New York Times, Thursday, July 15, 2021

This puzzle was simple and fun to make. I remember having the initial thought of doing a "YU" rebus as a spin on "Why you little!," then running the idea by my friend — the great Will Nediger — who was very enthusiastic, so I quickly made it and sent it in. I had to rework the grid and edit out FUNYUNS because someone hadn't heard of them.

I'm honestly surprised this is my first daily with the Times. I've been constructing since around 2008 and submitting to the Times since 2011. It's not that I was always sending them incredible work (I didn't begin using wordlists until 2017 and my earlier style was sort of a janky Something Different–esque hybrid), but still it's been a long long time coming.

Speaking of wordlists, I'm very pro the general movement of making them more accessible to beginning constructors and would love to, at some point in the future, make my wordlist publicly available for free. My main hesitation is that I've built mine up from a skeleton of a Jeff Chen list I bought years back and I can't say that the superficial research I've done on list-related copyright cases has made me confident in just brazenly posting a download link (however palimpsestic the original list's presence in mine may be after consolidating deletions, additions and rescorings). I've talked to multiple experienced constructors who similarly (i) would like to release their wordlists for free and (ii) feel somewhat barred from this by the fact that their lists are built from Chen's lists.

There's an uneasy sort of push-and-pull in the crossword world between man and machine [cue random Kraftwerk song]. There's both a tendency towards constructors optimizing puzzle quality and time spent with the help of software and databases as well as a tendency to hold onto and covet things, like private wordlists, that could be perceived to lend one's puzzles a unique stamp of human identity; with one hand we reach out to the robots, with the OTHER HAND we shield ourselves from them (and sometimes from each other). Anyway, I clearly have many thoughts on this. Feel free to drop me a line.

WHY YOU LITTLE is a perfect rebus revealer. Not only is it a phrase evoking all sorts of vivid images (why is it that an adult choking a kid over and over is okay, BTW?), but rationalizes why Y and U should be shrunk and crammed into a single box.

It's a shame that WHY YOU LITTLE appeared so recently, though. This puzzle would have had a more powerful impact on this daily solver if more time had elapsed. Unfortunate.

ENERGY USE is the classic way that Will Shortz wants a rebus string to be included — broken across words of a phrase. In the past, Will has balked at entries like TIMES PICAYUNE, where the string is fully embedded in one word, and the other word does no "theme work." I do like the color of YUKON GOLD POTATOES — that's some brilliant marketing — but it's strange to experience a non-standard rebus inclusion like this. I'd have welcomed FAMILY UNIT, MILITARY UNIFORM, SAY UNCLE, HIGHLY UNLIKELY, or even QWERTYUIOP for its sheer audacity.

I liked YUM YUM better. Even though it doesn't break YU across words, it's fun to have the repeat. There's been plenty of precedent for that.

It was odd to get the YUM repeated in YUM YUM / TOM YUM SOUP. They aren't etymologically related, but everything about it screams inelegant. I'd never put TOM YUM SOUP and BUBBLE YUM together in a themeless, for example.

There were a few wonky points, like I'M TOO headlining as a partial, and some ESSE ICBM RIAA. Overall, though, the spot-on revealer helped to make up for some of the not-quite-right parts of this entertaining debut.

Since Mr. Carpenter brought it up, here's the relevant excerpt from the XWord Info Word List FAQ: