New York Times, Monday, August 1, 2016

As with many of our puzzles, we come up with a revealer first and then try to build a crossword theme around it. This idea came from a tattoo on the back of a guy's hand we saw. It said "To Do" and then had the numbers 1 through 4 listed below it. He would take a pen and write down the things he wanted to get done every day on his hand. Really. Although neither of us are going to get tattoos, we thought that we would honor such a clever idea in a crossword puzzle!

The themers we came up with were not very long so we decided to include five of them. This is tricky because we hate to use 3 letter fill and try to limit their use. There are more of them than we would prefer in this puzzle, but we felt it was worth it to get the five theme answers. The two cheater black squares in the corners were necessary to keep the open corners from having crummy stuff in them.

Hope you enjoy the puzzle.

TO DO LIST hinting at "phrases that start with TO* and DO*." I was glad to get that revealer — as I was solving, I thought there might be a football theme going on, with six TDs. It's much harder to get TO* DO* phrases than T* D* phrases, so I liked the extra effort.

I also liked the big thinking, with those chunky upper right and lower left corners. Those roughly 6x6 areas are so tough to fill smoothly for a Monday puzzle. Some solvers/constructors are going to detest the black cheater squares at the very NE / SW of the puzzle, saying those are visually inelegant and/or too much of a crutch, but I don't mind them. If they allow a constructor to generate a more colorful, smooth section, I say by all means! (Just as long as not too many are used.)

And what great results in the NE. Nothing is a standout answer, but the entire region has nary a hitch. I wonder if some solvers will complain about RENOWN, but I'm a big fan of LESTER Brown and His Band of RENOWN, so it seems perfectly fine to me. Getting an OTTER and a DOMINO is pretty fun, too.

And even though this area is more sectioned off from the rest of the puzzle than I like — if you blacked out the H in TOOTHPASTE, you'd completely isolate the corner — at least there are two answers connecting it to the rest of the puzzle in TOOTHPASTE and TOUCHDOWN. Much better to me than one answer-type choke-offs.

The SW didn't turn out as nice. I'd expect to see a minor gluey bit or two in a big corner like this, so SNO is perfectly reasonable. So is RTE. DATER feels a bit made-up, and NOT EAT even more so. I especially didn't care for the latter since ATE is also in the grid. (This is a common dupe that drives constructors crazy, since EAT / ATE phrases are so useful, but you can't easily catch a duplication because the letter strings aren't identical.)

Darn it, now I'm thinking about eating chips while watching football. TOUCHDOWN!