New York Times, Tuesday, December 2, 2014

Out of nowhere, it popped into my head one day that [Holy cow] would make a suitable clue for ZOUNDS as well as ZEBU. Whether this kind of spontaneous realization is a sign of improving thematic awareness or an indication of deteriorating mental stability I'll leave for you readers to decide. The smart money's on the latter, since I'm not sure I was ever playing with a full deck to begin with. More like with a euchre deck, say.

Anyway, the hope that enough similar combos would constitute a decent theme led me to start searching for others. Discovering CURSES / BOWS was the crucial point of construction, as this puzzle, at least in its present form, might have proved impossible to build without it. In fact, if I hadn't found those symmetrical entries for the SE corner, I probably would have abandoned the effort altogether. ZOUNDS / ZEBU was just too nice of a combo, in my opinion, to contemplate making the puzzle without.

Will and Joel caught and fixed a subtle but dumb oversight of mine, replacing DARN with DAMN at 7a. DAMN *was* in that spot in earlier drafts, but I changed it to DARN for some unimportant reason, completely overlooking the resultant duplication. It was downright mortifying to think that I'd compromised the puzzle with something so easily corrected, all the more so considering that I'd noticed the mistake myself but hadn't yet submitted my own revision. But they did correct it, and relief washed over me in an awesome wave. So, GRAZIE MILLE, MERCI BEAUCOUP, MUCHAS GRACIAS.

Bonus points for identifying the movie paraphrased above. "Do you like Huey Lewis and the News?"

What an amusing theme idea, a word / phrase describing an outburst in the across direction and a normal word in the down. And each pair crosses at beginning or ending letters! I'm not totally sure I understand the concept — some sort of revealer would have been very helpful to clarify the idea — but I liked it enough that I was willing to go with the flow.

Amazing job of filling. In the past, I've gone on and on about the difficulties of peripheral theme answer layouts, and I've also warned about crossing themers causing distress. Here, Tim goes big by drawing a little from both — quite a challenge. I kept on expecting to see piles of glue glorped all around, especially in the NW and SE corners, but to my surprise, it never really came. Sure, there are some awkward spots like ONE EYE / AYR / ENOUNCE, but even that was fairly minor. ALGAL feels like an odd duck even though it's a perfectly cromulent word, and the ECU has long gone by the wayside, but a few of them here and there are well worth the crazy amount of interlocking goodness.

And check out the center, the piece de resistance. With two long slots to fill, plus BLAST and SHOOT already fixed into place, there's not a lot of freedom there. But Tim works in PAT BOONE and my favorite answer in the grid, FRACTALS. He even tosses in FAN BELT off of the F of FRACTALS. It's beautiful work.

I would have loved some sort of "does double duty" type of concept connecting everything together, but I'm not sure what that would be. Seeing as how I had to rewrite my first paragraph six times before really feeling like I got the explanation correct (am I still missing anything?), a revealer to give me a quick and description would have been ideal. But overall, I enjoyed the solve.