. David made it look easy, and me, well, I had to abort the whole effort.

So, after a reshuffling of the black squares, the four 11s came next. The URR section was the least friendly one to work with, but it turned out to be one of the nicer entries: BEURRE BLANC. And y'all know me and David Bowie, so once I saw 10-Down could be that entry, that was the only thing it was going to be. The rest of the grid was pretty pedestrian 3x5 or 3x4 corners, so they were cake.

While I'm here, 28 of the 70 entries are 3 letters long. That's 40% of the grid. That's amateur hour stuff, folks. And that's the reason these triple stack puzzles are (typically) easy to solve. Way too many points to break into the grid (the three letter entries). They're fun to make though. Okay, enough of this babbling, new puzzle Wednesday.

Oh, and one last thing: if you're into running and you live in the North Shore area of Boston, please join this great running club run by Dave Sullivan. (Dave gave me that boss Leaderboard you see in the middle column.) They're the North Shore Striders and the link is here.