UH-OH!

Eye surgery patients are always telling me that "Uh-Oh...." is a phrase they don't want to hear during their operation, but it occurred to me one day that it might make a great vowel-change-theme/ title for a Sunday puzzle. This proved to be pretty challenging because to do it right I had to change every "uh" sound in each phrase. Common words like "a" and "the" and "one" and "up" suddenly became dealbreakers.

Once I scrounged up suitable theme entries the puzzle went smoothly — I submitted it about November 1st, it was accepted December 15, and published about two months later since the Sunday queue is apparently rather short.

Will and Joel said their favorite entries were STONED SILENCE and HOT DOG BONE. I also like JANKY and "OH, WAIT!". Jeff must like those also since he gave them high scores on his XWord Info Word List.

(psst, Jeff ... how long do I have to keep promoting the word list?)

(Jeff: *passing Bruce a wad of unmarked bills*)

Sound change, from UH to OH, thus UH-OH! I laughed at NO GOATS NO GLORY, the motto of the saddest goatherder in the world. It's a great base phrase, "no guts no glory," and the change in meaning is amusing. I also like STONED SILENCE, from "stunned silence" ... although aren't stoned folks usually giggling and chatty?

That's what my friends tell me, anyway. Ahem.

None of the others did much for me, unfortunately. BREAD AND BOATER feels stilted. A hummingbird feeder and a HOMING BIRD FEEDER seem too similar. And I don't have great associations with Confederate Era Dixie, so DIXIE COPES left a bad taste in my mouth.

I did like that Bruce chose some interesting spelling changes; CUPS to COPES, FUN to PHONE, etc. Much better than a simple letter substitution of *UH* to *OH*.

Great work on the short fill; hardly anything stood out. Minor ENS, NENES, hardly anything else. IMMUNO is a prefix, but it's interesting. Big thumbs-up for the super-smooth solve.

Some fun long fill, too, especially that nice WAKING UP / OPEN CASE / STAGE SET triple. None of those blew my mind, but they're all good.

I do wish there was a little more long fill. There are some CRAWDADS, AP TESTS, HACKERS strewn about, but it felt like most of the puzzle was dominated by four or five-letter answers, with not much to break up that sensation.

Not a fan of that big diagonal slash across the middle, as it hindered my solving flow. It makes grid construction so much easier, as once you work through part of the NE and SW corners, you can effectively fill the halves of the puzzle separately. Opening one or two spaces along that diagonal would have helped a ton. Or opening up the spaces at the ends of it, perhaps by moving that set of three black squares under NEOPET down one row.

The theme didn't do much for me, but I did appreciate a lot of the grid execution, especially the very smooth fill. It was so smooth, in fact, that I would have loved to get some more long bonus entries in exchange for a couple more dabs of crossword glue.