New York Times, Tuesday, February 10, 2015

It's great to be back in the New York Times after a 7-year sabbatical!

The inspiration for this puzzle came from a weekly column in the local paper about English grammar and expressions. It has been 2 years since we completed this puzzle, so our collective memories are a bit foggy. But we believe the columnist made some pun with the expression OUT OF SORTS. We ran with that idea and came up with a bunch of other puns about professions. These included things like: the horse trainer was THRILLED TO BITS, the submarine captain had a SINKING FEELING, the strangler was ALL CHOKED UP (OMG can you imagine!). We realized there had to be something more in common with the theme and settled on a professional not feeling well.

We decided to try to include 5 theme answers. This has usually been difficult for us. We hate very many three letter fills and drawn the line at 20. Luckily there are only 17 in this puzzle. We also try to have 2 or 4 good long down fills. This obviously gets tougher with the increased theme density. The long fills in this puzzle worked out nicely (although we were not thrilled about a plural HOMEPLATES).

We wish we could comment on our clever original clues, but those typically get mostly rewritten for a puzzle this early in the week. Hope you enjoy the puzzle and demand more of ours!

If only the themers had been run vertically. Then it could have been [The ailing crossword writer was …] FEELING DOWN.

*rim shot*

I had heard some of them before, but I still got a laugh out of the trash collector being IN THE DUMPS and the postal worker being OUT OF SORTS. Yes, the latter is kind of a stretch, since postal employees don't have a fixed supply of sorts (do they?), but given the wacky theme concept, it worked for me.

I hadn't heard of FEELING PUNK before. Googling the phrase in quotes doesn't get many hits. Several dictionaries list PUNK in that sense though, some even with "feeling punk" as an example. Generally that would make it fine in my book if it were a piece of fill, but given that it's a theme entry, I would have liked a phrase more solidly in everyday use.

Very impressive to work in two sets of long downs along with the five themers. Typically, five themers make it hard to work in even one pair, so to get two is a nice bonus. So many of them are vivid, too. ASTEROIDS gives me pleasant childhood memories, and SHOOT EM UP is beauty.

STEEL (DRUM) BANDS feels a little incomplete without DRUM, but that's minor (plus, Wikipedia disagrees with me). And I usually have no problems with plurals, but I agree with Kurt and Jan-Michele that HOME PLATES feels a little odd. No doubt it's "correct" in that you could say "there are HOME PLATES in every ballpark," but it's tough for me to think of a sentence I'd actually hear in actual life.

An enjoyable solve, made even more so by the minimal amount of gluey fill — given five themers and four long downs, I would expect to see much more. Some might complain about WYTHE being too difficult or esoteric for a Tuesday puzzle, but I enjoyed reading about him. First American law professor and an early opponent of slavery? Heck yeah, worth learning about.