New York Times, Thursday, December 31, 2020

The idea for this puzzle came from reading about Small Business Saturday, a promotional day to support small businesses. Although I wrote the puzzle before the pandemic, the state of the economy today makes the idea of supporting small businesses even more important.

My objective here was to have symmetrical rebus boxes and to have the four Across answers containing the rebuses interlock with SMALL BUSINESSES. And, I think the low (70) word count makes for a more challenging Thursday.

If you imagine a person's face looking to the right, doesn't this grid look like a mullet, with that pyramid of hair flowing down the left side? BUSINESS in the front, (rebus) party in the back!

INC, CO, LTD, LLC are a solid quartet of "SMALL" BUSINESSES. Tough to squish in C CORP or SOLE PROPRIETORSHIP into one square, anyway.

I appreciated that David did such a strong job of picking long themers incorporating these rebus squares — not just MARGIN CALL (bonus points for it being business-related-ish), but TRAIN CAR, too. That's a whole lot more interesting than the down crossing being INCAS or CINCO. Even the shortest one, BITCOIN, had some juice — and was quasi-business-related!

There's always a cost of doing business, though, and those crossing pairs of long themers take up so much real estate. David employed heavy segmentation to deal with this, which made the grid flow suffer, chunking the puzzle into three sections. It's not terrible, since there are at least two entries leading into each corner, but it's far from ideal.

I usually don't pay attention to extra black squares, but they felt aesthetically blurgh today. There's such a concentration of them in the side pyramids, reaching in toward the middle. The square at the bottom after ANTSY is helpful, maybe even instrumental, in filling the big southwest corner, but it does contribute to the unwieldly look.

Not my favorite grid design ever, but I did like how it allowed for so many long rebus entries. And for a 70-word puzzle chock-full of theme, it's remarkably well-filled. INE, OVO, PPG minor, and the only sticking point — BARI — was fairly crossed. The constructor in me admires the balance David struck.