New York Times, Tuesday, September 13, 2022

Wait a second... No rebuses, no grid art, no tricksy theme shenanigans, no circled or shaded squares, no rule breaking... Did I even make this puzzle?

Well, yes. While this is my tenth (!!!) puzzle to run, it's actually only the second one I made chronologically, before I got into my Thursday groove. Now, I could use that as an excuse for some fill dodginess but I'm gonna stand up for myself and say I'm proud of 2019 Adam's work here.

And don't worry, I'll be back to my regular tricksiness soon.

In the meantime though, if you are looking for a twisty word challenge, I recently launched a new daily word game! It's called Anigrams, and it's all about unscrambling words of increasing lengths. I hope you'll give it a play, and feel free to hit me up with feedback on the bird app.

Can you make it all the way to the ?

Hard not to get your kicks out of this one. Four of them, to be precise! HERE'S THE KICKER is a sizzling phrase, and it aptly describes a FOOTBALL PLAYER, a ROCKETTE, an UNBORN BABY, and a KANGAROO.

ROCKETTE is perfect for this theme since their high kicks are iconic. In a free association exercise, if the experimenter said "Rockette," I'd blurt out "kick."

Not as much for FOOTBALL PLAYER, but I like that the general term disguises the lonely professional kicker, obfuscating the concept to build the a-ha moment.

What does it say about me that if the experimenter said UNBORN BABY, I'd scream TERROR?

Or that KANGAROO would elicit, "Where can I get a kangaroo suit like this guy?"

Kick around those results, experimenters!

Great quartet of long Downs, IN THE ZONE / UP IN ARMS / TOY STORY / OBSTRUCTS even more colorful than yesterday's. There's more short glue, though, a RUER of some.

One of the main differences from yesterday is that the 15x14 width shrinks available space and, thus, flexibility. Take the lower left, for example. If you don't have much separation between the starts of KANGAROO and HERES THE KICKER, and you thread UP IN ARMS through them, it's nearly inevitable to need something like A IS to hold it together. That's not a NO-NO, since the partial is easyish for newer solvers to uncover, but given all the other DO I / LEK / FORMA (dupe with DEFORM?) and some might ask, what the ELL?

Cute theme. The revealer feels ripe for a more playful angle — [What an expectant mother says upon being woken up in the middle of the night?] = HERE'S THE KICKER — but that's an entirely different puzzle.