New York Times, Thursday, August 17, 2017

Once I had the idea for this puzzle, I had a harder time than I thought I would to come up with expressions of the form FOUR ___, where the second word has exactly four letters and is in-the-language. What made it even tougher is I had the additional constraint that two of the four letters had to be embedded in the long answer (which, in each case, is really a definition of FOUR ___). One other possibility I considered was (FOUR) IRON hooked onto the "IR" in FAIRWAY CLUB, but I realized IRON (without the FOUR) would be a perfectly good answer (definition) of "fairway club" on its own.

I like the multiple meaning of GANG OF FOUR in the context of the puzzle.

I'm happy I stuck with the consistency that in all three instances, the gang of four circled letters is always read clockwise from the upper left. As I was building the grid, I toyed with the idea of having them start in various locations, with some going clockwise and some counterclockwise. Yikes!

Sorry, not a lot of bonus fill. QUIZ SHOW is kind of fun, I suppose.

This is Pete's 100th NYT puzzle! Congrats, sir. He sent me a post Jim did about him from almost a decade ago, which was funny to read. I guess he didn't run out of steam after all!

The GANG OF FOUR played upon today. (Never thought I'd say those words, considering their infamous place in history!) I like Pete's novel take, using 2x2 blocks — GANGs of FOUR squares, if you will — that intersect their defining answers. (four) STAR = GOOD RATING, the (four) TOPS = MOTOWN SINGERS, etc.

I usually don't care for dictionary definitions — it's not much fun to struggle and toil, with only something as stilted as GLASSES WEARER as your reward — but I appreciate that Pete found definitions that can contain the appropriate GANG OF FOUR. MOTOWN SINGERS is a good phrase, so to work the T O of (four) TOPS in there is neat.

For those of you non-baseball fans, SLUGGER gets a fun clue, referring to Barry BONDS. Nice way to disguise Bonds vs. bonds by having that word start the clue. (Assuming you knew who Barry Bonds was, of course.)

With definitional themes, I think it's even more important than usual to include a ton of bonus fill to jazz up the solving experience. I love QUIZ SHOW, CARGO NET, even BORZOI and HAGGIS are fun. But my favorite was the confusing AND SOON … er, AND SO ON. Great use of a mid-length slot, providing a mini a-ha moment when I finally parsed that correctly.

Given the extra constraints put on by those three GANGs of FOUR, and the need to include all the bonus fill for spice, I think some ISR, TIA, OTC (over the counter), FAS, QAT (what a Scrabble-friendly word!) is not bad in terms of crossword glue.

This one didn't quite clear my (very high) threshold for the definitional theme type, but I appreciated Pete's interesting pairing of the definitions with the literal GANGs OF FOUR.