New York Times, Thursday, January 28, 2016

This theme came to mind after spending a few hours inflating Mylar Halloween pumpkin balloons with canisters of helium. Since helium is a light gas, I envisioned a perfectly-round crossword balloon in an open, airy grid. I would need plenty of white space to hide the eight rebus squares.

Short rebus fillers (like HE) are tricky to work with because you need to restrict these common letter combinations to specific rebus squares — the combo shouldn't appear elsewhere in the puzzle. An "accidental" HE in the fill would go over like a lead balloon with solvers — I didn't want that! After more than a few versions, I was satisfied with the fill … which continued in an odd chemical direction (ACIDHEADS, ALCHEMIST, ON POT). I'm not channeling Timothy Leary. Please tune in to the puzzle, but don't drop out!

All in all, I think the grid vocab is accessible to first-time rebus solvers who are ready to scale the Thursday wall, as well as veterans of the craft. Happy solving to all — up, up and away!

I'm a sucker for innovation, and I love visuals within a puzzle, so I enjoyed the "string" trailing off from the BALLOON formed by the He(lium) rebus squares. (If you didn't see the .pdf file, check it out — fun to see the string flowing through the clues.)

I also liked much of the longer fill Liz chose. In rebus puzzles, my favorite is when a rebus square trips you up, only to find that the special square has hidden the answer in a tricky way. ACID (HE)ADS and ALC(HE)MIST were awfully nice, and my favorite was TUNA SUB — or was that TUNA (HE)RO!

Not as much a fan of the shorter stuff like T(HE)A and R(HE)A, but some of that is often necessary when working around eight rebus squares.

Speaking of around, I was mixed on the circle the squares formed. The physics geek in me loved the perfect theoretical performance, air pressure equally applied in all radial directions! But the pragmatist in me said it didn't look like most real-life balloons. My pragmatic side usually wins these days, so I would have preferred some ovate shape. It also would have made it more fun to find the rebus squares — figuring out the circular pattern made it a little too easy to plunk them all in.

I was also mixed on having (HE)LIUM and OCTET tied into the theme. On one hand, I like that helium's atomic symbol, He, was captured right in a rebus square! On the other hand, it's not very elegant to have a theme entry without a symmetrical partner. I could have written off (HE)LIUM as a revealer, but then OCTET also didn't have a partner on the opposite side. Felt inelegant.

A couple of gluey bits like A NICE crossing A COLD, but some of that is natural in the construction of a rebus puzzle where you have to fix a lot of answers into place. There's not that much flexibility in finding good words with a ?HE? pattern for example — just THEY, THEE, AHEM, etc. so your options in filling around those regions are limited.

But overall, fun idea with a neat visual.