NUMBER-ONE FRIENDS

Josh Billings said: "A dog is the only thing on earth that loves you more than you love yourself."

These dog days of summer call for a Sunday puzzle whose bark is bigger than its bite. A not-so-hard theme and fill seem appropriate for a sultry summer solve. The inspiration? The Obama family pooches — Bo and Sunny, our current, very cute, White House dogs.

I imagine that the pressures of the Presidency, along with the loneliness of the office, are eased by the presence of an unconditionally-loving pet. Over the years, our First Dogs have achieved sufficient fame to warrant a puzzle of their own.

As I constructed the grid, the primary design challenge was to surround the central doggy face with enough white space to make the face smile back at you.

Dog owners, I hope you'll work this puzzle with your pooch at your side, with extra ORTS on hand. Thank you for solving!

An earlier version of this puzzle had the answer CHECKERS MATCH at 24A, clued as "'Jumping' competition [the Nixons]". One of the puzzle testers, though, Frank Longo, pointed out that the Nixons' dog Checkers died in 1964, five years before Nixon took office, so Checkers was never a WHITE HOUSE DOG (62A). That was a great catch, preventing an error from getting into print. On top of that, Frank reworked the upper-middle portion of the grid with the new theme entry HER EXCELLENCY. Thank god for Frank!

More grid art! Liz usually employs circled letters to form visual elements (check out how many on that page are hers!), but today she uses those black squares as her paintbrush. I generally prefer this approach, as black squares are such a strong visual element that they often overwhelm any other effects. And what an effect today — as a pet lover, I couldn't help falling for that cute dog in the center and its ears standing straight up.

For me, the best Sunday puzzles are the ones with themes or ideas that cannot be done in a 15x grid. Jill and I did a similar dog picture a while back in a 15x, but that picture constrained things so much we didn't have room to put more than a few theme answers in. I love how today's large palette allows for quite a bit more, namely themers starting with the name of a WHITE HOUSE DOG. Neat idea.

I didn't know every WHITE HOUSE DOG, so the puzzle played difficult for me. It was even harder because Sundays require more open space than usual weekday themed puzzles. Check out that giant SW region, with MILLIE SMALL / LEG WARMER / ANNE MEARA. That's a themeless-esque stack right there! Not easy to fill. The crossings were rough for me, and I imagine I won't be the only one. MARL has an old-timey ADIT-type feel to it (an ADIT is a rarely used word for a mine shaft opening), and OREL / RAMA / MILLIE SMALL / NEWELL make for an awfully difficult pile-up of esoteric proper names.

Deploying so many black squares to form the picture of the dog forces big open spaces everywhere throughout the puzzle. The south is another good example of that. That giant space contains some great entries like BUDDY SYSTEM and ESCAPE ROUTE. However, MDCC, OSE, STETS, and POEME are a pretty high price to pay for all the goodness. Sundays are so tricky to create without a few of these blips. In many ways, much harder than a themeless.

Overall, a great visual, causing a lot of constraints in the grid and some compromises in the fill.