New York Times, Monday, February 17, 2014

This is my second puzzle in the NYT. I submitted this last year in January, so I don't remember what the inspiration was for the puzzle. The song in the central theme answer may have come on the radio and put the idea in my head.

I hope I succeeded in making the theme answers (as in Say ___) amusing and lively. The solvers will be the judge. Will asked me to change a couple of entries: METTA and SNA, 64 and 60 across respectively. Never having had to take out words in random places before, this was a bit worrisome because it can get messy fast, but it turned out to be a rather quick fix.

My favorite clue was for 73A (RATS) "They're not part of the 'family' any more" Not really a Monday clue, but I thought it was funny.

Now I must say that this is a special puzzle, but not for anything in the puzzle itself. It's special, you see, because by pure luck, Will chose to run it on my birthday. Thanks Will!

What a nice construction from a relatively new constructor! The 9-letter middle entry makes for a higher degree of difficulty, which is why I usually steer newbies away from doing this. But David does a really nice job filling those big corners with lovely 7's like DAYTONA, E TICKET, INCISOR, AT A TROT, SWEAR TO. Even better, the crosses are almost all smooth. If LEONS is your worst crossing entry, that's a big success.

And the theme is a nice variant on the "word that can follow" type. Typically Will doesn't take many of these anymore since they've become overdone, but David does a great job of choosing fun, colloquial phrases as themers: (SAY) UNCLE, (SAY) NO MORE, (SAY) CHEESE, (SAY) WHAT. I especially like that last one. I'm going to make it my personal mission to indignantly say SAY WHAT? to one person a day.

The one pause I had, the reason I didn't hand out the POW! today: the revealer felt a little strained. Specifically, the three SAYs didn't feel like they matched the four themers. This is a case where I think "less is more" would apply — having only three themers (in addition to SAY SAY SAY) would have felt more elegant to me. WHAT A JOKE 9 could have been the first one, SAY SAY SAY 9 could have symmetrically matched it as the last themer. Anyway, a matter of personal taste.

A final note, look at the word count: 78. A bit surprising, isn't it, given the big open corners? If pressed to guess, I would have said 76, maybe 74, but there are a lot of short entries in the middle of the grid that I didn't notice (a good thing!). I think many ambitious constructors would have cut down the word count to 76 (by taking out the black square between KEG and SELL) or 74 (by taking out the black square between EGO and AKA) but David chose not to. I think that's absolutely the right decision for a Monday puzzle, for which smoothness and lack of crosswordese are two of my greatest desires. Very well done.