Doing Front Flips

John Kugelman is a software engineer and musician from Gainesville, Va. His father, who turns 80 this year, is a sounding board for John's puzzle ideas and John finds that brainstorming with him is a great way to stay connected. "Every time I see him we throw around all kinds of wordplay, just spitballing and letting our minds roam."

This is John's first crossword for The Times. It grew out of 38-Across.

My dad is my puzzle sounding board and trusty test solver. He's turning 80 this year and crossword construction has been a wonderful way to connect with him. Whenever I see him, we throw around all kinds of wordplay ideas, just spitballing and letting our minds roam. As the engineer I'm always saying, "that won't work because of this and that rule," while he waves me off and goes on free associating.

We talked about doing spoonerisms for a while. I've come up with a lot of out there theme ideas, many too convoluted for their own good. Spoonerisms were something my dad understood immediately. For months he e-mailed me new ones he'd thought of. They sat on the shelf, though, because I didn't know what the entry point would be. Just putting unrelated spoonerisms in a grid isn't enough for a puzzle (one of those pesky "rules").

Thinking of WEARABLE THING TO TASTE was the foot in the door. We could spoonerize familiar sayings. That would appease the rule police.

For most of my puzzles I'm able to leverage my software expertise to do some of the heavy lifting. Not this one. The computer was no help. This one took pure old-fashioned human elbow grease.

My dad continues to send me new spoonerisms to this day. When I tell him there's no need — the puzzle's already been accepted — he just waves me off. "Bunny hunch," he says. "What can you do with that?"

Been a while since we've seen a Spoonerisms theme. You can search Sundays by title on our site — that turned up one from over a decade ago, another that played on celebs, and a third that tripled its switching. Given that Spoonerisms are so well-worn in crosswords, it's important to do something above and beyond. I like that John tightened up his concept by only playing on common sayings.

(Although, is MISTER MONEY BAGS a "saying," per se?)

WEARABLE THING TO TASTE is such an apt description of a Ring Pop. (Whoever came up with the Ring Pop concept, I hate you and the sticky drooly messes you've enabled my kids to make.) Fun spelling change from TERRIBLE to WEARABLE, too.

GEEKS BEARING GRIFTS isn't a strong spoonerism, since it involves the same starting consonants, but what a great result, so timely for our age of crypto scams. I hope Sam Trabucco escaped the black hole that is the Alameda Research / FTX scandal.

I found it inelegant to not involve all parts of the sayings, i.e. THING and TO didn't do any spoonerizing. After more thought, though, it seemed impossible to achieve this while sticking with common sayings, since so few maxims are only two words.

It would have been nice to be consistent with flipping the fronts of the first and last word, as THREE MARE SQUEALS A DAY took me forever to piece together. I appreciate the funny imagery, but I'm not sure it was worth the confusion.

I'm glad that Will Shortz has been spreading these out and that John did something little different in this overdone genre.