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I mean, none on its own. 1847, and was placed in commercial use the same year. Well, I don't think this puzzle has a theme, but who knows? Maybe if I blacken all the letters in the word "TIMES," I'll get a picture of a beetle or a pterodactyl or Richard Simmons. I noticed that "ATE" appears 5 times (TIMES) in this grid. I don't think that means anything. I noticed "TEST" appears 3 times (TIMES) in this grid. I don't think that means anything either. TOILETS. You can do with that what you will. Fill is mostly clean, and there's enough excitement in the SE corner for three puzzles. Things sped up from there. Aduba is (I guess I'll be seeing that last name in crosswords soon, too). I expect he was designed to be. But I don't have any other nits, really. This was fine. Excited to see how all these puzzles tie together tomorrow.
I've been asked not to comment on tomorrow's puzzle At All (because of the whole contest thingie …). I'll play that by ear. There will definitely be a post. Whether you'll get commentary or a grid, I don't know. Come back and find out, won't you? TIME-actually, each "square" is made out of two TIMEs running clockwise. These "squares" are arranged symmetrically in the grid. Smoother and cleaner today, though the theme is so slight that I nearly missed it entirely. I was actually concerned at the end when I had TIM for the answer to the revealer, and couldn't figure out why I hadn't encountered any other weird, partial, potentially rebus-y answers anywhere in the grid. I figured there'd be a TIMES square. An ambitious rebus, that. But I believed! Sadly, or happily, we got the TIMEs square we got. Four of them, actually. And so another puzzle about "time" goes into the meta mix.
Only one "X" today, so the weird "X"-ification that seemed so promising as a meta element in puzzles from earlier this week appears less important now. Nothing about this grid stands out as particularly odd, except perhaps a general dullness. There are no marquee answers, and not much in the way of fresh, colloquial, modern fill. Earlier this month. Here it is. No real trouble with today's grid. Toyota makes both, so probably not a great guess. NIGHTSAIL or SAIL and have (thus?) never heard the term. The grid offered up so little resistance that I cut right across (and down) and ended up connecting the NW with the SE before I'd filled much of anything in. Boom. Then I went back and filled in the stuff I'd blown by. … damn it! I genuinely want to say 'fishy' but I hate puns! Black squares in the grid form a smiley face / jack o' lantern image.
A lot is now riding on the meta payoff. Well, nothing is actually riding on it-unless you've hatched some kind of nerdy betting scheme -but since all the puzzles have felt Off in some way so far, and the fill has seem oddly compromised in inexplicable ways, it'll be hard to see how it all was worth it if payoff time doesn't pay off. Now I didn't think today's puzzle was bad, by any means. But again it was weirdly harder than its day of the week would suggest, and the theme was really Really loose (face answers? first and last are about eyes, middle … isn't … ?). The cross-referencing continues apace, for some reason. I've ever seen (!) in a crossword. So much more cleanly, w/ about 5 seconds work (that's how long it took me). But, again, the fill is not, overall, bad. National Book Award in the nonfiction category, where it is competing with books about the Taliban, China, and evolution, which I'm sure makes sense somehow. I calmly and wrongly wrote in ANON. … you get the idea).
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