New York Times, Thursday, December 23, 2021

Hope you enjoyed the letter-moving shenanigans in this one! On the theme side, I came up with the idea to move around vowels first. I wrote a script to find all word pairs that existed in the XWord Info list (thanks!) with two vowels switching — A for E, I for U, etc. (You could probably do it in one line with regular expressions... I should learn how to use those properly!) The resulting word sets were fairly short, and A for O was the only pair with raw material for enough phrases that tickled my funny bone.

I submitted the puzzle with the theme set from the final puzzle plus PACHELBEL'S CONAN, which I clued as the composer doing an impression of the late-night host (yikes!). The editors liked BOOK 'EM DONNA better but felt the fifth themer was too much of a tradeoff for fill quality. An 11-letter answer in the middle of a grid creates constraints.

For fill: if I made the puzzle today, I would try to work in a few more long answers and avoid drastically dividing the puzzle into its north/south halves. Happy with HERDS CATS, but feel the short fill could be snappier.

I can hear so many solvers grumbling about yet another anagrams theme, which would be a shame. Even after reading Stephen's comments, it might not be apparent that:

1. each theme word has exactly two vowels: one A and one O, and
2. when you switch the two, it forms another valid word.

I've even used TONGA TANGO in an anagram crossword for an upcoming book, and I didn't notice the pure vowel swap!

The concept piqued my curiosity enough to write a quick script to see what else was out there. My favorites that Stephen didn't include: CASTOR/CO-STAR — COSTAR OIL for a bodybuilding movie? GRAB ON, Josh GROBAN! RAMON/ROMAN, SONYA/SANYO. And if you relax the "only two vowels" constraint, OCTANE/ACT ONE. Something neat about the addition/deletion of a space.

Stephen and I discussed if a revealer would have been helpful. I'm 100% on board, although his thought of VOWEL MOVEMENT didn't work for me. It'd be fun to brainstorm what sort of "swap" or "switch" phrases might have worked.

None of the themers made me burst into laughter, but I appreciated that Stephen chose all five-letter keywords. That consistency kicked things up a notch.

Fully agreed with Stephen's self-critique, the grid flow is not great. It'd be interesting to explore connecting up ZERO-G and ITCH in a full revision attempting to improve feng shui and also include an extra-long Down bonus entry.

I favor trickier Thursdays, so even realizing that this was more than simply anagrams wasn't enough to scratch my itch. I flew through today's, which is a testament to Stephen's care in gridding, but it also points to it being more Tuesday-Wednesday.