New York Times, Wednesday, October 10, 2018

This puzzle began life as a different piece of music. And the solfège notes came at the end instead of the beginning. That iteration, however, had a problem. The solfège notes in one of the theme entries were (despite orthographic identity) pronounced differently in the base phrase. It was tough to let that version go, but the resulting consistency in pronunciation makes the theme a lot stronger. Good thing that DODO, SOSO, LALA, and SO sound the way they do!

This puzzle's revealer could also have come from "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star," which shares the same first seven notes as "The Alphabet Song." Both (along with "Baa, Baa, Black Sheep") derive from the French children's song "Ah! vous dirai-je, maman."

I hope the non-thematic music-related entries, RIHANNA, ONO, BASSI, TURNTABLE, EAR, LES [Misérables], and SXSW are a nice plus for solvers. It's fun to sprinkle theme-adjacent material into a grid, but sometimes I worry that it might be a distraction. Hopefully I struck a good balance here.

Jim and I play the "what will annoy Jeff game" most weeks. It's super fun — Jim simply tries to predict which puzzles will make me gnash my teeth. He thought today's would be one of those because the knowledge required is pretty specific.

Wrong! Score one for The U S of Murica, score negative eight for Canadiana!

I imagine there will be some who don't get what's going on. You do need some background to figure it out:

- Notes of the major scale can be sung DO RE MI FA SO LA TI DO.

- The ALPHABET song (same tune as "Twinkle, Twinkle") on a C major scale starts with C C G G A A G.

- You can thus translate that to DO DO SO SO LA LA SO.

The theme is demystified! Apologies to those who are rolling their eyes, saying, "Thanks, Captain Obvious!"

Well, it wasn't at all obvious to me what was going on, anyway. I liked that aspect of it — felt like a couple of interesting ideas merged creatively together. Not a jump-out-of-my-seat-a-ha-that's-brilliant-moment! But my curiosity was piqued enough to want to figure out what was going on.

I liked a lot of the gridwork, strong efforts to work in long bonuses like TURNTABLE, TODO LISTS, LINKED IN, ASHPLUME. That's ON ONE HAND.

On the other, some oddballs in OKRAS ADEPTS (such strange plurals), SANDP (that's the S&P 500, of course, never written out as AND except in crosswords), and the trio of IN STIR, IN SPOTS, IN TOW. I usually don't mind duplication of short words INside grids, but that gave the solve a repetitive feel.

Overall, it's not the incredibly memorable musical puzzle to which I hold every other, but it's a novel, interesting take. I'd be curious to see what percentage of solvers actually understood what was going on, or went back to figure it out.