New York Times, Saturday, April 17, 2021

I built this puzzle around an existing grid layout, rather than building around a marquee answer as I did for my first themeless. I took inspiration from Ian Livengood's 5/8/2015 NYT grid that I found when browsing the XWord Info archives (in his constructor notes, he recommends that new themeless constructors try it out) and created my own take on it.

I was very surprised to see this slotted for a Saturday since it has the maximum word count and few proper nouns, so I'll be interested to hear how the difficulty level plays for solvers. I didn't realize how many food references were in the puzzle until I finished it, at which point I actually went back and edited the SW corner to remove yet another food entry. Now I'm off to eat some 1A in celebration!

My kids will eat anything if it's covered with sprinkles — broccoli surprise, anyone? Why didn't anyone tell me about FUNFETTI? It's not the most clever portmanteau — as I expected, it's fun + confetti — but it's a marketing home run. I baked my daughter's last birthday cake, and for her next one, I fully expect her to pick FUNFETTI. With sprinkles on top, of course.

Standout clue for DRAG RACERS. Already a great entry, making it fresh with a Zoom reference elevates it even further.

Editors often don't give check marks for single-word entries, since ones like ENDEAVOR and INSTANT can be more neutral than assets. When you give AVIATION a zinger of a clue like [The Wright stuff?], though, that can help it stand out.

A few entries/clues that could confuse people:

• I thought I knew what RUBRIC meant: a classification, as in "under the RUBRIC of ___." I forgot, it can also mean "a general concept that marks divisions or coordinations in a conceptual scheme," which would be helpful in assessing grades.
• MOS is short for months. I went straight to modi operandi, especially since those Greek gods of mythology often played fast and loose with the rules.
• [Circular] is a great misdirect, not pointing to roundness, but a piece of paper that circulates; a FLYER.
• I snarfed a laugh when Jim Horne asked what it meant when chickens got cornfed (pronounced in one syllable, akin to "snarfed").

A lot of great wordplay today and immaculate gridwork. The 72-word themeless has an extremely high (and continually rising) bar, but a few years ago, I would have picked this one as a POW!

Tower of Hanoi is a game where you have to move all the disks from the first post to the third, one at a time. The catch is that you're not allowed to place a larger disk on top of a smaller one. The animation here shows a four-disk solution.

When programmers first learn a technique called "recursion" their first assignment is often to solve the Tower for an arbitrary number of disks. These weird functions that recursively call themselves are an example of STRANGE LOOPS from the Monday puzzle.