The Final Frontier

Rich Katz, of Park City, Utah, does freelance work in corporate restructuring, with a focus on financially challenged companies. He started solving crosswords about five years ago and quickly graduated to making them. This is his New York Times debut.

The starting point of its theme was 116-Across. Rich's love of puns is evidenced by his email address, which includes the Spanish "ricos" and "gatos." —

Professionally, I deal with messy corporate bankruptcies and reorganizations. Away from those messes, I live with my wife and dog in Park City, Utah, where I ski, hike, and stare intently and incessantly at Crossword Compiler screens. My wife says my behavior is puzzling.

Fun fact about me: I performed with a mime troupe in college. As you can see, I still struggle with words.

I got the idea for this puzzle after idly noticing that DUALIPA could be parsed as either a pop star (normally) or a complex beer (comically), and I decided to look for more such strings. At first I was focused only on people and didn't get very far. (Was the musician HERB ALPERT sufficiently well-known to be recharacterized as a fragrant shampoo? I thought not.) So I turned to technology and sent my word list to my programming-whiz son Teddy to do some filtering of it. Many awesome options came out of that; the proverbial cutting-room floor is littered with the likes of NASCAR NATION [Flower for a rapper?], MAIN EVENT [Breezeway in Bangor?], ONE ALARM [What Shaq has up his sleeve?], BOWL OVER [Either character in an iconic "Titanic" scene?] and START OUT [Celeb recommendation?].

SPACE TRAVEL gives me such warm feelings, remembering the last great book I read. It's a great rationale for "phrases that become new, kooky ones when you shift the position of the space."

Although some of the finds were commonplace to us old-timers — SUPERB OWL has been used many a time, all the way back to 2005 (see 14-Across in that one) and even 2001 — some of them amused me to no end. (LOO M)OVER vibed with my juvenile sense of humor, (ASP EN)TRÉE is a neat find, and MOAN(A BOUT) gave a sense of freshness. A lot of entertainment for this solver!

Focusing on short(ish) themers for a 21x21 can work if you 1.) pack a ton in, and 2.) make them stand out. The problem is that if you stick at the 140-word maximum, something has to be long, and that ends up being much of the fill. All sorts of challenges arise, including how to not lose the themers among the long grass of the forest. We've highlighted them below.

There's no doubt that SPACE TRAVEL is a themer, given its length and central Across location. Is ASPEN TREE or HORSE SENSE a themer? Or both? Or neither? A tiny asterisk is so easy to overlook.

One layout that tends to alleviate this problem is to lay out all your themers Across — and in the same rows. That leaves a lot of long Down filling, but that can create a bigger distinction between theme and fill.

I've had the pleasure of working with Rich for a while now, and I've found him to be open-minded, quick to learn, and unafraid to put in the time. Well-deserved debut — time to go celebrate with some teaser vices!