New York Times, Thursday, October 13, 2022

I avoided super large cities for this puzzle. Even though the reveal's TOWN can indicate one, as in the song "My Kind of Town" (referring to Chicago), I usually think of a town as something cozier in size.

This puzzle is brought to you by the letter O. I've never seen so many long O's in a 15 x 15 before — and I look for things like that — 19 of them! CHEERIEST reminds me of the show "Cheers", and it makes me happy to see NORM sitting on top of it.

The theme was given to me by my dog and best-bud Chester, who unfailingly brought me to zen during our walks, allowing clues and themes to tap on my shoulder. Chester left this world a half year ago, and was an angel to everyone who knew him. This puzzle's for you, big boy.

Rest in peace, Chester. I've had the privilege of working with Lewis on several puzzles now, and there have been so many times when one of his breakthroughs came after a long walk with his dear friend.

What a great find in BLAREDOUT to BUT (BUT "skipping" the town of LAREDO)! Most themes involving "deletions creating another valid entry" use short strings of letters. I don't remember seeing a six-letter one before. Impressive!

I like the big-thinking approach in using longer town names. BUTTE, LAREDO, PROVO are especially nice. MESA and ERIE work too, although four-letter finds aren't as interesting, especially when they contain mostly common letters.

As longtime readers would expect, I couldn't stop myself from investigating what else was possible. With the help of our Replacement Finder, half an hour of scanning through a list of towns turned up some fun multi-worders:

PERE NOEL to PEEL

MA CHERIE to MACH

SALT AIR to SIR

NO REMORSE to NORSE

I would have loved more multi-word themers, since single-word to single-word transformations aren't that eye-popping. There's something so fascinating about a space changing location or getting deleted.

There are many ways to present a theme like this, and today's is one of the hardest implementations to solve. Without circles to tell you where the towns are and without a clue for the base phrase, I struggled mightily to finish.

Will Shortz has said that all he wants out of Thursdays is that they're harder than Wednesdays. Circling the towns would have made the concept much easier, but still challenging — and more importantly, more fun to solve. Alternately, cluing both the base phrase and the resulting entry would have allowed for more fun entries like MA CHERIE (which doesn't work with today's presentation, since MACHERIE appears nonsensical without a hint to help the solver figure out that it's MA CHERIE).

Some neat finds, and certainly a hard Thursday workout for this OLDMAN!