New York Times, Wednesday, March 18, 2015

Despite only having three theme answers and a short revealer, constructing this puzzle was actually tough. The difficulty had to do with the lengths of the 14-letter entries and the 7-letter revealer. Unless I wanted six cheater squares, the QUEEN and DRONES entries had to go in the 4th and 12th rows (not rows 3 and 13, like usual). Under most circumstances that arrangement wouldn't be an issue, but here it was a problem, because the 7-letter length of the revealer meant that the top and bottom three rows had to be broken up with 3-block stacks in the middle column. Having those stacks then required threading a 9-letter entry down through three theme answers (no way to break it up), which doesn't always work. Luckily, it did this time. One restraint on theme arrangement was that QUEEN had to be on top.

Another difficulty with this grid was the impossibility of increasing the word count while holding the 3-letter words to a reasonable level. I could have added blocks into the corners to boost the word count to 74 or 76, but doing so would also have boosted the 3-letter count to 18 or 22, and made the solve much choppier. You can see how fortunate I was to be able to fill the open corners while still running four longish down answers through them. It was worth staying at 72, I think — especially since the SE corner filled so smoothly.

My initial submission from about 16 months ago, which Will had me rebuild completely, was a train wreck. In order to avoid open corners with stacked 7-letter entries, as well as to be able to break up the central column, I put the revealer in the middle. What's the problem? The number of 3-letter words. There were 26(!) of them, or one-third of the total. This grid is pretty embarrassing ... so bask in my ignominy.

It's interesting to see how quickly a new, topical entry with scrabbly letters becomes mainstream. When this puzzle was accepted in its current form last January, LOUIS C.K. had never been used in the NYT before. In fact, I remember being worried that he wasn't NYT-worthy. A little over a year later, and he's already making his third appearance, despite having seven letters and a weird pattern ending in -SCK.

And finally, you're missing out if you're not intimately familiar with Billy Ocean's CARIBBEAN QUEEN. She's simply awesome...

Now this is how you execute on a three-themer grid. When the theme density is low, I expect a huge amount of strong fill, at least sixish entries to enhance the solving experience. Tim goes above and beyond with three long pieces of fill — EASY CHAIR, IT'S A STEAL, SPONGE BOB — as well as a whole lot of strong 7s: AMSCRAY, FEDORAS, LOUIS CK, SPILL IT, and the BEEHIVE theme revealer. Doing all that with keeping the grid to less than 5 gluey bits = impressive.

The theme isn't complicated, but it's a nice set of entries. I like the touch of WORKERS and DRONES being plural, but QUEEN singular. It's those small touches that add to a theme's elegance.

Tim does a nice job in that difficult SE corner, where DRONES and BEEHIVE heavily constrain that 7x4 chunk. I imagine Tim tried placing the BEEHIVE revealer at the very bottom entry, but that would have been difficult given 55-Down would have had to end in a V. The result is pretty nice, just the obsolete MHO as a blight.

This is another case in which I might advocated for different spacing. Moving CARRIBEAN QUEEN and PREDATOR DRONES toward the center would still allowed for a few rows of spacing between the themers, but it would have also allowed a set of black squares separating DRONES from BEEHIVE. It's a very minor point as we're only discussing how to get rid of the measly MHO, but the OCD constructor in me can't help but wonder if that little dab of glue could have been avoided.

Beautiful clue for ISLETS, which are [Minor keys?] indeed. Good repurposing of a common musical phrase.