New York Times, Monday, January 12, 2015

I find that a theme idea often has to percolate for a while and undergo many changes before it's good enough to work on. This puzzle is a great example. The seed came from reading "Bleak House" and encountering the phrase "from pillar to post" (I had to look that one up in the dictionary!).

This started me thinking about a puzzle containing interesting phrases of the form "from x to y" (of which there are certainly a lot). But, after enumerating theme possibilities, the original idea felt too loose and the most interesting entries were just a bit too obscure.

So, the idea sat for a while until I noticed that several of the phrases denoted completeness from some perspective: a much tighter theme possibility! This led to today's grid, with the "from" dropping out due to grid/symmetry constraints. However, in my submission, I clued the theme entries too literally; e.g., CRADLE TO GRAVE was "all, from a lifetime's perspective".

In editing, Will and Joel made another big improvement by introducing more wordplay; e.g., changing the above to "... for a life insurance agent". So, that's a further theme evolution I should have made. They also toned down the difficulty to Monday-level by changing a relatively large percentage of the clues (lesson learned, hopefully).

All in all, I'm happy how this one turned out. I like that it has a pair of long downs (THE SCREAM and PSYCHOTIC) that fit well together despite the need to cross a lot of theme entries. I hope it starts your puzzling week off on the right foot.

Five "X to Y" phrases meaning "everything" or "complete" or "comprehensive," clued from the point of view of different professions. I liked the colorful phrases, especially the more specific one. STEM TO STERN is lively (arr, mateys!), and SEA TO SHINING SEA appropriately spans the grid. (I can't wait for Talk Like a Pirate Day, apparently.)

Definitely agreed; fun echo on THE SCREAM and PSYCHOTIC. Along with "Bleak House," it'd be interesting to get Jason in a therapy session and see what's going on.

I like how the glue is spread around, both in location and in type. Most people don't enjoy seeing an ETUI in their crossword, but as long as there's not another thing that's never really used in real life — an OLIO or something — it's passable. And I like that there's one foreign oddity (ORO), an ending (ERN), a partial (AS A), and a not super-common acronym (GSA). So even though there's five gluey bits, the solver (at least this one) isn't really bothered. Sure, I would almost always prefer a squeaky clean, but if you're going to have five sticky bits, I'd rather have a little Elmer's, a bit Krazy Glue, a dab of rubber cement, etc.

One thing I really like here is the cross-referencing of HOMER and APU in a less opaque than usual manner. Often I skip clues that read like [Friend of 62-Across], annoyed that I have to jump around. I usually never go back and see what the referencing was all about. So it was nice to get the word "Squishees" in both clues. I'd still like to see it as [Buyer of Squishees on "The Simpsons"] and [Seller of Squishees on "The Simpsons], but this is a step in the right direction.

All in all, I would have liked a even more consistency/tightness, as all the phrases seemed slightly different to me. I was searching for a word to describe the theme, and the best I could do was to use a combination of terms. Would have been perfect if a single word had jumped out as the unifying factor. Otherwise though, a pretty nice construction job and a fun solve.