New York Times, Tuesday, March 31, 2015

Will seems to like a good sports theme — he's run baseball and football crosswords that I have sent him. I don't think anyone has tackled gymnastics. I hope solvers enjoy it.

Now let me get back to that lacrosse puzzle I've been working on ...

Gymnastics equipment, nicely disguised within snappy phrases. I wasn't exactly sure what the VERBAL part of VERBAL GYMNASTICS had to do with a written puzzle — it would be kind of fun to watch people solve, screaming out the answers as they wrote them in — but sometimes I just need to poke myself and let things slide. Plus, VERBAL GYMNASTICS is such a cool phrase that it was worth the slight bit of confusion.

Sometimes I wonder if a revealer helps or hurts a puzzle. In this case, I think it was a good thing, especially given how snazzy VERBAL GYMNASTICS is. Plus, I don't know if the (pommel) horse or the (uneven) bars would be identifiable without some explicit exposition.

Smoothly filled. Gary does a nice job of careful entry selection; just a smattering of A FAN and CON'T minor glue to keep it all together.

With a 16x15 grid, I think it's important to go the extra mile to keep solvers' attention. I sure enjoyed getting the entries like YOO HOO! and NOW WHAT? along with TORTELLINI and LARYNGITIS. For a normal 15x15 puzzle, that would have been fine for me.

But I would have loved to see the boundary pushed a bit, either by 1.) taking out the black square between MUG and ERECTS (difficult to do cleanly) or 2.) shifting the two black squares by STYNE/NAPA either to the left or the right in order to allow ASSUAGE to grow to a 9-letter answer (easier). Not absolutely necessary of course, but as a solver I appreciate those added touches. Given how clean the puzzle turned out, I think getting a bit more sparkle would be worth the price of a little more glue.

FYI, I wondered how difficult it would be to hold an iron cross on the rings. I rock climb a few times a week and am feeling comfortable about my chances on a salmon ladder, so it couldn't be that hard, could it? I was going to post my feeble attempt on my gym's Olympic rings, but it turns out that my videocamera doesn't operate fast enough to capture nanoseconds.

ADDED NOTE: Gary mentioned that his orginal intent was to have the themers clued in a wacky way, i.e. [Olympic event for shallots?] for ONION RINGS. Thus the VERBAL GYMNASTICS revealer would have been more apt.