Thursday, September 27 - Peter Wentz

Good Thursday morning! Evad back for another stint as your guide among the acrosses and downs of today's New York Times crossword puzzle. This may be a debut for constructor Peter Wentz; if so, would love to see more from him!

Today's theme was right in my sweet spot--THE SHIFT KEY (61A).
It had on its surface a mathematical theme with numerical clues (I see Howard B. smiling now), and then a typewriteresque finish, where the theme entries spelled out the symbols above these keys ("shifted") on a computer's keyboard. And, as a final shout out to the computer geeks among us, we find ONE GIG (12D), clued as "Capacity of many a flash drive, informally." (Who among you remember the day we were walking around with "double density" 5-1/4" floppy disks that held around 360 kilobytes, or about 3000 times less capacity than these "memory sticks"?)

And now, drumroll please, your other theme entries:

- "90" PARENTHESES (17A) - nice that the constructor threw in a two-digit number to spice things up a bit.

- "3" POUND SIGN (32A) - this has some other interesting names, among them the "hash sign" or, even stranger, the octothorpe (try dropping that in casual conversation today!)

- "1" EXCLAMATION MARK (38A) - I call this an "exclamation point," and Google agrees with me as the point beats mark about 2:1. But, alas, the point version is 16 letters and wouldn't fit.

- "7" AMPERSAND (45A)

The only area I went a bit astray was ACHY for ROPY "Like some muscles" (41D). (Maybe I was thinking of Billy Ray Cyrus's "Achy Breaky Heart"?) I've been to ASSISI, so "Franciscan locale" (45D) was a gimme for me. Haven't been to DENALI (11D), which I see which means "the high one" in the Athabaskan language. MOCKED for "Unpopular, in a way" (46D) seemed a little odd at first, but grew on me as I thought about it. And how many knew that MOLIERE was the nom-de-plume of Jean Baptiste Poquelin (30D)?

DOTEDU (1A) was an interesting way to start off the puzzle ("End of many college addresses," such as my alma mater, rpi.edu.) Bit of a throwback to the STARR Report of the Clinton years--I remember Ken Starr and how the nation was so captivated by that scandal... Another possible political reference to MoveOn.org with 13D clued much less sensationally as "Not dawdle." Finally, the "show me" state of MISSOURI (8D) and ANATHEMA (39D) make for nice down entries to complete the fill.

And I'm done. See you folks next Thursday for my last guest spot.