VOWEL PLAY

This puzzle has an unusual construction story: I didn't come up with any of the theme entries! At least not directly. All I had was an idea, which came from . . . wait for it . . . a Facebook chat! It all started when my bro Trenton Charlson messaged me an awesome hand-constructed vowelless he'd been working on. He ultimately got stuck on a couple corners, but fortunately, I was able to help: I put on my CS major hat and taught him what I know about regular expressions. After that, he was off and rolling :).

This whole interchange got me thinking. What if I made a puzzle whose theme entries had the same consonants but different vowels? I couldn't think of any long examples, but I figured there must be a way to write a program to find some (if they existed). A few hours later, I had a working program, and there were a lot of possibilities. In fact, there were so many that I decided to constrain the theme to entries where a) the vowels are in the same positions and b) all the vowels are different. The next challenge was figuring out how to present the puzzle. Should it be a crossword or some sort of variety puzzle? Definitely a crossword. Daily or Sunday? Go big or go home, dude! Separate or merged theme entries? Merged seemed more interesting. Schrodinger squares or rebuses? Rebuses, since I'd probably need slashed clues anyway.

Moral of the story: The hours I spend on social media are OBVIOUSLY worthwhile! Hope you enjoy the puzzle.

Some VOWEL PLAY today (a nice pun on "foul play"). Entries work two ways, using different sets of vowels, and both two vowels in each of the special squares are used in the crossing direction.

Terrible explanation.

An example: 22-Across can be either DEAL A MEAL or DAILY MAIL. That second square, either E or A, uses both E and A in the crossing word, UNEASY.

Some fun finds, MINT OREOS / MANTA RAY my favorite. Not as impressed with things like DANGEROUS / DUNGAREES, as both are fairly utilitarian words.

I wish there had been a better way to present this. In the grid below, it's so tough to see the words MINT OREOS and MANTA RAY. Maybe if all the themers had been laid out in the across direction, and the diagonal slashes were replaced by horizontal ones?

I liked some of the bonuses in the fill, LENINS TOMB the standout. DIGITIZE was good, too. But I'm used to seeing more in David's puzzles.

Granted, the theme constraints are huge — an enormous number of double-letter crossings to work through — but along with some oddballs in RHENISH, ATANDT (AT&T), and SUBGUM (I eat a lot of Chinese food, but I struggled mightily to fill this in), I might have preferred fewer themers and better overall fill.

I did appreciate how smooth David kept the grid, a tremendous accomplishment given the theme's technical difficulty. To keep it to some UNI, ESS, JUL, HELI shows a ton of attention to detail.

Some interesting finds in a concept that I don't remember seeing before. Reminded me a little of "Split Decisions," a puzzle type Fred Piscop has been making for a while now.

This is only the fifth time diagonal slashes have been used in NYT daily crosswords. The first was this 1992 Crytocrossword by Eugene T. Maleska himself which included the awesome word SPLACKNUCKS, followed by this Tic-Tac-Toe grid by S. E. Booker.

Before today, the only two in the Shortz Era were this New Year's puzzle by Henry Hook in 1995, and a tricky 2011 Trip Payne puzzle called Figure It Out.

We added helpful slashes to a couple of grids to explain themes, but those slashes didn't appear in print. In 2012, Ian Livengood pulled a clever trick with keyboard digits and their shift-key equivalents. Just a few weeks after that, Joel Fagliano tried to confuse us with his W vs. double-U grid.

Added geeky note: David Steinberg mentioned Regular Expressions, which is as a way to do complex word pattern searches. And yes, of course, the XWord Info Finder Page supports them!