WELL, WELL, WELL, IF IT ISN'T ...

Joe DiPietro, of Brooklyn, owns a bar called "one star" in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan. He's been contributing puzzles to The Times since 1995. He's sometimes confused with the Tony-winning playwright with the same name, but the two don't know each other.

This Joe writes: "I love the sweet pain of filling grids." He sometimes spends weeks working and reworking them — and the resulting quality shows.

Summertime is slower for the bar business, so I have more time for coffee-fueled ideas in my office. This one started after looking at the word CHICKEN, and all I could see was the person's name at the end. Can you have a CHIC KEN (ask Barbie)? Started out that way, but chic was a different pronunciation. From there it was BRO KEN and so forth.

Of my first nine themers, eight had men's names. Seemed unavoidable at the time, and I knew I'd never be able to run for office after that : - ). Finally, MEG and GRACE showed up.

What's in a name? More like, what name's … in the final word of the theme phrase?

Shakespeare, I'm not.

Even after I uncovered three themers, I still wasn't sure what was going on. I thought I figured it out with "BURY THE HAT" CHET, but then I hit HEART BRO KEN. What's a HEART BRO — frat dude who's aiming for cardiology? No, that couldn't be right. My cleveradar told me I had to be missing something.

My equipment may be due for a tune-up.

A mix of thematic results, with some falling flat, but I did get a kick out of GROUND NUT MEG being an NFL fan nutty over the running game.

140-word 21x21 puzzles are never straightforward to build. They always require a bunch of long fill, which is usually the root of construction problems. Joe is such a pro — check out what he did in the SW corner. That diagonal line of black squares nearly segments the corner from the rest of the grid, with only three entry/exit points. This isn't ideal in terms of grid flow, but it's satisfactory — if a solver gets stuck at one point, there are still two others.

This sort of pseudo-segmentation does wonders for grid building. Once you have ROLLERS KATE and FORT LAUDER DALE in place, you can work on the SW corner almost independently of the rest of the grid. It's such a huge boon in construction to be able to tackle a big grid in sequential chunks, breaking down the Herculean mythos into minor labors.

Great results in that SW corner. FARMERS TAN and I GOT NOTHIN are sizzlers, and there's little evidence of the glue usually necessary to stick together adjacent downs — just ESTE and DAK. It's much easier to achieve this type of solid result when the rest of the grid doesn't affect what you're doing in the local region.

This is the type of trade-off that serves both the solver and the constructor.

All that great fill helped keep me entertained while I shrugged at entries like ROLLERS KATE and POP IN JAY. Jam-packing a grid full of TENNIS PRO, ASIAN PEARS, COME TO PAPA, HES DEAD JIM, THE RIDDLER, VIRGIN WOOL is such a boon for solvers who don't connect to the theme.