New York Times, Tuesday, February 9, 2016

Another fun early-week puzzle from Lynn. She takes single-word entries and interprets them as double words for kooky results. Really neat to start and end with related themers: BOMBS HELL and EYES HADES. Great find! I've seen a lot of puzzles involving a shifting of the letter S, but this one had a fresh feel to it. As I would expect from Lynn, the themers are consistent, all one word splitting into a kooky two-worders.

Bonus to get six themers. With shortish ones (8-9 letters), it's not so bad to pack six of them in, and Lynn shows us a smart method to do so. She takes her shortest answers (8 and 9 letters) and stacks them in rows 3 and 4 — this lets you treat the grid kind of like you're working with four themers, not six. You just have to be careful about those few overlapping letters — in the top case, the LL of BOMBSHELL and the UP of UPSTARTS — but as long as those letter pairs aren't really weird, like XU or JN or something, that little of an overlap isn't usually a problem.

Making the construction akin to one having only four themers also allows for a bit of long fill. Lynn does well to give us PIRATE SHIP (or is that PIRATE'S HIP?) and RED HERRING (ah, I guess not then).

Lynn's grids are usually so impressively clean that see AGUE and ETTE was unusual. These would be minor blips in most anyone else's grids — although some would argue that AGUE is perfectly fine since it's used in historical writing — but I put the bar quite high for Lynn.

Since that north section is somewhat flexible, I think the allure of the Z in ZULU must have been high. As much as I like rare letters in a grid, I would personally have preferred not including AGUE, favoring something like NOSY/TRUE. Given that Lynn has expertly worked in a J (JUDEA/JAB) so cleanly, that would have been enough in terms of rare letters for me.

Consistent, fun theme with grid execution well above average.