New York Times, Tuesday, December 10, 2013

The germ for this theme was MUCKETY-MUCK, which I thought was an interesting entry to build a theme around. In sorting through the possibilities, I landed with an M&M vowel progression theme. As far as I could determine, it hadn't been done before. I found a couple of other M&M themes over the past few years, but no vowel progression. After that, the remainder of the theme answers came together fairly readily. I considered MONEY MONGER for the MO-MO entry, but ultimately decided in favor of MODEST MOUSE.

This puzzle has an unusually specific theme — familiar phrases in the form MA- MA-, ME- ME-, MI- MI-, etc. I hope solvers don't notice just the M and Ms, especially with the M AND M entry at 55A, which is a little distracting!

I'll admit, I was underwhelmed by this puzzle theme at first, thinking it was composed of straightforward M and M phrases. Not that I dislike those, but they usually leave me wanting more if the X and Y are common letters — the fact that so many phrases start with M and M made it feel too easy to pull off; not tight enough. But then it dawned on me that there's an additional layer to the puzzle: each of the five themers incorporates a vowel progression! That is cool.

And what snazzy theme answers, most of them I'd be happy to use in a themeless. A little MODEST MOUSE for the younger crowd, MUCKETY MUCK for us who like to say humorous swear-word sounds without actually swearing (tee hee!), and the weird looking MISS MISSISSIPPI. The entry MISS MISSISSIPPI, I mean, not the actual Miss Mississippi. I'm sure her mother thinks she's very pretty.

Bold decision to incorporate long across fill today. These 10-letter answers are shorter than all the theme answers, and they are both really nice. The bottom section is awfully hard to construct though, with MODEST MOUSE overlapping SERPENTINE which hovers above MUCKETY MUCK and below MISS MISSISSIPPI. See how that severely constrains the fill? It gives few options where AIMS FOR sits, which results in the unfortunate CAN OF partial. Now if CAN OF had been clued "___ whoop-ass" that might have been a different story for me.

But Bill otherwise does really well to navigate through that section, tossing in UP HERE and ENVY to complete the south in clean fashion. That's strong work. In the SE I'm not so sure about KYL. Yes, he was the Senate Minority Whip and one of Time's 100 Most Influential People in 2010, but is he crossworthy? Maybe, maybe not. And more importantly, is he worth the URI tradeoff? I say no, but that's a matter of opinion (Jon Kyl and the URI alums I just offended might disagree).

A bit distracting to have the M AND M entry in the grid (which led me to think it was a not-so-subtle revealer for a straightforward M AND M type puzzle) but I can overlook that. Overall, a neat idea to combine two theme types to form something new. That's hard to accomplish in this day and age of so many ideas having already been used.

And go URI Rams!