Joseph Knecht

  Silent Movie - The Card Game Rabbit Rabbit.  Care to try your luck at cards? Husband and wife team Hoang-Kim Vu and Jessica Zetzman are veteran constructors for the NYT and Vu has published here as recently as last Thursday .  But today is their first pairing on the Corner. and they have some new tricks up their sleeves.  We'd better start by calling 'em: 62A . With 66-Across , images played in silent films, and what one might use to play the games in the first parts of the answers to the starred clues?: TITLE . 66A . See 62-Across : CARDS . Spreading their themers on the table, we quickly see the names of 4 films or videos that begin with the TITLE of a CARD game: 23A. *Channing Tatum film series featuring strippers: MAGIC MIKE . Bling wise this clue was not a good opening.   No trailer for this one, as I'm sure Merl Reagle would agree that a flick on male strippers wouldn't pass the Margaret Farrar "Sunday Mor...

  School Crossings With 4 LAT puzzles under his belt, Chase Dittrich definitely qualifies as a Corner veteran.  He is also a Marine Corp veteran and has had 4 puzzles published in the New York Times , including a Sunday.   And be sure to check out Husker's review of Chase's and Jeff Chen's February 12, 2022 themeless outing for Jeff Chen's lavish praise of Chase. (😄) Today Chase's theme schools us in a bit of  "circular reasoning", something he apparently learned as a math major in college.  So we don't get too lost, we'll start with the reveal and the grid. 37A. Places with guards, and what can be found six times in this puzzle: SCHOOL CROSSINGS . Does your school district have formal training for its crossing guards?  The splash video above will give you some tips about how they operate. The "six times" Chase refers to are the 6 circles in the grid where th...

  Double or Nothing Courtesy of The Swiss a duet devoted to electronic dance music One of the silver linings in the otherwise dark clouds of the global pandemic is a new generation of constructors who, locked down with time on their hands, have produced some wonderfully clever crossword puzzles.  Such is the outing of  today's constructor David Tuffs, who is making his debut appearance with the LA Times, but who has had at least three puzzles published in the NY Times    I personally hope his outing here is the first of many more.  David is fourth-year linguistics student at the UC Santa Cruz, and he certainly brings the right tools to the table.  Today's theme was one I found helpful.  It was obvious by the second clue that the letters in circles were all double letters, but it was not until the reveal that I understood there was an extra layer to the theme: 40A. High-stakes gamble, and how the...