Ryan and Brian Do Crosswords

Forgive me if I’m typing too slow, but I’m eating some cereal, and I would hate for it to get soggy. Isn’t that the worst? When things come up while you’re enjoying what should be a crunchy cereal (in this case, Rice Chex), and you get too caught up in your puzzle, your Facebook, your blogging, and the next thing you know, you have Rice Mush instead?

Also, who’s coming to Lollapuzzoola? It’s never too late to sign up. We have awesome puzzles in store, designed by some awesome constructors — Peter Gordon, Mike Nothnagel, Doug Peterson, Todd McClary… This is going to be off the charts.

(Rice cereal is awesome. Just awesome.)

Who had trouble sorting out the business in today’s puzzle? This was a great (if slightly inconsistent) theme. It gave me an “aha!” moment, which is rare, and which I love. Most of the fill is short stuff (nothing over seven letters, it seems, with one notable exception), which led to a lot of quick entries for me… Except, a number of them didn’t seem to quite fit the clues — that number being ten. Let’s look closer.

7D. Hit song from 2000… and a hint to 10 symmetrically arranged Across answers : WHO LET THE DOGS OUT?

In “The Tin Pan Alley Rag,” a play for which I’m currently playing piano, Scott Joplin tells Irving Berlin that his “Play A Simple Melody” is inescapable. I feel the same way about “Who Let The Dogs Out” — try as I might, I hear it everywhere. My least favorite incarnations are in commercials or movie trailers where they make it actually about dogs. That wasn’t clever the first time, and it’s still not clever. Stop doing it.

How about those 10 symmetrically placed answers? Well, there are ten entries in the grid that, to make proper sense, need to be reunited with their canine friends.

• 1A. Show-off : HOT [DOG]. As for the other kind of hot dog, Ryan and I are looking for quality soup recipes that include hot dogs. Any suggestions?
• 9A. U.S. Marine : DEVIL [DOG]. Didn’t know this term. I just know the snack cakes.
• 15A. Leader of the pack : ALPHA [DOG]. Who has seen Up, the brilliant new Pixar movie? Crossword genius Kevin G. Der-Hyphen-Youkilis worked on it. Kevin, if you’re reading this, please tell me what exactly you did on the movie. I want to be able to watch the movie again and point to something and say “That! That’s what Kevin did!” Oh, I bring it up because there are a bunch of dogs in the film, and one of them is named Alpha. That’s all.
• 34A. Animal control officer : [DOG] CATCHER
  
• 36A. Folded corner : [DOG] EAR
• 46A. G.I.’s ID : [DOG] TAG. Not only a tricky theme entry, but 100% abbreviations in the clue, 0% abbreviations in the answer. Not sure I like that…
• 47A. Person who raises and sells pups : [DOG] BREEDER
• 70A. One falling into good fortune : LUCKY [DOG]
• 72A. Old sailor : SALTY [DOG]. Didn’t know this one either.
• 74A. Cutthroat : [DOG] EAT [DOG]. Here’s where my issue with the consistency comes up. Why, suddenly, do we get an entry that requires two dogs to make sense? It made me think of Merl Reagle’s puzzle in the 2009 ACPT, where each theme entry was a pig-related pun — except one of them had two puns. I’m on the fence about this. If you set up a convention, you should stick to it, right? Well, what if you can double your fun by breaking your own rules? I don’t know… What do you think?

All in all, this was an enjoyable Thursday. I liked that the grid was super-sized (16 squares from top to bottom, to accommodate the long theme entry), I liked that the theme was secret and not really revealed until you revealed the whole thing at once, and I liked that I was able to do it in just 1.78 MOOT (multiples of Orange’s time).

Lollapuzzoola. Be there. Or I’ll let your dogs out.