New York Times, Monday, April 13, 2015

Crossword constructing is a little like writing a palindrome. You want to write something as sensible and natural as possible. Still, there's the constraint that the thing has to read backward and forward the same, and chances are it's going to sound a little awkward.

Straw? No, too stupid a fad. I put soot on warts.

No one writes this way normally. But I look on a long palindrome like this and I marvel. It's a stunt, of a sort, and a very cool one.

Similarly, the Monday and Tuesday crosswords this week are "stunt puzzles," in which the constructor has started with some peculiar thematic constraint that compromises the fill.

The constraint in today's debut by Alex Silverman is the stacking of names of 15-letter Beatles songs at the top and bottom of the grid. I don't remember seeing thematic stacking like this before, and it bowls me over . The puzzle's subject, the Beatles, gives me good feelings besides.

The downside of the constraint, of course, is some non-Mondayish or less-than-stellar vocabulary. You can list it as well as I can.

For any stunt puzzle, I weigh the amazingness of the theme, and the difficulty of the constraint, versus how compromised the vocabulary is as a result. It's a balance. For an amazing stunt, I may make major allowances. For a smaller one, not so much. Both today and tomorrow, I think, the compromises are fairly modest and well worth tolerating to get the wow.

I won't spoil tomorrow's puzzle, but will say only that it involves a different sort of stunt with a different issue with the fill.

In both puzzles I hope you can make the same allowances I do to appreciate what's cool.

I got interested in trying to construct a crossword after seeing the movie "Wordplay" and thinking, "I can do that." My first several attempts taught me that it is a lot harder that it looks. At some point my brother-in-law in New York told me, "Someday you're going to have a puzzle published in the Times." I'm glad he was right!

Special thanks to my friend Pavel of Pavel's Puzzles for great advice on how to improve my construction and for encouraging me to submit to the Times the puzzle that is now before you. And thanks to Will Shortz for saying he liked the theme the first time I submitted this puzzle, even though CRXS and MOKSA were not acceptable entries, and for accepting the rewritten version the second time.

Aside from constructing crosswords, I am a patent attorney in the Seattle area and like to play the piano.

Stacked grid-spanning theme answers is a stunt that gives me a nice endorphin rush — how is that even possible? I wish I'd thought of Will's example when I used to blog about crosswords (I used to blog about crosswords) because it's perfect. A long palindrome judged by the standards of poetry or literature is very likely to come up short, but that's not the point. It's cool!

Jeff tends to be less forgiving of the consequent clunky compromises so I'm curious to read his thoughts. In the meantime, I have one of the most beautiful Lennon-McCartney songs stuck in my head, "She's Leaving Home" from Sgt. Pepper. Which, by the way, is a stunt song because of its very repetitive chord structure. (None of the Beatles play on it; there's a small string orchestra instead.)

Debut! And what a debut. Jim and I had many discussions about this one, that fact alone making it a successful puzzle. Five Beatles songs — all 15 letters long — given a wacky interpretation, plus a kicker, the FOUR of WHEN IM SIXTY FOUR combined to form the FAB FOUR. Very cool idea.

Four grid-spanners are hard enough to do. I've commented many times on all the difficulties that arise with so many down entries that must interact with two or more grid-spanners. Including FIVE of them, two pairs each double-stacked, is an order of magnitude more difficult. It certainly provides a neat visual impact, akin to wide-open themeless puzzles. Amusing that this puzzle reminded me of another one, which just happened to have a double-stacked pair of grid-spanners ending in ALEX!

As Will mentioned, there are some compromises that the stacks force. For me, it was only really noticeable in the SE and NW corners where there's a concentration of gluey answers. And as to "Monday-like" answers, I think most anything is fair game — if the crossings are gettable. I LOVE the entry QUANT, for example, as it's both a memorable piece of finance lingo and inferable just by itself (it's slang for a "quantitative person").

LISLE crossing AVILA might be fair game in a themeless, but more a source of grumbling on a Monday.

This puzzle will likely play super strongly to the generation that grew up with the Beatles. I can certainly appreciate all the great feelings — it's like what the Simpsons or Monty Python do for me. Personally, not knowing SHES LEAVING HOME made me wonder if it would have been better to have just four themers (which would go along with FAB FOUR!), but I'm sure this song plays as well as the others to Beatles fans like Jim.

Memorable first puzzle; hoping to see more from Alex.