New York Times, Monday, February 24, 2014

Whenever I find a new 15 letter phrase, movie or book title, I eagerly add it to my data base. When it's an actual person, I feel as though I am welcoming them into the family. So when I discovered that my daughter's favorite author was indeed a member of this prestigious club, I set out to see how I could memorialize her in a crossword puzzle. It didn't take long to realized that the four March daughters in "Little Women" all had short names that might be used as the start of larger phrases. After an initial rejection (I had used Joblessness for Jo — an awkward word which had the wrong vowel sound), I did a second version which was eventually accepted.

A "Little Women" puzzle, featuring the four main characters, Jo, Meg, Beth, and Amy, hidden at the beginning of phrases. It's a theme that's been done before, but 1.) what theme hasn't been done before? and 2.) Adam did a really nice job of hiding the four in phrases or words such that they were nicely hidden. Even after I had plugged in JOKES AROUND and LOUISA MAY ALCOTT I was still wondering what was going on. Nice job, fun to have to do a bit more work on a Monday.

Curious choice, AMYL NITRITE. A real toughie to all but the chemists in the solving audience, although all the crossings seemed fair enough to me. And it is an interesting term to learn. The crossing ALL IN clued as "Tuckered out" sure gave me pause, as I'm not too familiar with that usage of the phrase. Perhaps "Final betting words" or the like would have addressed a bigger audience? Hard to say, but I was sure glad to see Mr. Happy Pencil pop up after I had been hovering a nervous fingertip over that crossing "L".

AMY did stand out to me as the only one where the name isn't pronounced the same as in its themer (AMYL is a short "A" sound if I'm remembering my organic chem correctly — although David says he pronounced it with the long "A" while at school in the northeast, so it might be regional), but I'm not sure I could come up a better themer. AMYGDALA, a part of the brain, is the only other thing I could think of that *might* be more something I'd like to learn on a Monday. But it also has a different pronunciation than AMY.

With five themers, and relatively long ones to boot, this construction had a great deal of constraints facing it. Any time you run words through three separate theme answers (look at NESTING SITE and AMALGAMATED), you're going to have very little options for those spaces. This makes filling awfully difficult, because normally you can try out five, ten, fifty different words in any one long down spot and figure out what's going to make for best fill. But when you have only a few options to plug in (ADULTERATED, AMELIORATED, APPLE BUTTER are some of the limited choices for the AMALGAMATED spot), you kind of need to go with the best you can get. That's why I rarely (if ever) run down entries through three themers.

Because of this layout, the fill suffers a bit, seeing the partials AS A and IT IN, the random Roman numeral CMVI, the relatively not well-known places in AMES and ORONO, the foreigns OBI and AMIE crossing near to MME, etc. Sometimes adding black squares to cut down word length will make a puzzle easier to fill, but Adam couldn't do that because he's already at the limit of 78. I'm not sure, but perhaps I would have let him go up to 80 words? I do like the long down fill, but AMALGAMATED and NESTING SITE aren't (to me) as snazzy as SOUNDTRACK and BYE BYE LOVE. So perhaps allowing those to be broken up could have made this a smoother Monday. I love seeing GAVIN McCloud, who brings back fond "Love Boat" memories, but perhaps putting a black square where his G sits might have helped the overall fill quality.

Definitely a good workout, on the hard side for a Monday.