New York Times, Tuesday, March 7, 2017

The impetus for this one came from seeing the sign "Nikola Tesla Corner" on my way to work, on Fifth Av./40^th St. next to Bryant Park in Manhattan. The sign commemorates Tesla's labs nearby on 8W40th Street, as well as his time spent feeding pigeons in Bryant Park. As a former electrical engineer, I am pleased to introduce his full name into the puzzle.

Theme is pretty straightforward, featuring the full set of the non-esoteric TESLA anagrams, ending with LAST BUT NOT LEAST. Favorite non-theme entry is DON'T SPEAK, which was a massive hit for No Doubt. More personally, however, I liked it more because it's a phrase that stuck in my mind from the Woody Allen movie "Bullets over Broadway," where Dianne Wiest's character uses the phrase repeatedly on her opposites, with much comical effect. Not laugh-out funny, but I just found it very amusing and memorable for some reason. Not surprisingly, she won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for that role.

Constructor logs: this was submitted way back in November 2013, and accepted in April 2014.

TALES, STEAL, SLATE, STALE, TESLA, and LEAST = SIX themers in total! Often, anagram puzzles can result in bleh themers due to the difficulty of finding good anagrams, but Freddie did a great job. CANTERBURY TALES and the crazy inventor NIKOLA TESLA are my favorites (I'm also a former engineer). And LAST BUT NOT LEAST in the last theme position is a beautiful touch.

At first, I hesitated on GOING STALE, as I'm used to hearing WENT STALE or GO STALE. (I'm very careful in adding different tenses into our word list, as sometimes a particular tense hits my ear wrong.) But after some thought, GOING STALE is fine. Many food items in my kitchen are in the process of GOING STALE right now.

Not only does Freddie use six themers, but all of them are fairly long — a ton of material to build around. An incredibly rough grid-building task.

The lower left is a good example of the problems that high theme density creates. Working around the starts of NIKOLA TESLA and LAST BUT NOT LEAST means that three down answers are already heavily constrained. I think the result is decent, but for a Tuesday puzzle, I worry that IZAAK crossing UZI and SKYE might give some solvers fits. As a constructor, you want to set solvers up for a fair win. I'm not sure this does that.

Same with KEPI / SISAL in the upper right. I know what a KEPI is because it was a themer in one of my puzzles, but faced with that intersection otherwise … oof, that would be rough.

A lot of crossword glue elsewhere: A MUST and TO THE as long partials, SSR, USTA, ASSN, LII, etc. = too much for one puzzle, especially when early-week, newer solvers can be turned off.

And NULLS ... nullifies, yeah?

Neat to get so many strong phrases using the anagrammed letters — I can't remember six that were this good in any other anagramming puzzle — but a heavy price to pay in grid execution.