New York Times, Wednesday, November 30, 2016

My top three apple products are, in order: apple crisp, apple strudel, and apple pie. My top three Apple products are…none, actually. I have a pretty hate-hate relationship with my iPhone, which has ruined my attention span and made it possible for my office to contact me at any hour. This Apple-themed puzzle is an exercise in (mild, mischievous) revenge.

I tend to have a lot of fun coming up with themes and a lot of difficulty constructing the actual grids, which I do by hand. Thankfully this one passed muster!

Anyone remember the outcry when Apple unveiled the name "iPad"? People cracked derogatory tampon-related jokes, but those quickly went away after the product became a huge success. Molly gives us a fun play on Apple's naming convention — iPod, iPhone, iPad, iMac, etc. — by twisting regular EYE- into i- phrases.

I enjoyed many of them, with iSHADOW my favorite. Not hard to imagine Apple releasing some sort of Google Glass type of espionage device! And the iDROP as a skydiver's device was amusing too.

Actually, my favorite was iSTRAIN, but not as it was clued (as a colander). Imagine, if you will, a toddler who goes under the table to take care of — ahem — some, er, tough business. The hilariously strained faces she makes!

I'm a terrible parent, I know. But I take the pooping-face pictures anyway.

A remarkably smooth grid, given Molly's comments about gridwork. There's not a ton of fill that's exceptional — BEDREST, BLOOPER, and RAPPORT are pretty good — but there's a lack of crossword glue that I would have expected after reading Molly's comments. Just some minor IN A, ARIL, TWEE stuff that many would consider passable or even perfectly fine.

Well, there's BOTA. After trying to cram WINESKIN into those four squares, I gave up and let the crossings work for me ... except that they led me to B O T A, which had to be incorrect. Apparently not! According to several sources, BOTA bag is another name for a wineskin. Curious inclusion — I wonder if Molly had to knit some sections together in the middle, or if BOTA is special to her in some way.

Speaking of bags, the HOBO purse was another curious one. I was sure that had to be some niche fashion term, but millions of sites disagreed with me. They're also called "hobo bags." After seeing pictures of them, I realized how common they are. Fun trivia that they're so named because they're saggy and slouchy, like the bundles hobos sling over their shoulder in cartoons.

I'm also not a huge fan of Apple products, but I enjoyed the wordplay, regular EYE- words twisted in an amusing way.