PREDICTABLE PARTINGS

When I started constructing six years ago my goal was to land a Sunday NYT. At last! My success is no doubt due to the fact that I recently gave up all impure thoughts. It might also be due to the 12 theme entries and 122 theme squares but one never really knows for sure, does one.

The seed was TOOKOFF [The ecdysiast ...] I was then pleasantly surprised to discover how many idiomatic ways there are to depart, but just enough to make for a tight theme. Now that my goal is achieved it seems safe enough to revert to impure thoughts, yes?

Fun Sunday puzzle, using "parting lines" clued for the appropriate profession. My favorite was [The demolitionist ...] BLEW THE JOINT. [The civil engineer...] HIT THE ROAD also made me chuckle, although I would have loved it if it had been clued to the Incredible Hulk. HULK SMASH is my go-to phrase, plus it would have been hilarious to see [The Incredible Hulk ...] in the NYT.

Good job with the layout today, not an easy task to pull together a group of themers with widely varying length. It's often very difficult to use short themers, because they tend to get lost within the noise of the puzzle. But the way the theme clues worked, with the [(Profession) ...] made it really clear which ones were themers and which weren't. Nice.

Well constructed Sunday puzzle. I estimate that Sunday puzzles are roughly three to five times harder to put together than a weekday, given the bigger palette and the higher average word length that Will's specifications dictate. Needing to settle for a few ugly entries is more common than it is in a weekday puzzle. So to have just a few REHEAL, REGREW, SYSTS, OLIO, I ROAM type entries shows the care John put into his gridwork. Even better, he's spread those entries around, not allowing any one section carry too much burden.

Note John's spacing. Eight long themers are not easy to work around (not to mention the four shorties!). But John does really well, placing two rows between each pair of long themers — this spacing almost always works better than just a single row in between. The middle of the grid could have presented a challenge, but John saves the shortest of his long themers for this spot, allowing good spacing between all four of them. Professional layout, that it is.

I did have a lot of trouble in one spot, but that had more to do with the cluing than the grid. IRAE crossing ARLEN usually wouldn't be too bad, in that IRAE is clued so often as ["Dies ___"] that I can fill it in automatically, without even fully comprehending it. And ARLEN Specter is familiar enough, but I find it tough to remember the difference between ARLEN and ARDEN, and ALLEN seemed like it could be that composer. It's probably a fair crossing for many solvers, but it left me a little crabby. Not that this is wrong or right, but the effect of crabbiness was what it was. Perhaps it's a good lesson to me, to actually look up things and not take them for granted!

It usually just takes a few great clues to make me overlook some flaws, and [Where auto racers retire?] for PITS and [Current amount] for AMPERE did it for me. I especially love the latter, in that it totally misdirects from the straightforward electrical measurement for a current, making you think about how much you have in your pocket, or how much the current tally is.

Some themers worked well for me, some felt a bit forced, but overall an enjoyable puzzle. Plus, I learned the term "ecdysiast"! What a fanciful word for that, er, profession.